Will Blog for Food

How US Government Screws Senior Citizen Social Security Recipients

By fiddling with statistics, the US Government is able to come up with any figures it wants to, and, of course, it wants to come up with the figures that make it look good. Therefore, unemployment rates and inflation are doctored to make them lower than they actually are. GDP is doctored to make it seem larger than it actually is. The pernicious part is that seniors count on their cost of living adjustments (COLAs) which are pegged to the inflation rate to help them keep their heads above water. By understating the inflation rate seniors have been cheated out of their COLAs to the tune of 70% of their entire check by some estimates.

And, of course, the Bush Administration does not have to admit that we're in a recession by understating the inflation rate at 2% whereas by assuming the inflation rate is 5% (which is more in tune with reality), we would definitely be in a recession. So a recession - like beauty - is in the eyes of the beholder and the government technocrats who lie with statistics have a different definition of beauty than you or I do. Why does understating the inflation rate get the government out of a recession? Because when you adjust for inflation, it lowers the GDP to the point that we've had negative growth for two straight quarters and - bingo - that's the "definition" of a recession. Of course, you could define it in a different way...

Kevin Phillips has done an excellent job in running down the inflation boondoggle:

Billionaire California bond manager Bill Gross calls it "a haute con job." Bloomberg News columnist John Wasik describes it as "a testament to the art of economic spin." More and more shoppers and consumers simply disbelieve it. The subject of this scorn is the federal government's vaunted Consumer Price Index or CPI. Americans are now beginning to understand that this indicator has its own share of gimmicks not unlike a sub-prime mortgage or the six pages of fine print that accompanies your credit card agreement. Some of these CPI ingredients -- product substitution weightings, "hedonics" (price reductions for added product quality or satisfaction), and use of owner's equivalent rent (instead of home ownership costs) -- have a comic aspect suitable to mockery by Bill Maher, Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart. But in a larger sense, they're not remotely funny. That's because the federal minimalization and misrepresentation of inflation, pursued statistically over the last 25 years, has been the main buttress of Washington's over-favorable and self-serving portraiture of the U.S. economy.

Understating the inflation rate has meant that the government has limited payouts to seniors whose social security COLAs are linked to the CPI. It also means that wage contracts tied to the CPI have saved corporations tons of money while underpaying workers. According to Phillips some $250 billion a year could be involved. Understating inflation also means that savers get a lower rate of return on their savings accounts while banks get to borrow money more cheaply.

Now anyone who has purchased gas or food recently - isn't that all of us ... hello! - knows that the price of these commodities has skyrocketed. Although the price of housing has deflated recently, anyone who bought a house say in the years from 2000 to 2006 knows that the cost of buying a house increased tremendously during those years. Yet neither housing costs nor food nor gas has been included in the CPI by the government.

Oil is up over 80 percent in the last twelve months. The New York Times' consumer reporter, W.P. Dunleavy, wrote on May 3 that his own groceries now cost $587 a month, up from $400 a year earlier. That's a 40 percent increase. Reports in the financial press make frequent reference to foreign investors who distrust the U.S. dollar because they calculate true U.S. inflation at 6% to 9% including food and energy. California economist John Williams, who runs an organization called Shadow Statistics, contends that if Washington still used the CPI measurements applied back in the 1970s, inflation would be in the 10 percent range. My own analysis, set out in much more detail in an article in the May issue of Harper's, comports with that of the cynical foreign investors. Therein lies the danger. If the current inflation rate is really 6-9 percent instead of the 2-3 percent claimed by government and most U.S. money managers, then Washington's official estimates that the economy still grew at a rate of some 0.6 percent in the first quarter of 2008 become nonsense. Subtracting a 6-9 percent inflation rate from nominal GDP growth would identify an economy that was deteriorating and shrinking, not growing. Concerned foreign dollar-holders would become even more concerned.

The deception started in the Kennedy Administration where the jobless statistics started taking a toll on the "Camelot" image. What to do to get the jobless rate down? Well, how about this? Stop counting "discouaged workers" or those who had "dropped out of the labor force" or "those who were not actively looking for work." I suppose all those had also decided to drop out of the eating and drinking force as well. Lyndon Johnson continued the deception by combining the social security budget with the general budget in the "unified budget". This masked the budget deficit. 

Now Richard Nixon topped them all by defining inflation downward and excluding food and energy costs from the CPI because they were too "volatile". In this way he arrived at "core inflation." What? Excluding the most essential aspects of economic life in order not to be embarrassed by the inflation rate? Yes, this is what Nixon actually did. Consequently, why should any American believe what the government tells them about inflation, recession, unemployment etc.? And why shouldn't social security recipients demand back payments on all the money they've been cheated out of by the government's redefining of statistics? Oh, and don't forget all that economic activity the government talks about is largely confined to the top 1% of income earners while the vast majority see their economic situation deteriorate.

In 1983, under the Reagan Administration, inflation was further finagled when the Bureau of Labor Statistics decided that housing, too, was overstating the Consumer Price Index; the BLS substituted an entirely different "Owner Equivalent Rent" measurement, based on what a homeowner might get for renting his or her house. This methodology, controversial at the time but still in place today, simply sidestepped what was happening in the real world of homeowner costs. Because low inflation encourages low interest rates, which in turn make it much easier to borrow money, the BLS's decision no doubt encouraged, during the late 1980s, the large and often speculative expansion in private debt—much of which involved real estate, and some of which went spectacularly bad between 1989 and 1992 in the savings-and-loan, real estate, and junk-bond scandals. Also, on the unemployment front, as Austan Goolsbee pointed out in his New York Times op-ed, the Reagan Administration further trimmed the number by reclassifying members of the military as "employed" instead of outside the labor force. The distortional inclinations of the next president, George H.W. Bush, came into focus in 1990, when Michael Boskin, the chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers, proposed to reorient U.S. economic statistics principally to reduce the measured rate of inflation. His stated grand ambition was to move the calculus away from old industrial-era methodologies toward the emerging services economy and the expanding retail and financial sectors. Skeptics, however, countered that the underlying goal, driven by worry over federal budget deficits, was to reduce the inflation rate in order to reduce federal payments—from interest on the national debt to cost-of-living outlays for government employees, retirees, and Social Security recipients. ... Nothing, however, can match the tortured evolution of the third key number, the somewhat misnamed Consumer Price Index. Government economists themselves admit that the revisions during the Clinton years worked to reduce the current inflation figures by more than a percentage point, but the overall distortion has been considerably more severe. Just the 1983 manipulation, which substituted "owner equivalent rent" for home-ownership costs, served to understate or reduce inflation during the recent housing boom by 3 to 4 percentage points. Moreover, since the 1990s, the CPI has been subjected to three other adjustments, all downward and all dubious: product substitution (if flank steak gets too expensive, people are assumed to shift to hamburger, but nobody is assumed to move up to filet mignon), geometric weighting (goods and services in which costs are rising most rapidly get a lower weighting for a presumed reduction in consumption), and, most bizarrely, hedonic adjustment, an unusual computation by which additional quality is attributed to a product or service. The hedonic adjustment, in particular, is as hard to estimate as it is to take seriously. (That it was launched during the tenure of the Oval Office's preeminent hedonist, William Jefferson Clinton, only adds to the absurdity.) No small part of the condemnation must lie in the timing. If quality improvements are to be counted, that count should have begun in the 1950s and 1960s, when such products and services as air-conditioning, air travel, and automatic transmissions—and these are just the A's!—improved consumer satisfaction to a comparable or greater degree than have more recent innovations. That the change was made only in the late Nineties shrieks of politics and opportunism, not integrity of measurement. Most of the time, hedonic adjustment is used to reduce the effective cost of goods, which in turn reduces the stated rate of inflation. Reversing the theory, however, the declining quality of goods or services should adjust effective prices and thereby add to inflation, but that side of the equation generally goes missing. "All in all," Williams points out, "if you were to peel back changes that were made in the CPI going back to the Carter years, you'd see that the CPI would now be 3.5 percent to 4 percent higher"—meaning that, because of lost CPI increases, Social Security checks would be 70 percent greater than they currently are. Furthermore, when discussing price pressure, government officials invariably bring up "core" inflation, which excludes precisely the two categories—food and energy—now verging on another 1970s-style price surge. This year we have already seen major U.S. food and grocery companies, among them Kellogg and Kraft, report sharp declines in earnings caused by rising grain and dairy prices. Central banks from Europe to Japan worry that the biggest inflation jumps in ten to fifteen years could get in the way of reducing interest rates to cope with weakening economies. Even the U.S. Labor Department acknowledged that in January, the price of imported goods had increased 13.7 percent compared with a year earlier, the biggest surge since record-keeping began in 1982. From Maine to Australia, from Alaska to the Middle East, a hydra-headed inflation is on the loose, unleashed by the many years of rapid growth in the supply of money from the world's central banks (not least the U.S. Federal Reserve), as well as by massive public and private debt creation.

