Bird that Sings

Two weeks Markos Moulitsas made a plea for Michigan Democrats to vote in the Republican Primary for Mitt “Say anything” Romney.

Why? Certainly not because any Democrat, or anyone else for that matter, likes Romney. Mitt is possibly the most unlikable candidate to emerge in either party since Pat Robertson or Richard Nixon.

No, Kos wanted people to support Romney because John “Hundred Years War” McCain, who was Romney’s major opposition in Michigan, is a much more dangerous candidate for Democrats to run against.

Romney won Michigan but now after South Carolina, Democrats again face the possibility that McCain could win Florida and become the firm favorite in a Republican Field which up until now has resembled the three blind mice—and one crazy mouse.

Indeed the smart thing for Democrats to do at this point would appear to be supporting anyone who could stop McCain in Florida, but does that enemy of my enemy logic extend so far as lending tacit support to the candidacy of the former Mayor of New York City, Rudolph “Hide the children” Giuliani?

Giuliani of course has staked a lot on Florida and if the polls and press are any judge (you make the call) is about to bite the big one down there. Meanwhile, as in Michigan, McCain and Romney are in a very tight race. The conventional wisdom seems to be that a late up tick in support for Giuliani would draw votes from McCain.

Unlike Michigan, Florida is not an open primary, so unless you have Republican grand uncles and grand aunts—or ne’er do well land speculator cousins—living there, this is more in the realm of spectator sports than politics, still . . .

. . . Rudy is a guy who’s made Norman Podhoretz his unofficial foreign policy advisor. He supports bombing Iran for the hell of it. William Bratton, his first police commissioner, who designed the preventive policing program on whose—mixed success—Rudy made his reputation in New York, hates him. The Fireman’s Union of New York, on whose shoulders Rudy rose to National prominence, hates him. He grew up in Brooklyn but followed the Yankees. He’s a good friend of Donald Trump’s. His term in office was characterized by currying favor with the gilded age gentry of Wall Street while waging an undeclared war on black people, poor people and street artists that went by the name, “Giuliani Time.”

In a recent poll, two out of three Americans chose Rudy as the candidate most likely to sell his soul to the devil in exchange for a push-up bra and black lace underwear.

Do we, under sanction from heaven, dare wish Giuliani back in the race, in order only to stop John McCain?
That’s the devil . . .

I woke up this morning missing Molly Ivins. But there was no need. I soon realized that I could still hear her voice in my head, and she was calling out as if from a great distance

“It’s the system, stupid!” I believe she was saying.
And it is, too.

I know Hillary and Barack are all involved in the “horse race” or “dog fight” or whatever they want to call it, but if they were paying attention to the real situation, this is what they’d find.

The US: superpower and supermarket of the world, lies at the nexus of three collapsing systems. The first is our system of campaign finance and by extension, government itself.

When pushed by that pushy guy, John Edwards, in one of last summer’s debates, Hillary defended corporate lobbyists with the plaintive line, “lobbyists are people too.”

Technically this is true. We’re all people, but to be fair, corporate lobbyists are a special class of persons. Generally we label these kinds of people as “parasites.” This is because they not only live off the blood and money of the rest of us, but their parasitic engagement with the system ruins it, makes it ultimately inoperable for any purposes but their own.

Like their patron saint, Darth Vader, many corporate lobbyists were once your elected representatives working for—achievable—change in the system itself. They worked themselves to the bone trying to pass legislation to make the world —a little—better, while continually trying to raise money to get reelected, until they finally got worn down. Then they took the golden handshake and joined the other side. In retirement from public service many corporate lobbyists get very, very rich. And let’s be honest, given the opportunity you might well do the same.

The results of the lobbyists gaming the system with their campaign contributions, however, have been disastrous. Whether or not legislators can take the lobbyists money and still vote against them, the cost of campaigns has escalated in the past decade alone, even more than the cost of elite colleges. This has made most legislators slaves to campaign contributions and the lobbyists who provide the lion share of them.

The obvious answer is Public Financing of campaigns. And of course, most corporate lobbyists don’t want that because Public Financing would spell the end to their outsized power. The tightening nexus of media conglomerates also don’t want it, because they want to continue to be able to charge a fortune for campaign ads. You can see where this is going.

Meanwhile the International Financial system is literally crumbling before our eyes. The business press has decided that the ongoing collapse of the financial system—though they don’t call it that, they call it “the recession”—is due to the “subprime mortgage meltdown.” While the bad, collateralized mortgage debt madly circulating through the financial system is certainly the initial cause of the credit crunch at the root of the current crisis, it is also a symptom of the larger malady.

