Monday, January 25, 2010
It’s the jobs, Washington
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
You got trouble, in Obama city. Pundits may blame it on the emphasis on reviving the bloodstream of business credit, on no-win wars, bailout, nuclear proliferation and global warming, on the internal Democrat health policy clash, but the most important neglected activity is the creation of jobs. Not 10% but 17% of Americans are jobless, and extensions of unemployment insurance and COBRA have expired. People are losing their homes, and going hungry!
Yeah, the other priorities were more acute, media screamed terrorist threats, and we saw shoelace bombers everywhere (bin Laden is clever and will sacrifice individual terrorists to keep us off-balance), and Republicans claimed neglect of public safety. Politics prevailed. Jobs, WPA-type infrastructure repair, renewable energy projects, immediate road and bridge jobs should have had equal priorities, with portable housing for transplanted workers sending money home. There are plenty workers in poor states willing to sacrifice home comforts for food for families. So what happened? Apart from the foreign emergencies, there were health care squabbles, similar to those besetting Clinton in 1993 (lucky for him, the dot.com economy boomed). Obamites should have learned. The Volcker method that saved Ragan’s economy , letting unemployment and inflation deplete inventories and force domestic production to revive, as the WWII did for the USA and world economy, appears not quite practical when China, India, Japan and the other Asian little tigers are willing to race their technologically-efficient machines (global warming be hanged, and thanks, for your US transfer of information machinery!), and will sell on credit, taking their payback in US treasuries, backed by our wealth. To New Yorkers, still flush with funds and IRAs from the good days, the threats are less evident, but travel upstate and the rest of the country! Rural people avoid some hunger and homelessness pain by taking in their married children (remember Robert Frost’s Home is where they have to take you back). Really, US has got to get back into the productive rather than the service economy game by shrinking imports and making more and trading with equals (in Israel they have expensive German flashlights rather than Asian fenny-priced goods). And let’s cut some maquiladores’ and Made in China goods.
So, what happened? The 2008 voters, disgusted with Bush, gave their faith and expectations to Obama, who said the right things and was willing to negotiate everything, in the interests of our and the world’s survival. But the dogs attacked on all fronts, the non-cooperative Republicans as recklessly as the terrorists. Obama’s New Deal did not start in as deep a despair as FDR’s and has a more effete and less hard-work oriented and more couch-potato citizenry. Anger and distrust spring up fast.
Example: Massachusetts, a Red state, three-to-one, elects this ex-nude male model, Scott Brown, to be remembered in the history books as Senator Beefcake, whom even Glen Beck the GOP agitprop ace wants to equip with a chastity belt. This outlier Palen-emulator had no trouble beating Martha Coakley, who was too self-assured to campaign, and compounded the errors by denying al Quaeda’s presence in Afghanistan. Even Obama’s last minute campaigning plea, emphasizing the need to save the health program, was blown off by the Massachusettsians, who have their own Romney plan, 97% effective.
Where does that leave Obama’s health plan, bereft of the 60 Senator majority? There are two ways, compromise or barge ahead. This column, eons ago, opined that the 100% coverage plan would never be accepted, and that community clinics are needed to take on the uninsurable and the poor, to avoid overloads at emergency rooms. The barge ahead option, as expressed by Paul Krugman, states that none of the three legs of the plan can be shortcut. He identifies them as coverage of the uninsurables, the 100% participation, to avoid a plan that only the deadly ill will join and that does not have the premium income to pay for itself, and premium subsidies for the poor and indigent. One may suggest another direction, Medicaid/Medicare extension to age 50. Also tort reform, hated by lawyers.
That the popular trust in Obama ha diminished is evident, but he has an undeniably brilliant flexible mind, and three more years to cure.
Lesser priority items are Guantanamo, the treacherous bankers, who cannot repair credit but gamble with people’s deposits in hedge fund world, using the gains to pay bonuses. Will Obama tax them, ash the Brits are already doing? Restore Glass-Steagall Act? Problem: the market is sinking.
Worse to come; the Supreme Court has overruled more than a century’s worth of decisions, dating back to the Theodore Roosevelt trust-busting era. In 1907 the Congress banned corporations from contributing to individual candidates. Corporations are not people and cannot vote; hence they cannot contribute to candidates, as individuals can. This new decision, which effectively permits corporate lobbyists to buy Congress people’s votes (shall we call it the Abramoff Decision?) breaks several precedents, and even John McCain, author , with Russ Feingold, of the contribution control law, is reportedly troubled by the extreme naiveté of some justices. Naiveté, my foot, Kennedy maybe, but Scalia the Constitution writers’ intent tracker, is he naive? This ranks with the Supremes’ 2000 election decision, in Bush v. Gore. Let’s get them on Sunday morning shows to eat their naiveté, and then write some laws requiring stockholder approval and lobbyist fund disclosure. That might help, at least with publicly financed corporations. The Supremes may be naïve; put people are smart, emotionally temporarily unstable, but sound on the whole. Or are we, still?
