The Republican Narrative

by Jackson Dave

You may be on the receiving end of a seemingly endless stream of emails passed around by right-ringers, espousing Republican “values,” endlessly castigating Democrats, liberals and the evils of welfare. Many are filled with hatred for President Obama, socialism, communism.

One of the fascinating aspects of this commerce is that it’s so difficult to get the sending parties to remove you from their mailing list---even though you may consider this person a friend.

We have one friend who’s been particularly persistent, on a five-year run. My neighbor and I pass notes occasionally, sharing our frustration, over the intrusion of his ideas, biases, hatred into our world. When pressed about particularly obnoxious mailings, he denies endorsement, but we know better.

Here are excerpts from the correspondence with my neighbor; the names have been changed to protect the innocent. The issue precipitating this exchange was Jack’s assertion that in scrutinizing political information, he had come to realize that he can’t trust what he hears from ABC or NBC. (The major networks have journalistic standards. One of the most distinguished journalists in history, Dan Rather lost his job at CBS in 2004 after reporting that George W. Bush had a poor service record in the Air National Guard. He was fired, not because the story was incorrect, but because the source was “unreliable.” Hate-filled e-mailers, concocting fanciful reports from their imagination and totally incredible sources have no journalistic standards.)

Yes, Frank, this is very troubling. Jack certainly seems like a good guy. He is fun to be with, generally. He is an exceptionally good conversationalist, witty and charming.

But he’s a little older than we, and perhaps he’s pulling baggage that he cannot---and does not want to---let go of. It seems clear enough that he’s part of the large movement that opposes the president because of his race. He endorses the writings of his right-wing correspondents because he agrees with them, but invalidates the networks because he disagrees with much of their material. He’s oblivious that mainstream media are also biased to the right, just not as far to the right as he would prefer. My God, they are all run by large corporations and Republican industrialists. There are endless examples of their rightward tilt…I have chronicled a number in my blog.

To some extent these messages are intended to distract meaningful dialog, but I think it goes beyond that. I get one or two e-notes per month from left-wingers over some political shenanigan, looking for joint laughs or countenance. Right-wingers, however, pursue a river of self-validation, I suspect, because they realize their message is so bloody inane. When people do something they know is wrong, or dumb, they tend to either hide it or actively pursue validation.

We are all compelled by our opinions; but some people hold them more tenaciously than others. I like to divide people into two groups according to whether or not they want to know if they are wrong about something. Unfortunately, it appears that the great majority fall into the latter group, and that includes many very intelligent people.

In a book called “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Can’t….” Jonathan Haidt studies our political divide. Republican “leaders” have institutionalized ignorance. By repeatedly lying about almost everything over and over, year after year, they have brought us to the point where a large number of us find ignorance a virtue and “facts” to be inconvenient and suspicious “truthiness.” According to Mr. Haidt, a person hearing a contradictory argument is able to discard this unwelcome information if only one person who claims to be knowledgeable steps forward to gainsay it. We can have 1000 experts, verses one “informed source,” and that’s adequate. This arrogance is then supported by the vast array of partisans who rush in to support the ignorant opinion.

The interesting thing about Jack, in regard to his persistence, is that he’s unwilling to engage in these matters directly. If you approach him face-to-face, he will regurgitate Republican boilerplate. You cannot get a conversation out of him. Never included in the endless mailings that he sends out is something that he has written or researched---something that he must answer to. He hides behind the writing of others. I have offered a number of times to “discuss” anything he likes. I once asked him why he sends us all this crap after being asked to desist. He became agitated, noticeably angry: “None of your business!” Well, actually it is.

After this latest mailing, about the usual crap: “we can’t give poor people welfare,” I returned an adult comment to his address list, which he carelessly included. He actually returned a quick apology, with the promise to never send me anything again.  Fine.  So I returned a simple, direct request to explain his priorities in this matter---something that he would have to consider and write down. Well, you can probably guess: no reply.