The underlying sickness that plagues the country is the hegemony of the finance economy over all other aspects of society and the human political economy.

The finance economy rose with the decline of manufacturing in the late 70’s and early 80’s. In these years the Stock Market went on a run that ultimately increased the total of corporate investment and theoretically, worth, by over fifteen fold, from 1981 until today.

What made this massive increase in the size of the finance economy possible was the good old US consumer. Instead of buying American goods manufactured here, we now bought foreign goods—and domestic real estate— financed by a new homegrown American product, cheap commercial credit and debt, produced for us by American banks like good old Citicorp, J.P Morgan Chase and the rest of them.

In fact, even as most of our real incomes declined we bought—directly and indirectly—more debt than we could, collectively, ever afford to repay. Many of us bought the credit debt because we needed to, just to keep our heads above water. Others of us bought debt so we could live like “the Kings and Queens of antiquity,” all on a white-collar, wage-slave salary. Others bought the debt so they could speculate with it and try to game the system themselves. But we all bought it.

Not so strangely, what was going on among individual consumers was recapitulated on an enormous scale in the financial world at large. The names of the kinds of transactions changed over the years, from Leveraged buyouts to the more recent CDO’s—collateralized debt obligations, but it was all about the buying and selling of debt.

As it turned out, this was a very good business and led to the creation of a small, but not insignificant, new class of rich and super rich.

The enormous new pools of financial wealth also enabled the corporate financial elite to hire all those damn lobbyists. Typically, the actual work of these corporate lobbyists— when they are not busy eating away at the integrity of the legislative system itself—is advocating for a regime of less regulation in the markets.

There are many examples of their successes; the deregulation of power and electricity companies that led to the rise of Enron, is one.

In 2005, we saw the new anti-bankruptcy law, in which the Credit Card companies, while keeping their ability to charge usurious interests rates, took away the refuge of Chapter 11 bankruptcy from ordinary Americans.

In 1999, the Banking and Insurance industries, after years of campaigning against the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act which kept them out of the incredibly lucrative investment markets, finally got the so called “firewall” legislation removed.

Once the banks went into collusion with the big investment firms, it was Katie bar the door; anything could be turned to an investment security, or “instrument” as the industry referred to them. And so we got the dicing up and bundling of these impossible to “rate” mortgage securities that are the cause of the current panic.

Now, the chickens are coming home to roost. The Big Banks and Big Investment houses have lost billions upon billions of dollars. They need to re-capitalize and fast, so they are bringing in new investment from the so-called Sovereign Wealth Funds; government investment funds held by nations in Asia and the Middle East.

What the SWF’s have in common is that they represent countries that have actually been producing goods and materials while the US has been mostly been busy making debt. In many cases these countries have literally been subsidizing our debt orgy in order to keep us flush enough to keep buying their stuff. But now the gig’s up. The American Finance economy is running aground and the producing nations are being forced to tip toe in—to take us over.

Frankly, they don’t have a choice.

However, besides the loss of American national sovereignty, there is an even deeper problem endemic to the Finance economy.

This is because the third system in collapse is “the big one,” the ecological system of the planet itself.

Even when the market is functioning as it should, management still has to answer to shareholders whose main concern is maximizing their investment. In the case of public or private companies with a lot of leveraged debt—and there’s a lot of them— there is a certain desperation to the search for immediate profits. However from the standpoint of the planet and its survival, maximizing return is not the first issue that needs to be addressed.

We should be talking about these things. It is an election year after all, but I think we’re not talking about it, because there are certain politicians who must know that they are implicated in the looming crises that hover about us.

Exhibit Number one: The Clintons.
As President, Bill Clinton pushed trade deals like NAFTA that both shipped jobs out of the country and rewarded the new financiers for their support. He signed the Gramm-Leach-Briley law that repealed most provisions of the Glass-Steagall act. He presided over the deregulation of the power and electric industries. He actively encouraged corporate lobbying in exchange for campaign contributions.

It’s hard to say what goes in the mind of the Clintons’ so that Hillary feels she can blithely ignore this history, pretending she is a candidate of change when in fact she is the very embodiment of a malignant status quo.

Molly Ivins saw it. In her January 20, 2006 column, she wrote:
“I’d like to make clear to the people who run the Democratic Party that I will not support Hillary Clinton for President. Enough. Enough triangulation, calculation and equivocation. Enough clever straddling, enough not offending anyone. This is not a Dick Morris election. . . ”

From my perspective, which admittedly is not the perspective of most Democrats, John Edwards is probably both the most electable candidate and the one who attacks the predations of the system most directly.

