Karl Rove Once Again Backed by the Super-Wealthy

He's back. Karl Rove, who helped elect one of our nation's worst presidents not once but twice is back to his old tricks. This is the guy who scared the nation with those phony aluminum tubes back in 2002 and helped throw our nation into a war we did not need, while President Bush let Osama bin Laden get away.

Let's be clear about this. George W. Bush is responsible for the economic meltdown. He did nothing to stop the wild real estate speculation. He did nothing to help homeowners once the mortgage debacle began to unfold. He did nothing to enforce the law when it comes to bank and Wall Street. In 2002, he signed a business reform bill and stuck the legislation in his desk without any intention of enforcing the law. Who got Bush elected? Karl Rove. Who got Bush elected a second time? Karl Rove. Who's allied to the most conservative and incompetent elements of the Republican Party? Karl Rove.

Here's an article I found in the Los Angeles Times about one of the slipperiest political operators the Republicans have working for them:

The office is marked only by a sign reading "American Crossroads" and "American Action Network." But behind the nondescript entrance is the headquarters of a new political power: a fundraising operation that has pulled in more than $32 million this year, as well as sophisticated marketing, research and advertising operations — all aimed at getting Republicans elected to the House and Senate.

(snip)

American Crossroads and its affiliates are the offspring of George W. Bush administration strategist Karl Rove and other senior GOP leaders who once worked within the regular party structure, especially the Republican National Committee and its tradition-encrusted headquarters near the Capitol.

(snip)

Many of the new groups were formed after the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision last year, which made it easier for corporations and unions to spend directly on political causes. New groups formed on the left and right, but the dramatic growth has been on the right.

There's a lot more money going to Karl than that $32 million. He's a slick coordinator who know how to hide money from contributors. Karl Rove and his friends are taking a ton of money from right-wing billionaires, exactly the same clowns who supported George W. Bush, and exactly the same clowns who supported the legislation and policies of Republicans that sent our economy into the tank. If you're out of work, if you're worried about your home, or you're wondering when the economy will recover, Karl Rove and his friends are responsible. Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich have been telling Republicans to block every effort by President Obama to get the economy moving. Obama has moved in the right direction, but if it had not be for the Republicans, the economy would be in much better shape today. And yet the Republicans have the gall to ask for your vote.

The New York Times has details on some of the planning by Karl Rove and other Republicans who were part of the Bush Administration or closely associated to it:

...the Republican fund-raiser Fred Malek, the onetime lobbyist and Bush White House counselor Ed Gillespie, and former Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter Mary Cheney, among others — agreed on plans for an ambitious new political machine that would marshal the resources of disparate business, nonprofit and interest groups to bring Republicans back to power this fall.

(snip)

[Karl Rove] has had a major hand in helping to summon the old coalition of millionaires and billionaires who supported Mr. Bush and have huge financial stakes in regulatory and tax policy...

Folks, this is what you call business as usual politics. Karl Rove and his friends are not smart enough or honest enough to keep the economy from going into the ditch, but they're smart enough to help their wealthy friends, exactly the kind of people who created the economic mess in the first place. Think of all the money they fed to friends like Halliburton. Think of all the money they fed to their rich cronies during Hurricane Katrina without actually accomplishing anything. This is a slick crowd: they know how to talk and how to raise money from conservative billionaires, but they're a danger to every working American, retired seniors and the future of every child. These are guys who live for today with no regard for the jobs being sent overseas and no regard for millions of Americans looking for a decent way forward in tough times.

Now Rove and his friends are a bit smarter, however, than the Tea Party Mad Hatters, but nevertheless, they are willing to work with them (or roll them?) in order to win the election. There should be no mistake about who's going to be in charge if the Republicans take the House and Senate: the old Bush crowd. The Democrats still have work to do but if Republicans are back in power, watch out. With Republicans controlling the agenda, it won't take much time for the economy to go right back into the ditch, right where George W. Bush and Karl Rove put us in the first place.

Reenergizing the American Economy

Wealthy Republicans these days talk a lot about free enterprise and competition but don't particularly believe what they're saying. They don't want competition. They want a free hand in acquiring a sweetheart deal from the government. They don't particularly care which government it is: ours or maybe the Chinese. These wealthy Republicans wave the American flags while shipping American jobs overseas. And they do lots of business with governments deeply involved in the business of their countries. Ironic, isn't it?