70%?!! That means that seniors should be getting almost twice what they're getting now in their monthly checks. And since what seniors need most - food and energy - isn't even counted in the CPI - thanks to Nixon - the statistical deceit is appalling! Core inflation? Schmore inflation! The American public is being deceived - about unemployment, economic growth, inflation - you name it. The government's incentive is to misrepresent all these indices because it puts them in a more favorable light and it masks the economic distortions going on in this economy, the massive transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich and the increasing economic inequality. Economic activity looks good because most of it takes place among the very wealthy. Exclude the top 1% of income earners and the picture for the rest of the population looks dismal.

The real numbers, to most economically minded Americans, would be a face full of cold water. Based on the criteria in place a quarter century ago, today's U.S. unemployment rate is somewhere between 9 percent and 12 percent; the inflation rate is as high as 7 or even 10 percent; economic growth since the recession of 2001 has been mediocre, despite a huge surge in the wealth and incomes of the superrich, and we are falling back into recession. If what we have been sold in recent years has been delusional "Pollyanna Creep," what we really need today is a picture of our economy ex-distortion. For what it would reveal is a nation in deep difficulty not just domestically but globally. Undermeasurement of inflation, in particular, hangs over our heads like a guillotine. To acknowledge it would send interest rates climbing, and thereby would endanger the viability of the massive buildup of public and private debt (from less than $11 trillion in 1987 to $49 trillion last year) that props up the American economy. Moreover, the rising cost of pensions, benefits, borrowing, and interest payments—all indexed or related to inflation—could join with the cost of financial bailouts to overwhelm the federal budget. As inflation and interest rates have been kept artificially suppressed, the United States has been indentured to its volatile financial sector, with its predilection for leverage and risky buccaneering. Arguably, the unraveling has already begun. As Robert Hardaway, a professor at the University of Denver, pointed out last September, the subprime lending crisis "can be directly traced back to the [1983] BLS decision to exclude the price of housing from the CPI. . .With the illusion of low inflation inducing lenders to offer 6 percent loans, not only has speculation run rampant on the expectations of ever-rising home prices, but home buyers by the millions have been tricked into buying homes even though they only qualified for the teaser rates." Were mainstream interest rates to jump into the 7 to 9 percent range—which could happen if inflation were to spur new concern—both Washington and Wall Street would be walking in quicksand. The make-believe economy of the past two decades, with its asset bubbles, massive borrowing, and rampant data distortion, would be in serious jeopardy. The U.S. dollar, off more than 40 percent against the euro since 2002, could slip down an even rockier slope.

And then, as long as we're talking about social security, there is the little issue of funding it. I have blogged previously about the unfairness of capping social security contributions at around $100,000, annual income, when CEOs and hedge fund managers are making $100 million and more per year. These annual incomes are far in excess of anything remotely resembling what a person needs to live on. And then they charge self-employed people 15% of their earned income for their social  security contribution even if the person is receiving social security and still working because they can't live on what they're getting in social security. Of course, the rich have to make absolutely no social security contributions on their unearned income - income from rents, interest and dividends. And then there's the little issue of rich people who have sky high retirement incomes still receiving social security.  It's insane. They don't need it. It should be means tested. All in all the whole program from start to finish which ever end you want to look at is a total botch job, thanks to the Republicans whose goal is to eliminate it altogether.

Amid World Food Shortages, Texas Rice Farmers Paid Not to Farm

While millions are starving throughout the world because of a lack of rice, the US Government is paying subsidies to Texas rice farmers whether they plant and harvest rice or not just so long as rice had been planted there some time in the past. Some of this land has even been developed as "cowboy starter kits," divided into tracts and sold to people who build on one acre and collect farm subsidies on the remaining acreage. Tenant farmers have been put out of business by landlords who raise their rents in order to "capture" the farm subsidy as by law it has to go to whoever actually farms the land, in this case the tenant.

In an article, "Farm Program Pays $1.3 Billion to People Who Don't Farm," the Washington Post reports:

Even though Donald R. Matthews put his sprawling new residence in the heart of rice country, he is no farmer. He is a 67-year-old asphalt contractor who wanted to build a dream house for his wife of 40 years. Yet under a federal agriculture program approved by Congress, his 18-acre suburban lot receives about $1,300 in annual "direct payments," because years ago the land was used to grow rice. Matthews is not alone. Nationwide, the federal government has paid at least $1.3 billion in subsidies for rice and other crops since 2000 to individuals who do no farming at all, according to an analysis of government records by The Washington Post. Some of them collect hundreds of thousands of dollars without planting a seed. Mary Anna Hudson, 87, from the River Oaks neighborhood in Houston, has received $191,000 over the past decade. For Houston surgeon Jimmy Frank Howell, the total was $490,709. ... In 1981, the Texas rice belt extended over about 600,000 acres. By last year, USDA records show, the amount of planted rice had shrunk to 202,000 acres, partly because landowners were able to get farm payments even if no rice was grown on their land. In fact, so many landowners and farmers are collecting money on their former ricelands -- $37 million last year alone -- that the acres no longer used for rice outnumber the planted ones.

Not only that but wealthy landowners can get property tax reductions on that portion of their land considered "agricultural" even though they have no intention of growing anything on it. In addition they can get "emergency disaster relief" even though they have not suffered a disaster.