As Russ Feingold pointed out last week, Edwards is a flawed candidate. However that doesn’t alter the fact that Edwards is currently the most eloquent spokesman we have against the influence of corporate money in politics and for the vanishing American Middle Class. He’s the only credible anti-corporate voice in the race.

The big problem with Edwards’ candidacy is it may no longer be viable. Edwards may be the most electable Democrat for a general election, but I don’t see how he gets from here to the nomination.

Nonetheless, I’ll be voting for John Edwards when my primary day arrives on February 5th. Edwards does take some votes from Obama, but I would submit that he takes more votes from Hillary and at this point, stopping Hillary is job one for Democrats.

1/17

The campaign caravan has moved on and the national press is about to forget Michigan again until some new disaster in the Upper Midwest impresses itself on the national consciousness. Before we go though I’d just like to echo the words of commentator and former University of Detroit basketball coach and Athletic Director, Dick Vitale when he said; “’S’bout bringing back Michigan, baby!”

In the recent Republican Primary you had the two leading GOP contenders of the week, Mitt “say anything” Romney, and John “hundred years War” McCain, treating Michigan to their competing visions for the future of the state.

McCain gave them his “straight talk” about bringing green jobs to Michigan, since “the old jobs are gone, and they ain’t coming back.” Romney opposed McCain’s “defeatist talk” with a scheme of his own: massive government intervention to right the auto industry; a hazy twenty billion dollar plan marrying some sort of government bailout with talk of good old American entrepreneurial drive. While the specifics of the plan were rather nebulous, Romney’s larger point won the day and the primary: the point being that we, the American people, cannot let Michigan fail.

The Devil of course is in the details.

Romney’s right, the government is going to have to intervene in Michigan, but as the political class is fond of saying these days, it’s going to have to be “smart” intervention. Meanwhile McCain is also right, the future is in green collar jobs.

One two-part idea America might try is this. To begin with, the Federal Government would assume the health care and legacy retirement costs of US auto workers from GM, Ford and Chrysler. This would help the Big 3 get back on their feet and stabilize job loss in the upper Mid West. In other words, your basic corporate bailout—I’m sure Mitt would approve.
However at the same time that the government is bailing out the big auto companies, it would also underwrite the creation of a new, Public Automobile company based in Detroit— or Dearborn, or Flint. This Publicly owned, and what the hell, worker managed, company would utilize closed and abandoned GM and Ford plants. It would be dedicated to building stripped down, low cost, hybrid vehicles that would go for eight to ten thousand dollars a pop. These new vehicles would be like a green version of the original Model-T.

The great thing about “The Green T” is it could be built to environmental standards, not corporate ones. The “Green T” might be able to get 100 miles to the gallon as do some prototype hybrid vehicles now being tested at the University of California, Davis. Whatever the case we know one thing; these cars would sell, sell well enough to help underwrite the costs of the government’s legacy buyouts, pay good wages and make back the initial Public investment.

We also know that since the company will be worker managed, the Public commission overseeing the company will be able to make a deal with the UAW to let the workers adjust their own pay rates and working conditions.

Taken together these two proposals would not only address the collapse of manufacturing in Michigan and the Mid West as a whole, but also climate change and the taboo against public ownership of industry. Further, it would point the way for Detroit to once again achieve profitability. The future, after all, is Green.

Now I know it might take McCain and Romney a minute to digest these twin proposals, so while they’re digesting, let’s talk amongst ourselves for a moment.

The big problem with this plan is not that it wouldn’t work. The big problem with this plan is that it violates the taboo on public ownership of industry and anything smacking of government intervention in the market—even while the market is slowly collapsing, under the weight of its own greed and malfeasance, right before our eyes.

This final issue; the relationship of the public sphere and the private sphere is actually the key socio-economic issue of the historical moment. It should be a central issue in the coming election but the Republicans sure ain’t gonna raise it, and with corporate Democrats like Clinton and Obama currently leading the Democratic field, we know the Democrats won’t either.

As we can see, bringing back Michigan won’t be easy. It can be done, but only over the dead bodies of the two major political parties, the ruling corporate oligarchy and their gatekeepers in the media.

But personally, I feel like one could profitably spend a lifetime just making good on Mitt Romney’s broken promises. And that’s a good enough reason for bringing back Michigan to me.