Right-wing “populists,” given voice by the Republican Party, have a narrative---a story that is intertwined within the myth of The American Dream. This story focuses on scapegoats and moves away from real issues of power and privilege. It’s a very compelling story and pulls at the unwary’s notion of “patriotism,” (see Patriots All).

The important factor here is that the Republican message goes straight to the heart; it has an emotional tag, and that’s what makes it so compelling. Democrats are inclined to counter this manipulation with facts and logic…heady stuff---boring, and for a less-than-intellectual, it goes right on by. We love to be told that we are victims. Liberals can’t seem to put together the catchy slogans that offer bromides to salve this open sore.

Beyond the allusion of “patriotism,” however, this all becomes very contradictory. There’s a “conservative,” religious sanction that has turned the Republican Party into a Church of Capitalism…in the name of Jesus. This is odd, considering that he was executed in part for overturning the money-changers tables in the temple. Those were the contemporary expression of capitalism, and the religious hierarchy extracted their cut from the commerce within their domain. Does this not cast Republicans in the role of the Jewish establishment that served Jesus up to the Romans?

Jackson Dave is a Robbinsense staff writer

300 Day Assessment

From a “liberal” perspective, the President’s record is anything but satisfactory. Our wars drag on, some have been dramatically expanded: Afghanistan, Pakistan. We are outraged over drone airstrikes, and consider them to be counterproductive. We are outraged by selective “killing” of civilians, including American citizens---. Beyond this, our government has become involved in a number of other struggles, as in Syria and Somalia.

There are endless other examples of failed policy on social and environmental fronts. The President was late on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” forced into moving on marriage rights by his vice president. This insane "war on drugs" still rages-- (aside from the toll that criminalization of drugs takes on our youth, who thinks that if the Canadian government outlawed tobacco products, our government would kill 70,000 of us to stop the flow of cigarettes across the Canadian border?); and he's been MIA on reeling in the financial establishment that has brought the world economy to its knees. These men should be in jail, not collecting record bonuses for their illegal practices (see accompanying article.)  Admittedly, much of candidate Obama’s “promise” was actually “expectations” on the part of the left wing. The president is a “Corporate Liberal:” he tilts left, but remains well within the bounds of the existing power structure. No corporate feathers are ruffled. Republican claims of liberal takeover and socialist decline are inane blather. (Comparisons with Hitler, Stalin, etc. are such vapid dribble that they magnify the irony: Hitler and Stalin were right-wing despots, not liberals. The Republicans have adopted and fully endorsed these leaders’ programs of propaganda/brainwashing, fear and hate mongering to gain political support.)

We can tell ourselves that if reelected, Mr. Obama will pursue the agenda that is really in his heart in his final years. But history has shown this to be unrealistic. Emerging from a triumphant, first term in 1996, President Clinton brought in enormous political capital, and many expected his second term to yield tremendous positive change. This was short-circuited by Republican exploitation of his personal foibles.

The real question looking forward to November is: which of our two candidates will make a better President for the next four years? While Mr. Obama is a known entity, we can only speculate about Mr. Romney. A more protean character has not been seen on the contemporary US tableau.

The Republican base, and the “Tea Partiers” in particular, have not lost their taste for the GOP promise to cut taxes, cut government services and balance the budget on the backs of the irresponsible, undeserving poor. The fact that this program has met with dismal failure every time it has been put to the test causes no caution or skepticism among this group of “believers.”

Mr. Romney has opted to 1) discard the conventional “shift to the middle” expected of general election candidates; 2) double down on expansion of our wars and our vast war-making capacity; and 3) glorify our nation’s position on the world stage, defying widespread international opposition, even among our “allies,” and fully re-endorsing “American Exceptionalism,” the primary source of the vast majority of our domestic insecurity and international mischief. Please re-visit our discussion of American Exceptionalism.

With almost daily faux pas that would make G. W. Bush blush, frequent disclosures of his shady business practices, even shadier personal financial practices, frequent offensive remarks made to almost every interest group, daily reversals on policy positions, evasion of almost any kind of concrete proposal or policy stance, the candidacy remains afloat.