If one looks at the history of the last 120 years, what many wealthy Republicans want are monopolies and guaranteed profits. For years, the best sweetheart deals over the long haul were found in South America. Then Eastern Europe was the next best venue for such deals. Now with the rape of American industry in full swing, the best deals are with the Chinese, Indians and a number of third world countries willing to pay big bucks up front. For a time, average Americans seemed to gain some benefit from the low prices that were the result of such wheeling and dealing. But it was only for a time. Seen any low prices lately? Wealthy Republicans have discovered low wages and fat profit margins. Welcome to the new economy.

Actually the new economy has been around for more than thirty years. The truth is that people noticed but didn't notice. It began with hostile takeovers that took American companies with lots of American jobs and turned them into lean operations that didn't have the R & D to keep their place in the world economy. Too much money was going into the pockets of people who were already rich but who couldn't seem to get enough. This kind of stuff still goes on. In recent years, many newspapers have been destroyed by such corporate raiders who fail to notice that newspapers need all the resources they can muster to survive the arrival of the Internet Age.

There's actually a myth that American ideas are what's keeping the American economy afloat. Like all myths, there's a grain of truth to it but the current myth is tied to a business superstition that you can't make a profit unless you set up a factory in Vietnam or Malaysia or whatever country is currently paying the lowest wages. It's part of a canard that big corporations throw around: We are in the business of ideas! Sure. Big corporations often buy their ideas from small corporations who get their ideas from university researchers looking for venture capital. Eventually the big corporation gets its big hands on the equipment of the small corporation, unscrews the stuff from the factory floor and ships it overseas for someone else to make. With an unemployment rate of 9.4%, America's empty factories now extend from Los Angeles to Jersey City. In the long run, selling generations of American know-how cannot keep the economy afloat.

The weird thing is that Ronald Reagan seemed to get that Americans not only need to lead in the best ideas but they need to lead in at least a few key areas of manufacturing. That is, after all, how we became great in the first place. Now, like most Republicans, Reagan seemed to have the idea that what the United States needed was a lot of poor workers with no bargaining power and no safety net. But unlike the Republicans of today, he actually felt the government sometimes needs to get involved in business. Reagan in particular stimulated the computer sector. In the 1980s, the United States was behind Japan in certain areas of computer technology. But Reagan felt technology was a national priority and even a national defense issue. And some years later Al Gore and Bill Clinton got it when they helped the Internet boom any number of times (No, Gore didn't invent the Internet as Republicans pretend that he claimed, but he did help it with a number of issues; actually Republican politicians and pundits of this era aren't good at inventing anything useful but they are admittedly fairly good at inventing nonsense).

For eight years, George W. Bush sat on his hands as it became obvious we had an energy problem. In the last year of his presidency, oil rose to $147 a barrel. Oil rose so high that oil prices were a factor in the economic meltdown of last September. Very quickly, oil started going the other way as America stopped going places and as the rest of the world fell into a steep recession. Nobody was buying oil and a barrel of oil dropped to the low 30s. Unfortunately, conservative lunkheads who have trouble paying attention started traveling again and buying big cars. The Los Angeles Times have noticed the climb in prices:

At some stations in the state, $3 gasoline was old news. A Mobil station in Goleta, near Santa Barbara, was charging $3.69 a gallon; a Chevron in Shoshone, near Death Valley National Park, was posting $3.66; and a 76 on the Westside was posting $3.59...

Death Valley? Now there's a metaphor. Look, the energy crisis is here. It's not going anywhere soon. During a recession, the use of oil drops. So does the price. But that doesn't mean the problem has gone away. So far, it's not clear that a significant majority of Americans get it. Maybe a small majority get it. But for things to change a majority of business people need to get it as well.

Here and there, one sees some glimmer of hope in the business community. There are people out there who get it, who have ideas, who have the know-how or who are close to getting the know-how if—and this is a big if—they can get help bringing their ideas to the market. This requires money. The problem is that if we wait around for big business to do something, the ideas and initiative and jobs will simply go overseas. The smart thing to do is to do what Reagan did in one of his few truly smart moves: get the government involved in stimulating new technology, this time in the alternative energy field. Here's an article from CNNMoney that offers a glimmer of hope:

Thousands of jobs are riding on Ener1's efforts to build the best car battery in the world.

