What next?

Assuming both Houses of Congress vote to approve the temporary Republican capitulation and send the bill to the President before midnight, we've squeaked through again.  The interesting part, this time, was that Obama finally drew a "red line" and didn't move it — but I suspect the thanks for a resolution should go to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, Wall Street lobbying firms, and a bunch of other essentially Republican organizations.

The question now is, "Have they learned anything?"  Keep your fingers crossed.

So called "moderate" Republicans — that is, not the ones Devin Nunes (R-CA) described as "lemmings with suicide vests" — just might get some more corporate support.  Yes, a lot of those "moderates" are afraid of primary challenges from the Tea Party lemmings, but wouldn't it be nice if some of those corporate interests got into those safe, perfectly gerrymandered Republican districts and financed primary challenges against right wing radicals by Republicans a little closer to the center?

Idiocy

Please try to explain this one: after closing down the government and furloughing 800,000 "non-essential" workers (now down to around 500,000 because Chuck Hagel redefined "essential" for the Defense Department), the House Republicans voted to pay those furloughed workers for the time they are not working.

Huh?

If government is bloated and overfunded, why in the hell would they want to pay people for work they haven't done?  Yes, it makes perfect sense to give the "essential" workers, slogging on without paychecks during the shutdown, back pay when the idiotic "crisis" is over — but why do they want to pay, say, the labor statistics people who were unable to produce a report for September, or the food inspectors who aren't finding the bacterial infections that might be in our lettuce?  Isn't that kind of like — umm — welfare?

Okay, it looks like a debt default will be pushed back by six weeks — but goddamn it, they're still idiots.

. . . . .

(By the way, the United States Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, and even the Koch brothers are feeling the red-hot poker of Tea Party craziness sliding up their asses.  They really should have known better,  along with scores of other pro-business lobbyists, but they put anti-regulatory enthusiasm above common sense.  Too bad, assholes.  You were idiots too.)

SCANDAL!!!!

Usually, I would have called this "Short Subjects," but modern life being what it is, I guess I'll just do what bloggers do.  I mean, something is bound to be scandalous?  Right?

Benghazi
If you have to figure out who was most responsible for the death of J. Christopher Stevens and three of his staff, the most likely offender was J. Christopher Stevens.  Hell,  he was the ambassador, and should have known the country better than anybody else.  Yes, it's a shame he's dead, but I guess he put a little too much faith in the Islamist assholes who were supposed to be protecting him.  Bad call, but I don't think certain shrill members of Congress can blame it on either Hillary or the big O.

501(C)(4)s
IRS agents in Cincinnati targeted local Tea Party groups for special scrutiny, albeit most of those groups had about as much "pull" as arthritic chickens.  The IRS was afraid to go after the big boys, like Obama's "Organizing for Action," or Karl Rove's "Crossroads GPS."  Okay, maybe they wanted to do more harm to conservative groups but, really, they didn't harm anybody.  It's mostly bullshit, which is why Our President felt free to tell us how awful it was.

Raiding the AP
I can't recall anybody ever referring to the Obama administration as a champion of civil liberties, and that seems to be mostly because it never was.  Attorney General Eric Holder, recently of Wall Street, never brings suits against big money, but he is not hesitant to persecute the press for releasing information we all really ought to know.  If we lose our free press (to the extent that it is free and not bought), we lose whatever is left of our democracy.

I am so nostalgic for the Nixon administration, which was the last time we had something resembling democracy rather than plutocracy in this country.  We will continue to move in the direction of austerity, no matter how much evidence arises to tell us it is the wrong direction.  The "starve the beast" assholes prevail, in both parties.

Here, in the USofA, it's not any "beast" being starved.  It's people.  Ordinary, everyday people.

Boehner's Dilemma

John Boehner has a problem. Well, okay, he has several problems.

First, despite his nominal leadership of the Republican party, he can't control the troops. Given his long history in the House, this must have come as a surprise to him — if there was anything Republicans have been good at for the past thirty years, it's been party discipline. The Tea Parties seem to have ruined that.

Second, he can't help but feel Eric Cantor's dagger poking at his side, looking for a good soft spot between the ribs. Cantor really wants to replace Boehner as Speaker of the House, and he doesn't seem to mind keeping his party divided against itself to get there.

Boehner is a corporatist, but also a pragmatist. As a corporatist, he prefers not to mess around with the possibility of creating financial meltdown. As a pragmatist, he follows Reagan in the belief that when you get 80% of what you wanted in a negotiation, you've won. When Obama offered up large chunks of Medicare and Medicaid on the altar of "moderation," Boehner was willing to go along with closing a few tax loopholes for the rich.

Cantor saw Boehner's "weakness" as an opportunity to run up to the front of the Tea Party parade with a large bass drum. Although he's been sounding more and more like a Grover Norquist ideologue lately, I suspect Cantor is much better understood as a pure opportunist — a man whose personal ambition far outweighs any party loyalty

After a few drinks the other night, I had this really neat fantasy. It won't come true, of course, but a lot of us would be supremely amused if it did.

John Boehner has lots of friends with money and power. Suppose he quietly encouraged some of them to start a "draft Eric Cantor" campaign for the 2012 presidential race. After all, the current crop of candidates is not especially impressive, and even the Tea Partiers have to be able to see that Cantor has a lot more on the ball than the intellectually challenged Michele Bachman.

I know, very unlikely — but what if Eric Cantor's hubris was great enough to get him to go along with it, and what if he won the nomination?

Why, then you'd have a black man running against a Jew for the highest office in the land! Oh no! Crisis in Redneckland!