On a clear, cold morning in February 2003, Nico de Boer heard what sounded like a clap of thunder and stepped outside his hillside home for a look. High above the tree line, the 40-year-old dairy farmer saw a trail of smoke curling across the sky -- all that remained of the space shuttle Columbia. Weeks later, de Boer was startled to learn that he was one of hundreds of East Texas ranchers entitled to up to $40,000 in disaster compensation from the federal government, even though the nearest debris landed 10 to 20 miles from his cattle. The money came from the U.S. Department of Agriculture as part of the Livestock Compensation Program, originally intended as a limited helping hand for dairy farmers and ranchers hurt by drought. Hurriedly drafted by the Bush administration in 2002 and expanded by Congress the following year, the relief plan rapidly became an expensive part of the government's sprawling system of entitlements for farmers, which topped $25 billion last year. In all, the Livestock Compensation Program cost taxpayers $1.2 billion during its two years of existence, 2002 and 2003. Of that, $635 million went to ranchers and dairy farmers in areas where there was moderate drought or none at all, according to an analysis of government records by The Washington Post. None of the ranchers were required to prove they suffered an actual loss. The government simply sent each of them a check based on the number of cattle they owned. ... Then, on Feb. 1, 2003, the shuttle exploded. To ensure recovery of the debris and pay for emergency costs, President Bush issued a federal disaster declaration. As an unintended result, most of East Texas was then eligible for livestock funds. Denton County's livestock owners collected $433,000, records show. "Speaking personally, I didn't think it was necessary at that point in time," said Calvin Peterson, an 81-year-old rancher who heads the local farm committee. "It might have been more political than anything." In Henderson County, about 100 miles southeast of Dallas, Nico de Boer felt the same way. When he arrived from the Netherlands 17 years ago, de Boer had 90 acres, a house, one barn and fewer than 200 cows. Today, he has 1,000 acres, multiple cow barns and sheds, 650 cows that produce 3 million pounds of milk monthly, a BMW in the driveway, a swimming pool, and two more farms in neighboring counties. The rolling hills surrounding his sprawling farm receive a generous average of 40 inches of rain annually. When the shuttle exploded, pastures were full and there hadn't been a drought or any other type of weather disaster in years, records show. But after the presidential disaster declaration, John Reeves of the local USDA office informed livestock owners in Henderson County they were eligible. They eventually collected $751,083 despite no shuttle damage. Reeves said he had no choice but to write the checks. "Congress passed legislation and approved us for that Livestock Compensation Program, and that's what it was," he said. "The closest debris I heard about was 10 to 20 miles away. There wasn't anything here," de Boer said. "Believe me, we would be better off if the government got out of the business and limited the payments to those who really need them."

Politicians in Washington have no respect for the taxpayers' money. It's all about getting special financial favors for constituents in their districts. There's no account- ability and very little transparency. Boondoggles such as this are rarely reported in the mainstream media. In addition to pissing away money to farmers or those who don't even farm under the aegis of a farm subsidy bill, they pour billions down the rathole of the war in Iraq and additional billions supporting the military-industrial complex to build boats the military doesn't even want. America surely is a nation in decline. The Republicans have set out to destroy government, and they have largely succeeded, destroying the American empire in the process. Meanwhile, Congress has come up with an even more costly farm subsidy bill.

Why We Need a Fighter, Not a Uniter

It looks like the long, drawn-out Democratic Presidential primary season will be over tomorrow after the superdelegates weigh in. Obama's quest to be a "uniter not a divider" is nieve at best since he could have all the people united behind him and still not sway the Republicans in the Senate who will filibuster every piece of Democratic legislation unless the Democrats have at least 60 seats in the Senate which seems unlikely. He will never unite the Republican Senators with the Democrats, and, despite having united "the people," it will all be for nought. That's why we need a fighter not a uniter, and Hillary is much more suited to that job. Task number one on day one of a new Presidency should be taking the Republicans head-on over the filibuster rules that allow them to filibuster just by threatening to do so. They don't have to give long-winded speeches to all hours of the night; they just have to say "we're going to filibuster" and whatever legislation is before that august body will be taken off the table and thrown in the circular file. That legislation is dead just on the Senate Republicans' say-so.

Obama's quest to be a uniter is a pipe-dream; it's pie in the sky. He doesn't know what determined fellows these Republicans are. They are fueled by the money heaped on them by wealthy interests represented by tons of lobbyists all pushing the agenda of the wealthy. A Democratic House and Senate combined with a Democratic President might actually get something done. But it would be necessary to have a filibuster-proof Senate. Otherwise, the Republicans will sit there and filibuster every piece of legislation not favored by the lobbyists to death. This is the fight the next (Democratic) President needs to take on right out of the starting gate. Otherwise, his or her Presidency will be for nought. I think Hillary (hopefully) understands this. Obama doesn't seem to have a clue. Sure he hasn't taken any PAC money himself. So what? How does this change the legislative proclivities of the Senate?

Bill Clinton was put in this same position because he faced a Republican Congress. It's now apparent that the Republicans can accomplish their ends even with a Democratic Congress by means of the filibuster rules. They told Bill Clinton "Either you cooperate with us (triangulate) or you'll accomplish nothing. You'll be a do-nothing President." They'll tell Obama the same thing, and he'll be pressured into triangulating. However, history has shown that it didn't work all that well for the first Clinton. He signed tons of Republican inspired legislation including the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act which led directly to the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Hopefully, President Hillary wouldn't let the same thing happen to her as happened to her husband. Anyway I'd bet she'd be more successful, having been around the block once, at taking on the Republicans than Obama would be.

The first step is using the nuclear option on the filibuster rules - obliteration of the filibuster - which the Republicans have perverted from its original purpose in order to serve their interests. And there are enough self-serving Democrats in the pockets of lobbyists that a Democratic President cannot even count on all of them. The Democratic Congress elected in 2006 has largely failed in its efforts because of its refusal to take on the Republicans over this issue. That makes it even more critical to take on the filibuster in 2009 and destroy it. The revolving door facilitates politicians who pander to lobbyists obtaining lucrative jobs with the corporations whose interests they represent once they leave "public service" if you want to call it that. For them though it's "special interest service." Their whole intention is to make a killing once they leave the government.

So, in conclusion, the stronger candidate in my opinion is Hillary Rodham Clinton. Both she and Obama want to do the right things for the US. The question is who has the better prospects for actually being successful at it. And who is willing on Day 1 to be a fighter, trim the Republicans' wings and put them in their place. There is a lot of money in Washington almost all of which is betting that neither Obama or Hillary will be able to do so.

The US and Iraq: Locked in an Embrace Gnawing on Each Other's Heads in the 9th Circle of Hell

Dante wrote one of the allegorical classics of western literature: The Inferno, meant to be a description of Hell. In the 9th (and lowest) circle of hell he placed Count Ugolino of Pisa and Archbishop Ruggieri, both  men frozen in ice up to their necks with Ugolino gnawing on Ruggieri's head for all eternity. This is an apt metaphor for the US in Iraq: the US is frozen in the 9th circle of hell with Iraq gnawing on its head for all eternity. The US can never get away from Iraq because the logic for staying is always circular. If we're winning, we have to stay until the job's finished which it never will be, and, if we're losing, we have to stay until we win which we never will.