The start-up firm is the only U.S. company able to mass produce batteries on American soil for an automobile industry poised to make a monumental shift from gasoline to electric power.

(snip)

The company has applied for a $480 million government loan to expand its facility and hopefully allow it to land a big contract. If that happens, Ener1 says it will go on a hiring spree.

Maybe Ener1 deserves the loan and maybe not. But I know there are hundreds of small American companies that deserves such loans and that will be the backbone of a new energy sector that will power American jobs. This is the future. Not the business as usual we've seen for thirty years. Americans jobs depend on companies that develop and use American talent. Let's hope Barack Obama gets it. Let's hope obstructionist Republican fossils get out of the way. It's time for the future to arrive in America.

Economy Continues to Sink While Republicans Play Games

As usual, Washington Republicans and their friends in the media are sitting on their well-financed posteriors playing games and otherwise doing nothing as the economy continues to tank. Some experts say another 2 million jobs may be lost this year thanks to the Bush economic meltdown.

Here's just one example courtesy of Think Progress:

Scarborough, Brzezinski, and other regular Morning Joe contributors have made similarly flawed arguments in recent days:

Brzezinski: “I’m confused as to why we’re being tricked into thinking this is a stimulus bill, when it’s packed with welfare programs.”

Pat Buchanan: “This is just a big Democratic bill with all this pork and slop.”

Jim Cramer: “I have it maybe that there’s 142 people really will get a job.”

Dylan Ratigan: “[T]he Democrats would do themselves a tremendous favor to not put spending programs in when we’re dealing with a stimulus bill.”

Scarborough: “This is a streaming pile of garbage.”

This group of do nothing Republicans suggests more tax cuts. Brilliant. Being rich Republicans themselves, they will benefit from their own suggestion. Like other rich Republicans, they'll buy their clothes from Asia, their yachts and luxury cars from Europe and their diamonds from Africa and that will do nothing for the American economy. Years of economic neglect by Republicans has done enormous damage to the American economy. One might almost call them right wing anarchists since they are more interested in mayhem than they are in the future of the United States as a people.

Deregulation and Trickle Down Economics Is a Colossal Faillure

The economic policies of the last twenty-five years or so have been a mistake based on illusions supported by lies and profitable for some through fraud. We forget too easily the problems of the 1970s and the fact that Americans did reasonably well in the 1980s because most households were earning two incomes out of economic necessity.

Paul Krugman has been watching the stumbling antics of the Bush administration for some years now. He made some predictions a few years back that weren't entirely accurate only because nearly everybody underestimated the desire of countries like China to find a place to park their new wealth. But Krugman was more right than wrong. The Republicans in Washington have done a poor job of minding the store. Largely through luck, we've been the beneficiary of a banking system that until recently was famous for its integrity. Because of a reckless level of deregulation and lack of oversight, that integrity is increasingly suspect.

Anyway, here's part of what Paul Krugman had to say today:

Contrary to popular belief, the stock market crash of 1929 wasn’t the defining moment of the Great Depression. What turned an ordinary recession into a civilization-threatening slump was the wave of bank runs that swept across America in 1930 and 1931.

This banking crisis of the 1930s showed that unregulated, unsupervised financial markets can all too easily suffer catastrophic failure.

As the decades passed, however, that lesson was forgotten — and now we’re relearning it, the hard way.

(snip)

[For the last number of years,] Wall Street chafed at regulations that limited risk, but also limited potential profits. And little by little it wriggled free — partly by persuading politicians to relax the rules, but mainly by creating a “shadow banking system” that relied on complex financial arrangements to bypass regulations designed to ensure that banking was safe.

It's unforgiveable that Wall Street allowed financial instruments to circulate that were given high credit ratings when those instruments were just as bad as the old junk bonds scams of the 1980s and certainly no better than the phony accounting audits and the high credit ratings that got Enron in trouble when its board of directors was a bit too pleased with 'creative' solutions to the company's extravagent spending and careless financial controls.



****I wish I had time to comment on the current political season. Whoever wins the Democratic nomination is clearly going to have to work to unite the party. As for McCain, maybe it's time for him to start thinking about a hobby to keep him occupied. He's no longer presidential material.

Poverty Increasing in America

Statistics show that poverty is increasing in America. Given predatory credit cards, pay day cash sharks (including some just outside military bases), variable loans that can result in losing a home, a volatile job market where good pay is often followed by much lower pay, it's getting easier for Americans to get in trouble these days and trouble doesn't necessarily mean poverty but it can mean serious problems, difficulty and worry. We're keep hearing about record corporate profits but most Americans have to wonder where those profits are going.