As for me, I'd still be poking around the available third-party candidates looking for a place to cast my protest vote — but at least I could have a few good laughs.

Compromise

"I just said it was like a cross between a bulldog and chihuahua,
but what I meant is it will have a fantastic hybrid vigor."
Boris Johnson - Mayor of London

Most Americans are paying little or no attention to the recent elections in the UK. I might be among them were it not for the fact that I indulge in a bit of BBC on podcast while out walking off the pounds. What I've enjoyed most about the recent UK excitement is the way the right (Cameron and the Conservatives) have so easily found a route to compromise with the (sort of) left (Clegg and the LibDems.) (Please pardon my parentheses.)

Our own Barack Obama has been attempting to travel a similar course, with many unexpected and, doubtless, heartrending roadblocks thrown up in his way. Somehow, he managed to endorse offshore drilling for oil just in advance of the destruction of the Gulf of Mexico. Somehow, he managed to endorse the SM-3 missile interceptor system just before it was shown to be pretty-much worthless. Honestly, I don't believe the guy is an asshole — but I think he's been getting some pretty bad advice.

The Far Right has taken over the Republican establishment, and the Tea Party dorks are almost a breath of fresh air — kind of like a right-of-center LibDem-ish minority. There is nobody even remotely open to compromise in the GOP except for, perhaps, Lindsey Graham and those two women from Maine. Unlike just about all the other Republicans, they're not unmitigated opportunists — they say what they mean. (I especially admire Lindsey Graham, for his genuine respect for the law.)

Frankly, Mr. President, this might be an ideal time to be a one-term president, so stop trying to compromise and take a firm stand. Dump those Rubin relics, repudiate the remnant Clintonians, and just lose the goddamned election in 2012! The steps the new president will be forced to take — to deal with an ongoing economic crisis — will be so unpopular that his or her party will be pesonae non gratae for many subsequent years.

Take one for the team, and stop trying to be all things to all people. You're not.

Derivatives

I have to admit I was very pleasantly surprised by the proposed derivatives regulations that came out of the Senate's Agriculture committee — so much so, that I think it would be fantastic if somebody could find a way to assign farm price supports, the next time they come up, to Banking and Finance.

Blanche Lincoln provided real leadership, and Charles Grassley bravely decided to satisfy Iowa voters rather than adhere to monolithic Republican Party discipline. (Well, maybe he had permission.) However it happened, the bill reported out of committee is significantly better than the House version.

Perhaps it's because those farm state Senators have a genuine understanding of the way derivatives are supposed to work. The reason Agriculture is responsible for derivatives is because farmers need futures contracts to manage risk . Those contracts always have been traded openly and, by and large, they have done the job for both farmers and end users of agricultural products. Markets do work, provided they are not diddled by those who look for ways to profit from market failure.

So now it's "wait and see" time again. I don't think the Republicans are dumb enough to filibuster a financial reform bill, but who knows? With enough pressure from Fox News and the minions of Dick Armey, it still could happen.

More important to the final bill, though, is what comes down from the White House. Geithner and Summers have been mouthing some of the "correct" pronouncements lately, but nobody ever should forget just how much money Wall Street has to sling around. A hell of a lot was tossed at Obama during the 2008 campaign, and thanks to the Supreme Court's decision in the Citizens United case, there will be a hell of a lot more to be tossed around in the future.

Conspiracy or Culture?

The Times had an interesting article today about the Tea Party movement, focusing on ordinary, previously non-political people who have become involved. Many are the kinds of people who used to tell me that I was paranoid. Well, as we used to say back in the sixties, "paranoia is heightened awareness."

Mind you, I suppose I should be at least somewhat pleased by the rapid growth of the idea that elite groups have undue control over our society and our lives. But, on the other hand, most of the details of Tea Party beliefs are dictated by mouthpieces for those same elite groups — Glen Beck, Sarah Palin, and similar faux-populists. (The persistent problem with populism is that people are such damned suckers for demagogy.)

The chief fear of those Tea Party foot soldiers is that their movement will be co-opted by the Republican Party. It's a rational fear, and former House Majority Leader Dick Armey is leading the charge. It may be that the Tea Party movement will have to choose between co-option and continued fragmentation — although a hostile takeover of the Republicans by Tea Party activists also is a possibility. Frankly, I look forward to that happening. It would leave the Republicans as fragmented as the Democrats.

So, I asked myself, why is it that the right can launch itself into a massive populist tizzy, while the left just sits around with its thumb up its ass?

The answer, of course, is the last election. Most people on the left — not me, regular "view from vicworld" readers may recall — believed we had "won," then were totally stunned when Obama and the Democrats let us down. Nascent populist groups like MoveOn.org were co-opted by the mainline Democrats very early in the election cycle. The innocents who actually bought the hype about "hope" and "change" are crushed, having seen neither.

It's kind of like the left is in a clinical depression, unable to get out of bed.

Is it really all a big conspiracy, as the Tea Parties believe, orchestrated by the Trilateral Commission, the Federal Reserve, and (as some of them doubtless believe) the Elders of Zion to boot? It's kind of fun to believe in conspiracy theories, of course, and when conspiracy theorists get together, they feed off each other.

Sorry, but its not a conspiracy. It's culture — the culture of the modern world. It makes as much sense to say that Italian men "conspire" to pinch women's asses as to say that the rich "conspire" to control the government by buying our esteemed political leaders. That's just the way it is.

And, as Marx correctly noted, if you kick out one pack of plutocrats, a new pack of plutocrats slips right into place. All the tea parties in the world won't change that.