Stuck in hell gnawing on each other's heads - the US and Iraq will continue their dance of death until China decides to take away the baby bottle of finance and the whole enterprise collapses of its own weight bringing down the whole economy with it and turning US taxpayers into perpetual slaves as interest and debt are forever. The kind of violence that goes on in Iraq can continue to pop up on and on so there will never be an end game, there will never be a definition of winning, there will be nothing but interminable, intermittent violence leading to more and more death and destruction and pissing money down hell's rathole. And al Quaida is getting exactly what it wants - bleeding the US to death. The US, responsible for a million Iraqi deaths - mostly civilians - is not capable of liberating the people it's killing - only killing the unliberated. It's created 2 million refugees and displaced persons, people who cannot lead any kind of normal life and are condemned to a hellish existence despite their innocence.

Colin Powell's Pottery Barn metaphor for Iraq is not apt. We broke it but we can't  fix it so either we wash our bloody hands and admit our guilt for creating this chaos or we stay frozen in a deathly embrace gnawing on Iraq's head in perpetuity. This is a worse result than admitting that all the lives spent, all the money spent, was not only in vain but was res- ponsible for the des- truction of a nation and a people, reducing a some- what civilized society to a trash heap, a Humpty Dumpty that can't be put back together again. In fact the only hope for its ever being put back together is for the US to get out and let the chips fall where they may because the US prescence there is only making matters worse.

Whatever "improvement" there is in the situation there has come about because the US has bought off some of the fighters. Frantically trying to find every fighter to pay off is a fool's mission, but it's clear the only Iraqis who want the US there are those who have their hands in the US' pockets. The Iraqi government is corrupt; it's being paid off so it wants the US to maintain its prescence there so it can continue to get paid off. This is part and parcel of the gnawing on our neck which will go on until the US cuts the umbilical cord and leaves with past blood but not future blood on its hands - where the line of demarcation between past and future is the point at which the US leaves. Abandon all hope ye who enter here should have been the US' slogan for war in Iraq.

Christian Conservative, an Oxymoron?

Would Jesus be a Christian conservative? I don't think so. They stand for everything he didn't. For instance, Jesus was against capital accumulation, the private pursuit of wealth and for helping people less fortunate. What do Christian conservatives stand for: capital accumulation and not paying taxes which might help somebody less fortunate. Christianity has become a perversion of what Jesus stood for and proclaimed: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven." Basically, Christianity has come around to serving the needs of its constituents which are basically selfish. (So what else is new?) And their selfish interests have to do with getting their souls into heaven in the least onerous way. Helping others materially and paying taxes to support government programs which help the less fortunate is onerous. Tithing to the church and adopting a certain mindset of correct beliefs (allowing yourself to  be brainwashed) is less onerous. It doesn't require any physical exertion. Tithing is simply life-after-death insurance which corresponds to life insurance. The prudent person wants both.

Christianity in the US, especially modern day evangelicals, places all the emphasis on having a correct belief system. Any time believing a certain way is important, in my opinion, you're dealing with brainwashing. And if it's so important that, unless you have the correct beliefs, you're going to hell, the stakes are raised considerably and the brainwashing is commensurably increased. The Soviet Union used to brainwash its constituents politically. In the US that function has been off-loaded to conservative pastors who provide religious and political brainwashing, the political component of which dictates that government should lower taxes and eliminate social programs to help the poor. Even the pastors, including the Grassley six, advocate the private pursuit of wealth and capital accumulation as evidenced by their own conspicuous consumption and extravagant lifestyles. Jesus told the rich man: "Sell what you have, give it to the poor and come and follow me." (Oh, and, by the way, I live an impoverished lifestyle. Get used to it!) Modern day evangelicals preach a "prosperity doctrine" which teaches that private wealth is a sign of God's approval. It's a nice theory but it is the exact opposite of what Jesus taught. Nor is it original. Max Weber in 1904 pointed out in "The Protestant Ethic and the Rise of Capitalism" how Protestantism made Christianity more amenable to the private pursuit of wealth.

PHOENIX, Nov. 14 /Christian Newswire/ -- The head of a financial accountability group for Christian nonprofits says that the Senate Finance Committee is likely to be looking at three areas of operation of "the Grassley Six," as he calls them, major ministries headed by Kenneth Copeland, Creflo Dollar, Benny Hinn, Eddie Long, Joyce Meyer and Randy and Paula White. Ken Behr, president of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, told Church Executive, a business magazine for larger and mega churches, that Senator Chuck Grassley is likely to probe into concerns over excessive compensation, income unrelated to the business purpose of the ministries, and perks or what is known as "excessive benefit transactions."

In a statement, Grassley said he was acting on complaints from the public and news coverage of the organizations. "The allegations involve governing boards that aren't independent and allow generous salaries and housing allowances and amenities such as private jets and Rolls-Royces," Grassley said. "I don't want to conclude that there's a problem, but I have an obligation to donors and the taxpayers to find out more. People who donated should have their money spent as intended and in adherence with the tax code."

Creflo Dollar has a Lear Jet, a Gulfstream 3 jet, a Rolls-Royce, a $3 million mansion in Atlanta and a more modest $2.44 million condo overlooking Central Park in Manhattan. These guys and gals have amassed personal fortunes, and their parishioners are stupid enough to keep contributing to them. They live like Wall Street moguls! Why? Didn't they read that part of the Bible where Jesus tells the rich man to give all his money to the poor or that part about it being easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven? These people would not necessarily have to live ostentatious and extravagant lifestyles. It is possible to accumulate a lot of money, live a modest lifestyle and use that money to do good works to help the poor and less fortunate. Some rich people even lead an impoverished lifestyle using their money to help others.

Jesus was against the private accumulation of capital: "Consider the birds of the field; they neither sow nor reap, but yet their Heavenly Father provides for them. Lay not up earthly treasure where dust and moth can corrupt, but seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven and all these things will be added to you." Jesus' only act of violence was overturning the money changers' tables in the temple. One could gather from this that money and all its manifestions was disgusting to him especially when it was an integral part of religion.

Christianity has had 2000 years to distort and pervert Jesus' teachings. It didn't start with the modern day evangelicals and their wealthy pastors. Renaissance Popes offered indulgences which bilked the faithful into paying money to get their souls or their dead relatives' souls out of purgatory and into heaven. Again life-after-death insurance or pay-to-play to get your soul into heaven much as you would pay a bribe to gain your body safe passage. Clergymen have been proficient for centuries in using the fear card to fleece their flocks. They've been proficient in getting their flocks to contribute to the church (meaning them) in order to enrich themselves while getting the flock to believe they were giving to God and promoting their own prospects for the afterlife. And the fear of death is the ultimate fear of the unknown.

According to Jesus, however, this particular theory is invalid. It's not what you believe that counts; it's not what you give to the church that counts. It's how much you help those who are less fortunate that counts. Suppose God is not really interested in whether you  believe in Him or believe in Jesus or not. What a refreshing breath of fresh air to be relieved of that brainwashing burden! By the way, a lot of religious people and good citizens don't believe in Jesus: Jews, for example.