Romney comes from a political family. Father George was a long-time political activist, governor of Michigan in 1962, and ran for president in ‘68. His mother ran for U. S. Senate. Both were moderate, and pursued many progressive programs. As Governor of Massachusetts, Mitt followed a moderate course and set up the archetype of “Obamacare,” which he now vilifies.

But in order to run as a Republican, he must run as an extreme “conservative.” (Extreme conservative is an oxymoron, my friends.) His base, the one that led George W. Bush to office, is incredibly active, angry and energized by racial hatred of our African American President. We believe that the dichotomy between his personal beliefs and the “conservatism” which he’s forced to profess lies at the core of why the man makes so many mistakes. His blunders are a reflection of the battle going on inside. This does not, however, explain his personal problems, such as his tax returns. The man has been running for President for probably six years, or more. Reputed to have wealth approaching ten figures, as a future presidential prospect, everyone knows that the public expects him to pay taxes! Certainly he can afford it.

The latest flap is a case study in the difficulty of the campaign. In a video clip produced by Priorities USA, a senior citizen whose wife died from cancer after he was laid off from a steel plant, perhaps displaced by Bain Capital, alludes to Romney’s culpability. To cast her candidate in a favorable light, Andrea Saul, Romney’s press secretary, stated that if the woman had been a Massachusetts resident, Romney’s healthcare plan would have covered her and saved her life. (Actually, the woman had private healthcare insurance.) But the Republicans want to distance themselves from Romney’s plan in Mass.  Ann coulter, Rush and the GOP establishment demanded Saul’s head for going “off message,” “message” being reiteration of the same meaningless and misleading blather over and over ad nauseum.

It gets better! The most intriguing thing about this flap is that the video clip was an allusion only. There’s no claim of Romney’s blame. More significantly, it was never commercially broadcast…it was a brief bit on the internet. The Romney camp took the bait and in their indignant zeal to repudiate Mr. Obama, they forced the issue to public attention---the clip goes viral.

Meanwhile, the Obama campaign is circulating ads referring to Romney’s personal and business financial practices. With Romney as head of their audit board, Marriott Hotels was running a “Son of BOSS” tax evasion scheme for several years in the ‘90s. The IRS sued and Marriott was hit for back taxes and a multi-million dollar fine. This coupled with Romney’s personal tax avoidance schemes present an effective negative ad campaign. The Romney camp hasn’t bothered refuting this ad.

Instead, he counters with the claim that: Mr. Obama is trying to “undo welfare reform.” This is false. He signed an executive order which allows individual states discretion in implementing welfare. Republicans are supposed to favor “States’ rights,” but really they simply oppose everything Obama does.

We might assume that if elected, Romney will revert to the moderate policies that have highlighted his career, but that would be naïve. The reality of modern American politics is that immediately after election, a first term president begins running for reelection. That will demand continuing gratification of his boisterous, right-wing constituency. Robbinsense believes strongly that the spectacle that we have seen, which prompted most prominent Republicans to dismiss him as the worst candidate that the party could put forward, will continue to play out on the national and world stage. Romney will become George W. Bush II, a better-educated, perhaps more polished version, but every bit as embarrassing and disastrous for our country.

We know that there are good people at various levels of government still holding onto the Republican banner, but it’s difficult to get behind any candidate pandering to this base. For the last three years Republicans have shown that they have no interest in advancing the welfare of our country. In fact, they have been up front with this, announcing to the public that their legislative and political agenda for the next 3 ½ years was to unseat the President. In the process, they have done everything possible to aggravate our recession, including opposition to any program that might create jobs or restrain businesses from exporting jobs. Much of the President’s moderate policies have been pulled right from the GOP playbook, yet they still oppose and revile the man.

