Forgotten History

The 'big bang' day is over and we can all relax for another year.  I watched so many fireworks displays on TV last night that I have sparklers shining under my eyelids.  The nicest thing about the Fourth Of July is that we are, for one day, united in our patriotism.  It's too bad that we now revert to the divisiveness that polarizes us.  It's back to politics as usual. 

Lord John Dalberg Acton understood the corruption of power.  Following are a few of his quotes (source;Wikipedia) that illustrate how well he knew the hidden evils inherent in politics.

• “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
• "Great men are almost always bad men."
• “There is no worse heresy than the fact that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”
• “The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.” 
• "The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks."
• "Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity."
• "The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern."
• "There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men.

My favorite quote is not from Lord Acton, but the famous one by George Santayana.  It is:  "Those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it."  To which Harry Truman added the words "and understand" making it read 'Those who do not read and understand history ----.  

It's one thing to fail to understand the lessons to be learned from mistakes made hundreds of years ago, but quite another to be so brain dead that some men fail to learn the lessons of the past 50 years.  More accurately, the past 12 years.  

If the bonehead men in Congress can't remember what caused our recession they are doomed to repeat it.  Paul Krugman pointedly takes them to task for repeating the same mistakes before the ink is dry on the most recent ones.  

 Here are a few excerpts from "Corporate Cash Con" as published in the New York Times.

. -- the lessons of the 2008 financial crisis have been forgotten, and the very ideas that got us into the crisis — regulation is always bad, what’s good for the bankers is good for America, tax cuts are the universal elixir — have regained their hold. 

And now trickle-down economics — specifically, the idea that anything that increases corporate profits is good for the economy — is making a comeback. 

How can people simultaneously demand savage cuts in Medicare and Medicaid and defend special tax breaks favoring hedge fund managers and owners of corporate jets? 

--here’s what a spokesman for Eric Cantor, told Greg Sargent of The Washington Post: “You can’t help the wage earner by taxing the wage payer offering a job.” He went on to imply, disingenuously, that the tax breaks at issue mainly help small businesses (they’re actually mainly for big corporations). But the basic argument was that anything that leaves more money in the hands of corporations will mean more jobs.

U.S. corporations are supposed to pay taxes on the profits of their overseas subsidiaries — but only when those profits are transferred back to the parent company. Now there’s a move afoot — driven, of course, by a major lobbying campaign — to offer an amnesty under which companies could move funds back while paying hardly any taxes. And even some Democrats are supporting this idea, claiming that it would create jobs.

As opponents of this plan point out, we’ve already seen this movie:  Companies did indeed take advantage of the amnesty to move a lot of money back to the United States. But they used that money to pay dividends, pay down debt, buy up other companies, buy back their own stock — pretty much everything except increasing investment and creating jobs. Indeed, there’s no evidence that the 2004 tax holiday did anything at all to stimulate the economy. 

--[ the tax holiday] did  give big corporations a chance to avoid paying taxes, because they would eventually have repatriated, and paid taxes on, much of the money they brought in under the amnesty. And it also gave these companies an incentive to move even more jobs overseas, since they now know that there’s a good chance that they’ll be able to bring overseas profits home nearly tax-free under future amnesties. 

--How can anyone imagine that lack of corporate cash is what’s holding back recovery in America right now? After all, it’s widely understood that corporations are already sitting on large amounts of cash that they aren’t investing in their own businesses. 

--  a major conservative talking point, with right-wingers claiming that businesses are failing to invest because of political uncertainty. That’s almost surely false: the evidence strongly says that the real reason businesses are sitting on cash is lack of consumer demand.

--claims that a corporate tax holiday would create jobs, or that ending the tax break for corporate jets would destroy jobs, are nonsense. 

 -- Lack of corporate cash is not the problem facing America. Big business already has the money it needs to expand; what it lacks is a reason to expand with consumers still on the ropes and the government slashing spending. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

Now the Republicans (and some Democrats) want to let the banks and big corporations run amok with more tax breaks, less regulation and the right of person-hood without the responsibilities.  How did that work for them during the past 12 years?