Suppose that what really counts is how you live your life, especially in terms of whether or not you've helped those less fortunate than yourself. There are many ways to do this to be sure, and supporting a tax policy that redistributes wealth to help the poor and disadvantaged is surely one of them. Government can and should help the poor in a comprehensive manner while private charity is at best a hit or miss, hodge podge proposition. In other words, by its very nature, some people will always be left out. With a comprehensive government program, sufficiently funded and mandated, this should not happen. Everyone that falls into a certain category will be helped unless there's corruption and bribery which is all too common in government, especially in the Bush administration.

Religions other than Christianity don't place the same emphasis on having a correct belief system so they have a lot less of a load, a lot less of a mental burden on their shoulders. In the Pilgrim's Progress, Christian carried this burden on his back which was a metaphor for the mental burden of having to have a correct belief system or in other words to accept the brainwashing aspect of religion. Religions that don't try to indoctrinate their constituents into having correct beliefs place the emphasis elsewhere (like on living a good life), are much less involved in guilt and shame and free their constituents' minds so that they can function in a more creative manner intellectually. Therefore, they are far more likely to make real contributions to human knowledge than are people whose minds are hampered by religious brainwashing. Consider Einstein. Not being a Christian, his mind was free to ponder the universe without having to be afraid he was violating some sacred, correct belief system and that his soul was in in jeopardy. What a refreshing approach to life!

Finally, in Jesus' last teaching, before he was hauled off and crucified, according to Matthew, he told his disciples:

31"When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. 32All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. 34"Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.' 37"Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?' 40"The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.' 41"Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.' 44"They also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?' 45"He will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.' 46"Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life."

Is there any clearer exposition that, according to Jesus, what is really important is not what you believe but how much you help your fellow man especiallly those less fortunate?  This is the coup de grace to all those who have perverted Christianity into a belief system which condones the private acccumulation of capital and ignores or deemphasizes the pursuit of policies which help those in need. Jesus did not distinguish between the deserving and the undeserving poor. Being poor was in and of itself, de facto, a good enough reason that they should be helped. So may I suggest that supporting tax policies that redistribute wealth from rich to poor and provide support for people in need is quite a bit less severe than "selling what thou hast and giving it to the poor." Instead of a life-after-death insurance policy which involves tirthing to the church, real Christians should support governmental programs which redistribute wealth and help those in need. 

America's Trillion Dollar War Machine and the Wall Street Bail-Out

It's not mere speculation that the US is a huge war machine that neglects the welfare of its own people. When it comes to war, no expense is spared. When it comes to funding programs to help the American people, any expense is too much. The US government is very poor when it comes to welfare in the broad sense of the word, very rich when it comes to war and occupying the world and bailing out Wall Street. With over 700 military bases abroad, there are more than 3 bases for every country in the world. Meanwhile, veterans are made to beg for their benefits and go homeless in the streets. No government official or Presidential candidate is even talking about homelessness in America which is a major and growing problem especially among the elderly and veterans. In The Three Trillion Dollar War, Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes write

The Bush Administration was wrong about the benefits of the war and it was wrong about the costs of the war. The president and his advisers expected a quick, inexpensive conflict. Instead, we have a war that is costing more than anyone could have imagined. The cost of direct US military operations - not even including long-term costs such as taking care of wounded veterans - already exceeds the cost of the 12-year war in Vietnam and is more than double the cost of the Korean War. And, even in the best case scenario, these costs are projected to be almost ten times the cost of the first Gulf War, almost a third more than the cost of the Vietnam War, and twice that of the First World War. The only war in our history which cost more was the Second World War, when 16.3 million U.S. troops fought in a campaign lasting four years, at a total cost (in 2007 dollars, after adjusting for inflation) of about $5 trillion (that's $5 million million, or £2.5 million million). With virtually the entire armed forces committed to fighting the Germans and Japanese, the cost per troop (in today's dollars) was less than $100,000 in 2007 dollars. By contrast, the Iraq war is costing upward of $400,000 per troop. Most Americans have yet to feel these costs. The price in blood has been paid by our voluntary military and by hired contractors. The price in treasure has, in a sense, been financed entirely by borrowing. Taxes have not been raised to pay for it - in fact, taxes on the rich have actually fallen. Deficit spending gives the illusion that the laws of economics can be repealed, that we can have both guns and butter. But of course the laws are not repealed. The costs of the war are real even if they have been deferred, possibly to another generation.

As Fed chairman Bernanke continues to bail out Wall Street and in the process adds hundreds of billions of dollars in liabilities to the Federal government and the American taxpayer, the US continues to increase its debts and liabilities. First, Bernanke arranged a deal for JPMorganChase to buy out Bear Stearns for $2 a share. But Bear Stearns shareholders were not happy with that so Bernanke in effect says "OK, then, how about $10 a share?" We can't have unhappy shareholders in a bankrupt company, can we?  We must do  something!

J.P. Morgan and Bear still needed the Fed's acquiescence to reopen negotiations. New York Fed President Timothy F. Geithner, with support from colleagues on the Fed Board of Governors in Washington and top officials at the Treasury Department, used that as leverage to negotiate the new deal.

The key word here is acquiescence. The Fed is acquiescing to everything in order to appease Wall Street investors, taking on even more liability in the new deal. The first deal had the fed assuming $30 billion in Bear Stearns liabilities. The second deal has it assuming everything over $1 billion. How is that a better deal for the American taxpayer? This is all a continuing and massive transfer of wealth from the taxpayer to the wealthy along with Bernanke's promise of $400 billion of liquidity to Wall Street banks. Now don't you think that the collective minds on Wall Street are going to figure out a way to cash in on all that liability? They will figure out how to work the system so as to manifest that transfer of wealth and cash in on every last dollar of the Fed's guarantees. When you add on the $160 billion stimulus package, you come up with the astonishing figure, depending on how you value the Bear Stearns liability, of around another trillion dollars for  the recent bailouts and stimuli. A few trillion here, a few trillion there ... pretty soon you're talking about real money!

From Robert Reich's blog:

So JP Morgan is raising its offer for Bear Stearns, hmm? Well, it still may be a good deal for old JP, because the worst that can happen is JP loses $1 billion. If losses turn out to be more than $1 billion, the Fed – that is, you and I and every other American taxpayer – will make it up to JP. Who knows what the assets are really worth? They may be worth 80 cents on the dollar, in which case Bear’s stocks are a huge value even at $10 a share (remember, their market price before the panic was around $70 a share). They may be worth 90 cents on the dollar – even better for JP. Or they may eventually (in the long run, when the crisis is over and housing values start trending upward again) be worth far more --- maybe, just maybe, even approaching $70 a share. JP doesn’t know. Bear doesn’t know. The Fed doesn’t know. Everyone is guessing. Bear shareholders are playing a giant game of “chicken.” They’re threatening to go into bankruptcy – that is, liquidate the firm and essentially sell off their assets in an auction – if they don’t get a better deal from JP than the $2 per share JP originally offered.