Statistics are funny; we know they don't always tell the full picture. In California, rents are high and take a significant portion of income. But there are homeowners who can barely make ends meet who share their homes with others. I met a woman in her 60s a few years ago crippled with arthritis and heart trouble who had three adult sons, one with a wife, living at home along with a grandson by her daughter (who lived elsewhere and had lost custody of the boy); the small house had only two bedrooms, though the married son and his wife lived more or less in the small converted garage and the grandson slept in the living room. It was not an easy living arrangement for anyone. There are many stories out there and they don't always get told.

Tony Pugh of the McClatchy Washington Bureau has a long article on the increased number of Americans in severe poverty:

The percentage of poor Americans who are living in severe poverty has reached a 32-year high, millions of working Americans are falling closer to the poverty line and the gulf between the nation's "haves" and "have-nots" continues to widen.

A McClatchy Newspapers analysis of 2005 census figures, the latest available, found that nearly 16 million Americans are living in deep or severe poverty. A family of four with two children and an annual income of less than $9,903 - half the federal poverty line - was considered severely poor in 2005. So were individuals who made less than $5,080 a year.

(snip)

The plight of the severely poor is a distressing sidebar to an unusual economic expansion. Worker productivity has increased dramatically since the brief recession of 2001, but wages and job growth have lagged behind. At the same time, the share of national income going to corporate profits has dwarfed the amount going to wages and salaries. That helps explain why the median household income of working-age families, adjusted for inflation, has fallen for five straight years.

(snip)

As more poor Americans sink into severe poverty, more individuals and families living within $8,000 above or below the poverty line also have seen their incomes decline. Steven Woolf of Virginia Commonwealth University attributes this to what he calls a "sinkhole effect" on income.

"Just as a sinkhole causes everything above it to collapse downward, families and individuals in the middle and upper classes appear to be migrating to lower-income tiers that bring them closer to the poverty threshold," Woolf wrote in the study.

(snip)

One in three Americans will experience a full year of extreme poverty at some point in his or her adult life, according to long-term research by Mark Rank, a professor of social welfare at the Washington University in St. Louis.

An estimated 58 percent of Americans between the ages of 20 and 75 will spend at least a year in poverty, Rank said. Two of three will use a public assistance program between ages 20 and 65, and 40 percent will do so for five years or more.

These estimates apply only to non-immigrants. If illegal immigrants were factored in, the numbers would be worse, Rank said.

"It would appear that for most Americans the question is no longer if, but rather when, they will experience poverty. ...

The article includes stories about two people in poverty. Multiply that by millions and none of us can take it in. It's a disturbing article. For my money, it shows the failure of Republicanism over the last 26 years and the failure of American business for over thirty years to honor its long-standing agreement with American workers. If something isn't done, it's going to get worse.

Tom Vilsack and the American Dream

Governor Tom Vilsack brought his presidential bid to Sioux City, Iowa. Vilsack is not the most dynamic Democratic hopeful in the field but he hit an interesting note on the American dream. Here's Bret Hayworth of the Sioux City Journal with the story:

Northwest Iowans got a glimpse of a different Tom Vilsack Wednesday.

After coming to know Vilsack during his two terms as Iowa governor -- he still has eight days left as governor -- political junkies turning out to see him at the Elks Lodge in Sioux City heard him talk about fiscal responsibility, aiding education and improving access to health care and health insurance.

(snip)

...Vilsack contended he is the Democrat who can right America's ship after years of failed leadership under George W. Bush.

He said a majority of American youth "do not believe in the American Dream" and that they can achieve it. He said it's becoming more difficult for the middle class to make due in the early 21st century as well.

"We need an economy that works for all of the people," he said, pointing to the need to become energy independent through renewable, homegrown energies, to reduce the 47 million Americans without health insurance and to make tougher federal budget decisions rather than running up the federal debt.

It hits a nerve with me that a majority of young Americans do not much believe they have a future. It also resonates with my knowledge of the history of the 1930s—and that's a bit of a shock. Vilsack should develop that theme more and also the theme that he can bring hope to America's young.

It would not surprise me if other candidates start picking up some of this theme for their own campaigns.