What do women want? Not Republicans

It’s tough to be the one at the party the girls don’t want to dance with.

That’s not to say the Democrats have women swooning. The GOP has a 49 percent disapproval rating among female voters, according to their own poll, while the Democrats are disliked by 39 percent. But this is a Republican poll, and the relatively narrow margin, when one is talking about half the electorate, has given the party of Palin a way to claim that there aren’t any winners.

“If Republicans talk about things like the economy, the debt, make the case for jobs and schools and education, and push back,” Republicans will win, RNC Chair, Reince Priebus said.

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Government shutdown fills Congress’ coffers – not yours

War brings camaraderie. The men and women who fought World War Two, what Tom Brokaw called America’s “Greatest Generation,” came together to fight a war, and taking care of your buddy in a foxhole taught them that we all have to watch out for each other. It’s how we achieved victory, and when the war was over, it’s how we became a hard working and strong democracy, a leader in the world’s economy and, for a while, at least, the global standard for human and civil rights.
But a nation at war with itself finds its comrades-in-arms with blinders on, seeing only the side of the road those like them choose to toe. It doesn’t matter that politicians of all persuasions have tried to build bridges across the divide. The stubborn perspective of Republican hardliners ignores, disavows or buries any outreach as if it were an apple from Eden’s serpent. The foxholes where they have planted themselves for this battle are dimly lit gutters, and their comrades tend to be the rats in three-corner hats that scamper through the flotsam of rotten, old ideas.

World War Two veterans, politicians and journalists enter the memorial, on the Mall, in Washington, DC, Wednesday.
(Photo by Leo Shane III, Stars and Stripes)

That’s why it was particularly galling to see the Republican National Committee use a group of aged World War Two veterans as props when they “forced” the reopening of the memorial to that war, Wednesday, less than 48 hours after they refused to budget the National Park Service and allowed the government to shutdown.

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Shocker: Government shirks responsibility, again

The deal approved today is truly a missed opportunity to do something big to reduce our long-term fiscal problems…”
- from a statement released Tuesday, by Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, co-chairs of a bipartisan deficit reduction committee

If you don’t stand broadly and shoulder the responsibilities of governing, there should be no surprise when the house of cards you’ve tried to build over the last two years comes crashing down around you. That’s what happened over New Year’s Day, when the Senate, and then the House, passed an overwhelmingly bipartisan bill that mitigated the effects of the final sunset (thank God) of the Bush tax cuts.

As a solution to the so called “fiscal cliff,” the Senate version of a  revamped House bill falls short of averting every slippery rock on the way to the economic edge, but it was the only lifeline of agreement left after Speaker of the House, John Boehner (R-OH), turned down the president’s offer of early December, refusing to take the same tack with his caucus that he essentially was forced to take Tuesday night. Since he dropped the ball the White House handed him, Boehner had to make do with the cold, meatless bone of a compromise worked out between Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Vice President Joe Biden.

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Wal-Mart protesters call for workers' rights

Workers' rights are human rights. That's what one hand painted sign said at a protest outside a Wal-Mart store in Decatur, Georgia, Friday. About two dozen protesters stood on the sidewalk across the street from the mega-retailer's store in this suburb, just east of Atlanta, playing drums, waving flags and signs, and shouting at motorists to make them aware of what they see as the questionable labor practices of the world's largest retailer. "We wanted to show our solidarity with Wal-Mart workers," said Diana Eidson, who took part in the event on the unofficial kickoff day of the holiday shopping season. Many Wal-Mart associates around the country walked out, Friday, to demonstrate their own dissatisfaction with their employer.

"We're saying community, not consumerism; family, not frenzy," Misty Novitch, a social justice activist, agreed. "We're trying to offer a different way of doing Black Friday, that supports the [Wal-Mart] workers on strike around the country, striking for just a living wage, healthcare, predictable scheduling," she explained, "so they don't get retaliated against when they try to form a union, the ability to form a union without fear." READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE...

Fiscal cliff compromise a wolf in elephant's clothing

Here we go again. The Republicans are skipping down the path toward obstructionism, aiming to get away with doing the least by convincing us it is the most they can do. It isn't. They will give it another sham title like "Tax Reform." It won't be. They're saying it will increase significant revenue by being "fair" to the middle class and the "job creators." It won't, and it isn't.

"The math tends not to work," said President Obama, at his first post-election press conference, last Wednesday. While he agreed with recent statements by Speaker of the House, John Boehner (R-OH), that "there are loopholes that can be closed, and we should look at how we can make the process of deductions, the filing process easier, simpler," the president added, "what I'm not going to do is to extend further a tax cut for folks who don't need it, which would cost close to a trillion dollars."

By focusing only on closing loopholes and changing the tax code, the Republicans are actually taking aim at middle class households. The top two percent aren't the only ones who benefit from deductions.

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-PBG

Too big to fail: feudalism, socialism and other demons of capitalism

(From my examiner.com column)

There is a lot of talk these days about how the $700 billion bank bailout that passed in 2008 was a step toward socialism, that we were effectively nationalizing the banks. The "big bad" government would own our savings and our mortgages.

In fact, at the end of last year, according to Fox News, RNC Vice Chairman James Bopp, Jr., tried to get Republicans to sign on to a resolution that said, in part, that bailouts and other federally funded stimuli are:

"...moving our free-market based economy another dangerous step closer toward socialism."