As part of the new Bear Stearns deal, the Fed's role was also renegotiated. The central bank originally had agreed to put public dollars on the line to guarantee $30 billion of risky mortgages owned by Bear Stearns. In the reworked deal, J.P. Morgan agreed to cover the first $1 billion in losses if the value of those securities falls, with the Fed responsible for any losses beyond that. The main point here is that what Bernanke and the Fed are doing is all guess work. They are in uncharted waters and they are playing by ear. But their main concern is the investors not the homeowners who are in or about to go into foreclosure. If they wanted to protect them, they'd mandate restructuring of their loans. But this would piss off the investors who were counting on the homeowners' mortgages resetting to higher interest rates. In other words the investors were counting on the homeowners getting screwed when they made their investments, and, by golly, it's not fair to change the rules of the game now and make their investments worth less. However, it's OK to bail out huge investment banks.

Wall street has become a huge casino and doesn't serve any positive economic purpose or function. It used to be that they provided venture capital for start-ups and assisted with initial public offerings (IPOs). Now Silicon Valley has their own venture capital firms, and Wall Street just provides ever more fancy investment vehicles for rich investors who are not satisfied with just buying stocks and bonds as in the old days. No, they want to bet that the values of these stocks and bonds will go up or down at some future date. They want to buy insurance against their bets. They want derivatives of derivatives. They want synthetic exposure to the bond market as opposed to real exposure. They want credit default swaps. Who needs all this stuff? Surely, it contributes nothing to GDP. 70% of GDP is consumer spending; the remainder is almost evenly divided between real investment and government spending.

[Investment] is defined as investments by business or households in capital. Examples of investment by a business include construction of a new mine, purchase of software, or purchase of machinery and equipment for a factory. Spending by households on new houses is also included in Investment. In contrast to its colloquial meaning, 'Investment' in GDP does not mean purchases of financial products.

In the $14 trillion American economy, if Wall Street and all its supposedly sophisticated investment vehicles disappeared off the face of the earth, the GDP would not be affected one bit! They are talking about regulating Wall Street banks; why not just outlaw all these fancy schmancy investment vehicles? They didn't rear their ugly heads until a couple years ago anyway, and right off the bat they've cost the American taxpayers almost a trillion dollars. Why not get back to a real  economy?

And, tying this all together, the US government is spending $3 trillion on war (and spends more on its military than the rest of the world combined), another trillion on bailouts and stimulus packages, and all the while running up the US national debt to almost $10 trillion. If the US government were to disappear altogether, the US GDP would still be roughly $12 trillion based on consumer spending and real investment. So my solution to this mess: get rid of Wall Street and get rid of the war based component of government spending. They say that in 10 years the government budget will be totally consumed with paying interest on the national debt, social security and medicare. But that doesn't account for the fact that war trumps social security and medicare. It's far more likely that the government budget will consist of paying interest on the national debt and war.

Three Cheers for the Failure of the Neocon Carlyle Group Hedge Fund!

The Carlyle Group, a bunch of neocons including former President George H W Bush, James Baker, former Secretary of State, Frank Carlucci, former Secretary of Defense among others, who sought to profit off the war in Iraq by investing in defense contractors, have come a cropper! Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray! They had the inside information about war and the massive budget expenditures for war, and they sought to profit from this insider information and to profit off of war. For all essential purposes, they are war profiteers. But their greed did not stop there. Not content just to profit from war, they formed a couple of hedge funds in order to multiply their profits by investing in mortgage backed securities. Now those hedge funds have defaulted and I couldn't be happier. I hope these billionaires lose their asses. Just desserts I say.

A fund managed by the US private equity giant Carlyle Group has become the latest to be hit by demands from lending banks making calls on loans secured on mortgage bonds. Carlyle Capital Corp, a publicly traded fund that holds $21.7bn (£10.8bn) of securities, said it had received a default notice from one of its lending banks and expected at least one more after it failed to meet demands for extra security from jittery counterparties. The Guernsey-based fund has struggled to meet more than $60m of margin calls and demands for extra collateral since the start of the month. It met the calls until Wednesday, when it was landed with more than $37m of demands and missed four out of seven calls. John Stomber, the chief executive of Carlyle Capital, said counterparties were demanding margin prices that did not represent the underlying recoverable value of the fund's assets. Carlyle Capital's investments are all AAA-rated securities issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the US-Government-sponsored mortgage finance agencies. "This disconnect has created instability and variability in our repo financing arrangements," he added. "Management is actively working with the company's repo counterparties to develop more stable financing terms." The return demanded for agency mortgage bonds over 10-year US Treasuries has widened to the highest for 22 years, according to Bloomberg. Tumult in the credit markets as asset values of all but the safest of debt plummet is prompting lenders to investment funds to demand ever-greater security for their loans, forcing funds into crisis even if they claim the underlying assets are sound. Carlyle Capital's woes come after Peloton, a London-based hedge fund, was forced to liquidate its two funds and shut down because 14 lending banks had pulled credit lines. William O'Donnell, a UBS government bond strategist, said markets were "utterly unhinged". ... Carlyle Group has more than $75bn under management. In the 1990s, its advisers included John Major, the former prime minister, and George Bush, the former US president.

From a previous blog:

And then there's the Carlyle Group from which George Bush, the father, is making billions from the War on Terrorism. Even as the planes smashed into the WTC George Herbert Walker Bush was meeting with Osama Bin Laden's brother at the Carlyle Group. Quote from the website- the Bush- Saudi Connection: "It’s passing strange that even as the hijacked planes smashed into the World Trade Center, the Carlyle Group was holding its annual investor conference. Shafig Bin Laden, brother of Osama Bin Laden, attended."

Now while the Fed is bailing out investment bankers by pumping liquidity into the system, they are not pumping liquidity into the individual motgagees who are defaulting on their mortgage payments and going into foreclosure. A slight difference in moral hazard whether you are Joe Six Pack or a high flying financial institution. They lecture the poor mortgage holders that they knew what they were getting into; therefore, they are acting irresponsibly if they walk away from their obligation to pay their mortgage. However, when a financial institution gets a government bailout instead of facing the full consequences of the decisions it made, it's clear that there is a different standard for Joe Six Pack than there is for the mega-rich CEOs and billionaire investors.

The government is simply protecting its own: rich investors. They made a bet that the  middle class would responsibly pay their predatory mortgages once they reset thus netting them juicy profits. That bet didn't work out so they went to Uncle Sam to bail them out. No such bail-out was extended to Joe Six Pack. Paulson and Bernanke tell you that the economy would grind to a halt if Wall Street investment banks fail. Nonsense! The only consequence is that all the rich investors would lose their shirts. They deserve to do so because of their greedy risk taking behaviour. In other words they rolled the dice and lost. Then they come crying to the government. When they are winning they chide that the government has no place interfering in the free market. The government should keep its nose out of their affairs. Wall Street to government: butt out. We rich bastards know what we're doing and we don't need government to regulate us. Privatize! Privatize! Hands off the economy.