The Republican Party tosses the terms “liberal” and “conservative” around like pillows at an adolescent slumber party. “Liberal” comes from the root: liberty. The classic liberal is one who advances freedom, generally through change in social and political processes and institutions. “Conservative,” in contrast, is one who resists change, or strives to conserve the status quo. It doesn’t take much to see how the modern Republican Party has stood these terms on their heads.

While extolling the virtues of “understood” American freedom and “liberty,” the GOP pursues an agenda that actively suppresses our freedoms: freedom to vote, freedom of speech, freedom to assemble, the right to an abortion, freedom to control the size of our families (through birth control), freedom to practice any religion (except GOP-favored Christianity) and freedom to conduct our lives in a style that is different from their norm. They claim they want government “out of our lives,” but actually, they demand to have it in YOUR bedroom, monitoring your private affairs. This hypocrisy should not be tolerated.

While Robbinsense is dissatisfied with the record of the president, and recognizes that progress on any number of fronts toward reforming our society has been poor, the prospect of a Romney presidency is even worst. We advocate reelection of President Obama.

More Mayhem Among Money Mavens

by C. O. Jones

Jon Corzine was a star, a shooting star: CEO of Goldman Sachs, U. S. Senator (D.NJ), spending $62 Million of his own money in the 2000 election, recipient of the coveted Enron Prize for Distinguished Public Service in 2005, Governor of New Jersey in 2007, (another $38 Million). Corzine made things happen; he was a prince of the revolving door.

Returning to the public sphere in March 2010, he was appointed CEO and Chairman of MF Global, a multinational futures broker and bond dealer. With experience, political connections and a veteran of the revolving door, he was expected to turn around this mid-level company with a struggling balance sheet.

Always known as a risk-taker, Corzine took personal control of investment decisions and surreptitiously began buying European “sovereign bonds,” i.e. he began betting on the bailout of troubled European economies.

“Accepted" accounting procedures for these nefarious instruments allow profits to appear immediately after purchase of the bonds. Investors began taking notice that the firm was making a profit, and stock prices rose; but “customer” funds, as required by law, were kept aside.

 The cycle was augmented by pulling in funds from other sectors of the company through a highly risky and discredited financial practice called “Internal Repo.”  This led to the inevitable growing pyramid of profits: as long as the funds came in, more of these highly risky derivatives could be purchased, which led to ever greater profits shown on the books. With the funds leveraged to 40:1, staggering profits might be realized with a swing of a mere 2 or 3%. This, of course, promised enormous bonuses for Corzine. Conversely, a drop of 1 or 2% would produce margin calls from J. P. Morgan, Global’s banker, and trouble for investors---but not for Jon Corzine!

Finally, with Euro Bond holdings exceeding $6 Billion, word started leaking out, investors became nervous, and the bubble burst. MF Global now stands as the 8^th largest bankruptcy in US history. With $1.2 Billion in customer funds “missing,” we speculate that the funds were slipped into margin calls.

Testifying under subpoena at a House Agriculture Committee hearing, Corzine professed ignorance about the massive shortfall that emerged as regulators and federal investigators began probing MF Global's Oct. 31 bankruptcy. Though several committee members still thanked Corzine for opting not to cite his Fifth Amendment right to avoid testifying, others appeared somewhat irritated by his carefully chosen answers. Several described the financial jeopardy now faced by farmers and other agriculture constituents who were MF Global customers.

This sad, troubling tale comes four short years after the previous, massive collapse of the financial services industry, generated by industry fraud, and bailed out by government and future taxpayers. The point here is that the nabobs who run this industry know no bounds in greed and duplicity. The Obama administration has not brought justice to the men who cooked up the myriad of fraudulent schemes from the last mess, any more than it has brought Jon Corzine to justice.  There have been no trials, no jail time. In fact, the same people who brought down the world economy are still pulling the strings, and claiming even greater salaries and bonuses than before the crisis.

In another, recent financial corruption case, United States of America v. Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm, a threesome of bit players on Wall Street got convicted of obscure antitrust violations. This just-completed trial in downtown New York against three faceless financial executives, over 10 years in the making, allowed federal prosecutors to make public for the first time the astonishing inner workings of the reigning American crime syndicate, which now operates not out of Little Italy and Las Vegas, but out of Wall Street.