(The GOP continues to find endorsers of the pending resolution. It is scheduled to be voted on next week by party delegates attending the RNC Winter Meetings in Washington, DC.)

But to move toward socialism in this country would take a lot more than having some ownership in banks and automobile companies. It seems to me that it is easier to view last year's final money grab by the outgoing administration as a slide back to feudalism, rather than a leap ahead to socialism.

Here's why I say that.

When, in the course of human events, our forebears revolted and evolved the radically progressive democratic republic we call home, they only sidestepped the troubling system of King George and the lords who supported and served him. Rather than allow a ruler to disseminate what was his will, the United States of America was to be a nation that was run according to the will of the people. To insure that no one branch of government superseded the other, the Founding Fathers intelligently installed a system of checks and balances.

We do not work to serve the king. We do not work to serve the lord of the manor. We work to better our own lives and the lives of our neighbors.

Let me take you back to that time, though, when the king counted on his loyal lords to give tributes and defend his lands. In return, the king ensured that those who supported him were all in alliance. If one of the fiefdoms chose to no longer support the king, His Royal Highness could entreat neighboring lords to subdue the free lance, in exchange for treasures and more land to call their own.

Likewise, if the kingdom was losing land to an invader, and his own lords were failing in their common defense, he would send the King's Army out to help them. If the fight was really desperate, the king would send an emissary to another kingdom, to ask for their help with men and money. In this way, wars were fought in feudal Europe for hundreds of years.

The patronage period of the Renaissance was only a different form of the same thing. The merchant republics that gave birth to the Italian Renaissance were little more than oligarchies, an early, quite undemocratic, form of capitalism. Someone with money made your life possible, but it was still a class society where nobility got ahead and the peasants suffered.

Indeed, according to Wikipedia's entry for Renaissance/Historiography, "many historians now point out that most of the negative social factors popularly associated with the 'medieval' period – poverty, warfare, religious and political persecution, for example – seem to have worsened in [the Renaissance] era."

The royal courts of Europe in the closing centuries of the last millennium were just an extension of that oligarchy. The royalty of the time was so puffed up about the Renaissance that their ancestors created, that they did not notice the seething peasantry they were crushing under their pointy shoes. They told them to "eat cake."

Even today, there are those who argue that in order to get Americans working, you have to make sure the companies that employ them get all kinds of breaks, like offshore tax shelters, like not having to pay them their employees a living wage. The trickle-downers basically echo that old capitalist chestnut, "What's good for GM is good for America."

Companies that are "too big to fail" are just modern day fiefdoms. Giving them our tax dollars, and the money we have gone to China to borrow, is just a new way for the king to save his realm. It is not socialism. It's just a perpetuation of the status quo.

-PBG

The Last Money Grab

Wall Street and Main Street Lay Siege to Easy Street

Best not to get stuck on Easy Street in these economic times.

It may seem oxymoronic to think of Easy Street and Wall Street as developments on the opposite sides of an economic rift, but that is just what is being created with this economic earthquake. While denizens of both may be sweating the distance of their fall, those on Easy Street, by implication, are really confident they have found a way to come out okay.

Those on Main Street, meanwhile, run around like town folk in a spaghetti western when the bad guys ride into town, ducking into clapboard buildings, horse troughs and rain barrels, lest the meteoric fall of the economy crush them under its growing shadow. If they knew what was good for them, they would scramble to higher ground, take buggies and coaches to the gates of Easy Street and rattle the gilded cage.

The Main Streeters wouldn't be alone. At the gate on the other end of Easy Street are the folks from Wall Street. They are going through a ring of keys, desperately trying each one in the gate's chained padlock, their hands sweating while they yell at each other and shake their heads.

"It's key number two!"

"No, it's key seven!"

"I say one! Key number one!"

It will take the traders a while to realize that the bankers on Easy Street have changed the locks, and they did it with the help of congress and Hank Paulsen. "Suspicion falls ... on the objectivity of Paulsen who is a former merchant banker." - October 3, 2008, canberratimes.au.com

"A lost cause."

If we were worried before about a growing disparity and the shrinking of the middle class, we should really be worried now. We lost 159,000 jobs in September, the worst monthly jobless report in five years. According to the NY Times, "with the job market now swiftly deteriorating and fear dogging the financial system, what optimism remained has given way to the broad assumption that 2008 is a lost cause."

And with the Fed contemplating another rate cut, there is little incentive to save. Not that it matters, since over 6% of us are not working and making money anyway.

So the bankers will take this money that congress is approving and the president will sign, go inside their ivory towers and shut the gates on Easy Street and the American Dream. "...banks may continue to hoard their dollars regardless of a rescue package from Washington, depriving businesses of capital needed to expand," the Times article goes on to say. If that's the case, what's the point of the package, except that Bush and Cheney will have succeeded in bankrupting the country of more than just its principles?

I wonder if the lamest lame duck administration in my lifetime will be forced by the courts to sell their own personal assets to help settle this debt and calm the markets. Yeah. Right. They'll be locked safely away, while Main Streeters and Wall Streeters alike slowly go broke, starve and die. Brother, can you spare grande mocha latte?

-PBG