I say let the hedge funds fail. They have nothing to do with the everyday needs of average middle class people. They only have to do with rich investors. Some hedge fund managers have made as much as $100 million a year. These people don't deserve to be bailed out by the government. It's just another example of the transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich facilitated by the Bush Administration and lauded by Rush Limbaugh and all the true conservatives. After all the $400 billion promised by the Fed to cover shaky investment banks will ultimately come out of taxpayers' pockets. Or the Fed will print money causing hyperinflation and the dollar's demise. Either way it's more government debt and taxpayer liability.

Well the chickens are coming home to roost. A good portion of Wall Street could go out of business without affecting the real economy. It only serves the needs of investors, not average citizens. This portion of the economy should be allowed to "seize up." Then the economy could get back to its real function: providing goods and services for real people instead of providing investment opportunities for rich investors. Bernanke and Paulson are only watching out for the investment class not the middle class home owners going into foreclosure, otherwise known as the debtor class.

Why Obama Should Not Be the Democratic Nominee

There are a lot of reasons.  But before I start let me say that I'll vote for Barack if he's the Democratic nominee. He would be infinitely better than John McCain.

1. He wants to bring people together. Give me a break! The only people he needs to bring together are the Republican Senators who will filibuster every piece of Democratic inspired legislation to death and effectively stop anything the Democrats want to do. Think he'll get the bloc-voting, filibustering Republican Senators to come over to the Democratic side? Think again. He'll either get nothing done or triangulate as Bill Clinton did. Instead of triangulation what we need is a President who will take on the filibustering Republicans and the legitimacy of the filibuster itself. This might spark a constituional crisis but so be it!

2. As nominee, the Republicans will generate all kinds of rumors about his African connections. Half his family lives there. Then there are the rumors about his lack of patriotism. The Republican smear machine will go to work on Obama. You can see they are ambivalent about who they'd rather run against because they've already developed a well-spring of hatred and demonization for Hillary over the last 20 years or so. They'll have to start from scratch with Obama, but they're already working overtime to make up for lost time.

3. As President, there will be all kinds of pressure on him to intervene in Africa. We've already got a mess on our hands in Iraq, that road to hell having been paved with bad intentions. We don't need another one in Africa, this time the road to hell being paved with good intentions. Mia Farrow, Steven Spielberg and others have been pressuring politicians to intervene there. And who's already there siding with the bad guys? China. They want the oil and they don't give a crap about who gets pushed off their land in order for them to get it. We don't need a confrontation with China in Africa.

4. Lack of political sophis-tication. We don't need Amateur Hour in the White House.

5. More susceptible to cooption and selling out. He'll want to triangulate with the Republicans as Bill Clinton did (a big mistake in my opinion) in order to get anything done. Republican pressure will undermine his agenda and determine the course of legislation. (Witness Bill Clinton with Gatt-NAFTA and signing the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act which led directly to the sub-prime mortgage crisis.) Hopefully, Hillary has gotten beyond "triangulation," realizes the errors of her husband's ways.

6. Obama is more likely to pander to powerful interests. Hillary has been there, done that and has nothing to prove.

7. Obama still hasn't made his fortune; Hillary has nothing to sweat financially. This would make Obama more likely to sidle up to and be impressed by powerful financial interests.

8. Hip-hop in the White House? Oh, noooooooooo.

I'm Endorsing Hillary!

The Democratic nominee for  President will be either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, no doubt. I think Hillary is not only more electable but will bring with her far more resources in terms of actually changing the course of this country, not the least of which is her husband, Bill. In many ways Bill Clinton's Presidency was one shining hour in between the crap heaps of  the two Bushes. True, not everything he accomplished has turned out to be the best for this country, namely, repealing the  Glass-Steagall Act which led to the sub-prime mortgage mess and  NAFTA. But he did balance the budget, something that all Republicans, for all  their  conservative rhetoric, have failed to do since (and including!) Ronald Reagan.

Barack Obama is a sharp guy, but he's long on rhetoric and charisma and short on actual experience. The Republicans will make mince meat of him in the general election, and he will be too easily co-optible in the Oval Office. The lobbyists and corporate power brokers will swoop down on him like there's no tomorrow. Hillary's pretty much immune to being tempted by the trappings of power, in my opinion. She's seen it all; she's done it all. She knows most of the world leaders, and she would bring with her a powerful group of intelligent people. Hillary's got the grit to withstand the Republican onslaught. Did I say that she's been through it once already? I think Hillary's values are tremendous, her heart's in the right place and she will restore some sanity to this nation's policies both at home and abroad.

Barack Obama is promising a lot of stuff that a  President does not really have the where- withal to pull off. He's going to be a uniter. What does that mean? Does anyone really believe that all the white Republican southerners in all the red states are really going to rally around him? It'll never happen. I want a fighter not a uniter. That's realistic. I believe Hillary's a fighter, and she's got a good corner man in Bill. Together they have a wealth of experience and a proven track record. What's Obama's track record? He was against the Iraq war from the start? He gave a speech at the 2004 Democratic convention? Give me a break. Talk is  cheap. The Iraq war is moot at this point except for getting the hell out of there, not leaving behind any permanent bases and stopping the torrent of cash going there that's bankrupting the US. Any of the Democrats will try to do that, but it will take political skill and experience to actually get the job done and stave off the Republicans who have invested heavily in making Iraq a US client state in the mideast.

I have already pointed out the difficulty any Democratic President will have in getting his or her agenda passed through Congress. It's not going to be a hayride, folks. Any Democratic President is going to have the same problem the Democratic Congress has had for the last year in getting anything done. The last thing we want is a President who doesn't know the ropes (Obama) and will spin his wheels for two to four years getting nothing accomplished. The last thing we want is a Democratic President who is going to play ball with the Republicans and corporate interests to continue  business as usual. Obama may be inspirational, but we don't need inspiration at this point. We don't need to be "moved." We don't need a lot of long winded rhetoric promising this and that. We don't need naivete in the White House surrounded by novice advisors. Any fool knows what needs to be done. Hillary will just be more capable of doing it, that's all.

The last point is electability. My feeling is that it will be very tough sledding to get Obama elected. First of all no white southerner will vote for him. There's a lot of rednecks in the north who won't vote for him either, and he's red meat for the Republican hate machine. They'll try to skewer Hillary too, but she's had the experience of having been through it once, and she's a smart cookie. It won't be easy sledding for the Republicans this time. I think the smart  Democrats (and I put the  Clintons in this category) have thought this through and will be well prepared to deal with the Republican hate mongers  this  time around. Let the Lee Atwaters and the Karl Roves beware! They have been assasinating characters  and destroying Democrats at will for far too long. I would hope the Democats would put up a decent fight this  time, and I think Hillary is far more capable of doing so than Barack.

Barack appeals to the Democratic base more, but Hillary appeals far more to the general population of voters including moderates and independents, and, in the final analysis, getting a Democrat actually elected President is what it's all about. Another Republican in the White House and the US will go the way of the Roman Empire having lasted not anywhere near as long. Rome had its sage Claudius (correponding to Bill Clinton) after the disastrous Tiberius (Reagan) and in between Caligula and Nero (corresponding to the two Bushes). Let's hope that the lantern of enlightenment will be relit under Hillary Clinton!

Think There's Going to be 'Change' if a Democrat Occupies the White House in '09? Think Again.