You got trouble, in Obama city. Pundits may blame it on the emphasis on reviving the bloodstream of business credit, on no-win wars, bailout, nuclear proliferation and global warming, on the internal Democrat health policy clash, but the most important neglected activity is the creation of jobs. Not 10% but 17% of Americans are jobless, and extensions of unemployment insurance and COBRA have expired. People are losing their homes, and going hungry!
Yeah, the other priorities were more acute, media screamed terrorist threats, and we saw shoelace bombers everywhere (bin Laden is clever and will sacrifice individual terrorists to keep us off-balance), and Republicans claimed neglect of public safety. Politics prevailed. Jobs, WPA-type infrastructure repair, renewable energy projects, immediate road and bridge jobs should have had equal priorities, with portable housing for transplanted workers sending money home. There are plenty workers in poor states willing to sacrifice home comforts for food for families. So what happened? Apart from the foreign emergencies, there were health care squabbles, similar to those besetting Clinton in 1993 (lucky for him, the dot.com economy boomed). Obamites should have learned. The Volcker method that saved Ragan’s economy , letting unemployment and inflation deplete inventories and force domestic production to revive, as the WWII did for the USA and world economy, appears not quite practical when China, India, Japan and the other Asian little tigers are willing to race their technologically-efficient machines (global warming be hanged, and thanks, for your US transfer of information machinery!), and will sell on credit, taking their payback in US treasuries, backed by our wealth. To New Yorkers, still flush with funds and IRAs from the good days, the threats are less evident, but travel upstate and the rest of the country! Rural people avoid some hunger and homelessness pain by taking in their married children (remember Robert Frost’s Home is where they have to take you back). Really, US has got to get back into the productive rather than the service economy game by shrinking imports and making more and trading with equals (in Israel they have expensive German flashlights rather than Asian fenny-priced goods). And let’s cut some maquiladores’ and Made in China goods.
So, what happened? The 2008 voters, disgusted with Bush, gave their faith and expectations to Obama, who said the right things and was willing to negotiate everything, in the interests of our and the world’s survival. But the dogs attacked on all fronts, the non-cooperative Republicans as recklessly as the terrorists. Obama’s New Deal did not start in as deep a despair as FDR’s and has a more effete and less hard-work oriented and more couch-potato citizenry. Anger and distrust spring up fast.
Example: Massachusetts, a Red state, three-to-one, elects this ex-nude male model, Scott Brown, to be remembered in the history books as Senator Beefcake, whom even Glen Beck the GOP agitprop ace wants to equip with a chastity belt. This outlier Palen-emulator had no trouble beating Martha Coakley, who was too self-assured to campaign, and compounded the errors by denying al Quaeda’s presence in Afghanistan. Even Obama’s last minute campaigning plea, emphasizing the need to save the health program, was blown off by the Massachusettsians, who have their own Romney plan, 97% effective.
Where does that leave Obama’s health plan, bereft of the 60 Senator majority? There are two ways, compromise or barge ahead. This column, eons ago, opined that the 100% coverage plan would never be accepted, and that community clinics are needed to take on the uninsurable and the poor, to avoid overloads at emergency rooms. The barge ahead option, as expressed by Paul Krugman, states that none of the three legs of the plan can be shortcut. He identifies them as coverage of the uninsurables, the 100% participation, to avoid a plan that only the deadly ill will join and that does not have the premium income to pay for itself, and premium subsidies for the poor and indigent. One may suggest another direction, Medicaid/Medicare extension to age 50. Also tort reform, hated by lawyers.
That the popular trust in Obama ha diminished is evident, but he has an undeniably brilliant flexible mind, and three more years to cure.
Lesser priority items are Guantanamo, the treacherous bankers, who cannot repair credit but gamble with people’s deposits in hedge fund world, using the gains to pay bonuses. Will Obama tax them, ash the Brits are already doing? Restore Glass-Steagall Act? Problem: the market is sinking.
Worse to come; the Supreme Court has overruled more than a century’s worth of decisions, dating back to the Theodore Roosevelt trust-busting era. In 1907 the Congress banned corporations from contributing to individual candidates. Corporations are not people and cannot vote; hence they cannot contribute to candidates, as individuals can. This new decision, which effectively permits corporate lobbyists to buy Congress people’s votes (shall we call it the Abramoff Decision?) breaks several precedents, and even John McCain, author , with Russ Feingold, of the contribution control law, is reportedly troubled by the extreme naiveté of some justices. Naiveté, my foot, Kennedy maybe, but Scalia the Constitution writers’ intent tracker, is he naive? This ranks with the Supremes’ 2000 election decision, in Bush v. Gore. Let’s get them on Sunday morning shows to eat their naiveté, and then write some laws requiring stockholder approval and lobbyist fund disclosure. That might help, at least with publicly financed corporations. The Supremes may be naïve; put people are smart, emotionally temporarily unstable, but sound on the whole. Or are we, still?
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 3:03 AM 