The defendants in the case – Dominick Carollo, Steven Goldberg and Peter Grimm – worked for GE Capital, the finance arm of General Electric. Along with virtually every major bank and finance company on Wall Street – not just GE, but J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, UBS, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Wachovia and more – these three Wall Street thugs spent the past decade taking part in a breathtakingly broad scheme to skim billions of dollars from the coffers of cities and small towns across America. The banks secretly colluded to rig the public bids on municipal bonds, a business worth $3.7 trillion. By conspiring to lower the interest rates that towns earn on these investments, they stole from schools, hospitals, libraries and nursing homes – from “virtually every state, district and territory in the United States,” according to one settlement. And they did it so cleverly that the victims never even knew they were being ­cheated. No thumbs were broken, and no cement goulashes were recovered, but lots of money disappeared, and its manner of disappearance had a familiar ring: organized crime.

In fact, stripped of all the camouflaging financial verbiage, the crimes the defendants and their co-conspirators committed were virtually indistinguishable from the kind of thuggery practiced for decades by the Mafia, which has long made manipulation of public bids for things like garbage collection and construction contracts a cornerstone of its business. What’s more, in the manner of old mob trials, Wall Street’s secret machinations were revealed during the Carollo trial through crackling wiretap recordings and the lurid testimony of cooperating witnesses, who came into court with bowed heads, pointing fingers at their accomplices. The new-age gangsters even invented an elaborate code to hide their crimes. They spoke in thieves’ cant, or as Italian mobsters talking about “getting a button man to clip the capo.” On tape after tape these Wall Street crooks coughed up phrases like “pull a nickel out” or “get to the right level” or “you’re hanging out there” – all code words used to manipulate the interest rates on municipal bonds. The only thing that made this trial different from a typical mob trial was the scale of the crime.

Some progress is being made. Last month the SEC announced a $150 Million refund to Capital One credit card customers for abusive, misleading, even fraudulent lending practices. OK, this is nice, but it represents hardly even a wrist-slap to the managers who carry out this chicanery. 

On cue, the international system brings us TIBOR, or LIBOR. This bank scandal is so large that Barclay’s Bank set aside $300 Million just for litigation. Fines for Barclay’s alone are near $500 Million. This scandal involves massive collusion, among the largest banks, worldwide, to manipulate interest rates (as in the Carollo case) to suit the individual bank’s portfolio.

While the fines here may reflect the magnitude of the crimes, the important factor is that Barclay’s share holders will shoulder the burden of the penalties. Those who committed the crimes go scot-free. These people belong in jail, for God’s sake, not idling around watching for the next big opportunity for a killing. Our political leaders don’t have the gumption to go after the criminals. We need new laws---a return to Glass Segal. We need regulatory teeth to enforce our existing laws. Legislative injunctions to prevent fraud and collusion are impossible because the bankers control our politicians.

Millions in this country alone live in crushing poverty. Scores of Einsteins and Mozarts live in squalor without a chance to present their gifts to the world. Bankers, who contribute nothing, control our politicians, travel the oceans in yachts and hide their millions/billions in foreign tax havens. We need to be aware, my friends, of the faceless threat from the reigning oligarchy that controls our country, our public dialog and us!

As we move toward what looks to be a pivotal election in November, consider the likely positions of our two candidates on confronting this threat to our democratic structure. We can conclude from the last 3 years that if re-elected, President Obama is unlikely to take dramatic steps to control the banks.

Mr. Romney, on the other hand, refuses to be specific on any policy issue. From what he does say, however, we can assume that he will continue the trend of taking the teeth out of regulatory agencies. Given that these are the only things that stand between us and the rapacious bankers, we must conclude that under his government this disturbing trend will continue unfettered. Take your pick.

C. O. Jones is a Robbinsense staff writer