We couldn't wait to elect Democratic majorities in the House and Senate in the elections of 2006. We thought they would end the Iraq war and reverse some of Bush's insane policies. Then not much happened. Why? Two things: the filibuster and the veto. The filibuster, according to the way the rules are set up in the Senate at the present time, allows 41 senators voting as a block to defeat any legislation sent to it by the House. It takes 60 votes for cloture which amounts to ending the filibuster and allowing the legislation to proceed. Since the House and Senate both have to pass the legislation before it's sent to the President, the House is simply spinning its wheels passing legislation, which it can do with a Democratic majority, but which will get stopped cold once it reaches the Senate where it will be filibustered by the Republicans voting in a block. Unfortunately, this legislation will never see the light of day, and the House is wasting its time, but it makes the Congress persons look good. They can say "I voted for this and I voted for that," but it's all to no avail so why bother? Any legislation that does get through both the House and Senate can and has been vetoed by the President if it's not to his liking and any Democrat inspired legislation is not to his liking. So even with Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate, not much has changed.

The filibuster may be well established in the popular consciousness — think of long-winded senators speechifying for days. But because modern Senate rules allow lawmakers to avoid the spectacle of pontificating by merely threatening the act, filibusters and the efforts to overcome them are being used more frequently, and on more issues, than at any other point in history. So far in this first year of the 110th Congress, there have been 72 motions to stop filibusters, most on the Iraq war but also on routine issues like reauthorizing Amtrak funding. There were 68 such motions in the full two years of the previous Congress, 53 in 1987-88 and 23 in 1977-78. In 1967-68, there were 5 such votes, one of them on a plan to amend cloture itself, which failed. For policy making, this is the legislative equivalent of gum on a shoe. It has produced a numbing cycle of Washington futility: House Democrats pass a bill, but Senate Democrats, facing a filibuster by the Republican minority, fail to get the 60 votes needed to end debate. Little wonder that approval ratings of Congress stink these days.

But, you say, wait till the elections of '08, and then we'll have a Democratic President and Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate. Surely, the Democrats will be able to bring about change at that point. Unfortunately, the prognosis is not good despite what the Democrats running for the White House say. They are promising change, health care, jobs etc. etc. But the reality is that the Republicans will still be able to defeat any Democrat inspired legislation with the filibuster. Granted they won't have the veto and a Democratic President wouldn't use it anyway. Whether it's Hillary or Obama or Edwards, they would be sitting there willing and eager to sign legislation to get the country back on track and to reverse the insidious policies of the Bush Administration. The problem is that they would need a filibuster proof Senate in order to do that. In other words they would need 60 Democratic seats, and they're not going to get them. They'd need to pick up 9 Democratic seats and keep the ones they have, and 6 of the 9 seats up for election are secure Republican seats according to all estimates. OK, so even if the Democrats win the White House, which is not altogether a foregone conclusion, nothing is going to get done because it would have to get through a Senate which is controlled by a minority of Republicans using the filibuster to defeat all legislation that isn't suitable to them. 

So we would be right back where we were when Bill Clinton was in the White House. All legislation going to the President to sign would have to be triangulated which is nothing more than saying it would be Republican controlled. Do you really think Clinton would have repealed the Glass-Steagall Act (which led to the sub-prime mortgage mess), approved NAFTA and CAFTA (which led to the export of middle class jobs) and signed a bill on welfare reform without the Republicans breathing down his neck? His Presidency would have been quite different if the Democrats controlled the House and had a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. A new Democratic President in 2008 is going to be faced with the same situation. Since the Democrats have already demonstrated that they won't take the Republicans to the mat, and the Republicans have demonstrated that they will take the Democrats to the mat, the Republicans will remain in control of the nation even with a Democratic President and Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. It doesn't take Karl Rove to figure this out.

One possible way out of this morass would be to change the filibuster rule, to make the Republicans actually stay on the floor and filibuster rather than just say they were going to like the rules are set up now. However, it takes a two thirds majority to change the Senate rules and that's not going to happen any time soon. So forget that. We're stuck with a rule which effectively gives a minority of Senators voting in a block the power to defeat any legislation they so desire, and the Republicans have demonstrated time and again their willingness to use it. And, as we know, the Republicans play hardball. They will use every tool at their disposal, every weapon in their arsenal, to prevent any Democratic inspired legislation from ever getting to the President to sign into law. And the Democrats will capitulate because they are wimps and because some of them might as well have been Republicans. They won't vote as a block, and even, if they did, it wouldn't do them any good.

There is one other possibility, and that's been dubbed the nuclear option. The Republicans under Bill Frist threatened to use it. It boils down to a procedural end run around the filibuster.

In 2005, then Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist threatened to end Democratic filibuster of judicial nominees by something called the "nuclear option." It is actually a series of steps designed to bypass the two-thirds vote requirement to change rules: The Senate moves to vote on a controversial nominee. At least 41 Senators call for filibuster. The Senate Majority Leader raises a point of order, saying debate has gone on long enough and that a vote must be taken within a certain time frame. (Current Senate rules requires a cloture vote at this point.) The Vice President -- acting as presiding officer -- sustains the point of order. A Democratic Senator appeals the decision. A Republican Senator moves to table the motion on the floor (the appeal). This vote - to table the appeal - is procedural and cannot be subjected to a filibuster; it requires only a majority vote (in case of a tie, the Vice President casts the tie-breaking vote). With debate ended, the Senate would vote on the issue at hand; this vote requires only a majority of those voting. The filibuster has effectively been closed with a majority vote instead of a three-fifths vote.

This is exacrtly what the Democrats should do and should use, but they're such wimps that I'd lay odds they won't do it. They'll play nicey nice with the Republicans, they'll try to be "collegial," they'll sell out to the same corporate interests, they'll be eager to dole out pork to their home districts. Forget universal health care (unless it benefits corporate interests), forget the reversal of NAFTA and CAFTA, forget taxing the rich, forget anything that threatens corporate interests. Even if Edwards gets in, he won't be able to take on corporate domination of the government without a filibuster proof majority in the Senate or without using the nuclear option which is really the only hope for meaningful reform starting in 2009. If the Democrats are serious about changing the direction of the US, they need to use every tool available even if it provokes a confrontation with the Repuiblicans. The Republicans aren't afraid of confrontation. The Democrats shouldn't be either. They should do whatever's necessary to make majority rule prevail and defeat the filibuster which is antidemocratic and gives a small bunch of Senators representing a small number of citizens overwhelming power. Consider that California and New York contain huge populations. But they only have two senators just like sparsely populated Rhode Island and Wyoming.

The Republicans have turned this country into a corporatocracy and turned it away from a democracy. They've gutted the middle class starting with Reagan. Their agenda is to privatize everything: education, social security, health care. Do the Democrats have the guts to take them on and be as partisan in the implementation of their agenda? Have they even articulated a coherent agenda? I don't think so. The Republicans, at least, have a coherent philosophy and agenda. Where is the Democratic equivalent? If the Republicans can enunciate clearly their philosophy of privatism, the Democrats should be able to enunciate a philosophy which is a rational, balanced combination of capitalism and socialism. Are they afraid of the word? The Republicans aren't afraid of theirs.