It has been noted that some Republicans aren't really that stupid; they are actually venal and will take the country down just so Obama will be blamed for the recession (or depression) and will lose the next election.  Now that's just plain evil.  It was Mitch McConnell who bragged that "The single most important thing that we want to achieve  is for President  Obama to be a one-term president."   That's not the oath of office that he swore to.  It is a perversion of Democracy.  To so blatantly brag about his main goal is despicable. 

Halloween Scare plus a good video

In case you  missed it.  Jon Stewart and the President.  What a combination.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Barack Obama Pt. 3
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Rally to Restore Sanity

Here's your Halloween fright!  It's scarier than any ghoul, goblin, or witch.  It's even scarier than Sarah Palin.  Here is another good NYT op-ed piece from Paul Krugman.  Read it and weep.

Divided We Fail

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Barring a huge upset, Republicans will take control of at least one house of Congress next week. How worried should we be by that prospect?
Not very, say some pundits. After all, the last time Republicans controlled Congress while a Democrat lived in the White House was the period from the beginning of 1995 to the end of 2000. And people remember that era as a good time, a time of rapid job creation and responsible budgets. Can we hope for a similar experience now?
No, we can’t. This is going to be terrible. In fact, future historians will probably look back at the 2010 election as a catastrophe for America, one that condemned the nation to years of political chaos and economic weakness.
Start with the politics.
In the late-1990s, Republicans and Democrats were able to work together on some issues. President Obama seems to believe that the same thing can happen again today. In a recent interview with National Journal, he sounded a conciliatory note, saying that Democrats need to have an “appropriate sense of humility,” and that he would “spend more time building consensus.” Good luck with that.
After all, that era of partial cooperation in the 1990s came only after Republicans had tried all-out confrontation, actually shutting down the federal government in an effort to force President Bill Clinton to give in to their demands for big cuts in Medicare.
Now, the government shutdown ended up hurting Republicans politically, and some observers seem to assume that memories of that experience will deter the G.O.P. from being too confrontational this time around. But the lesson current Republicans seem to have drawn from 1995 isn’t that they were too confrontational, it’s that they weren’t confrontational enough.
Another recent interview by National Journal, this one with Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, has received a lot of attention thanks to a headline-grabbing quote: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
If you read the full interview, what Mr. McConnell was saying was that, in 1995, Republicans erred by focusing too much on their policy agenda and not enough on destroying the president: “We suffered from some degree of hubris and acted as if the president was irrelevant and we would roll over him. By the summer of 1995, he was already on the way to being re-elected, and we were hanging on for our lives.” So this time around, he implied, they’ll stay focused on bringing down Mr. Obama.
True, Mr. McConnell did say that he might be willing to work with Mr. Obama in certain circumstances — namely, if he’s willing to do a “Clintonian back flip,” taking positions that would find more support among Republicans than in his own party. Of course, this would actually hurt Mr. Obama’s chances of re-election — but that’s the point.
We might add that should any Republicans in Congress find themselves considering the possibility of acting in a statesmanlike, bipartisan manner, they’ll surely reconsider after looking over their shoulder at the Tea Party-types, who will jump on them if they show any signs of being reasonable. The role of the Tea Party is one reason smart observers expect another government shutdown, probably as early as next spring.
Beyond the politics, the crucial difference between the 1990s and now is the state of the economy.
When Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, the U.S. economy had strong fundamentals. Household debt was much lower than it is today. Business investment was surging, in large part thanks to the new opportunities created by information technology — opportunities that were much broader than the follies of the dot-com bubble.
In this favorable environment, economic management was mainly a matter of putting the brakes on the boom, so as to keep the economy from overheating and head off potential inflation. And this was a job the Federal Reserve could do on its own by raising interest rates, without any help from Congress.
Today’s situation is completely different. The economy, weighed down by the debt that households ran up during the Bush-era bubble, is in dire straits; deflation, not inflation, is the clear and present danger. And it’s not at all clear that the Fed has the tools to head off this danger. Right now we very much need active policies on the part of the federal government to get us out of our economic trap.
But we won’t get those policies if Republicans control the House. In fact, if they get their way, we’ll get the worst of both worlds: They’ll refuse to do anything to boost the economy now, claiming to be worried about the deficit, while simultaneously increasing long-run deficits with irresponsible tax cuts — cuts they have already announced won’t have to be offset with spending cuts.
So if the elections go as expected next week, here’s my advice: Be afraid. Be very afraid.