Thoughts on the Big Bailout Bust:
The $700 Billion bailout may have lost in the House of Representatives, but the problem remains and will grow worse by the day. We are in a financial mess, caused by many things, but ultimately the responsibility of the politicians we elect to office. They created the rules and provided the oversight which failed, and both parties share a hand in this. None of us are going to enjoy the next year without some proper actions taken, so the pressure will remain on Congress and the Administration to act, even though their creativity seems quite limited as you might expect for not very creative people.
Amazingly, the first draft of the Paulson Plan was simply this: “Give me $700 Billion, with complete autonomy and authority, no oversight, and no possibility of future recriminations, and I will solve your problem. If you do not do this, the financial system will melt down, millions will lose their jobs, the world will plunge into an economic depression of indeterminate length, and the President and I will say I told you so.” They already did about the same thing on the War in Iraq, and they seem surprised that it was rejected the second time they dragged the same strategy out.
Ross Perot Has Another Plan:
I sent you this web site once before, but I am sending it again. http://perotcharts.com/. Along with economist Pat Choate, they have put together a fairly straightforward plan for this crisis that makes a great deal more sense that what we have seen so far coming out of Congress or the Administration. If you think this makes sense, I urge you to send this to everyone you know. We are working against time on this crisis at the moment, and Perot and Choate demonstrate that there is some creativity around – it just isn’t among the characters the characters in Washington or New York.
The Terrible Problem of Distrust:
The huge $700 Billion dollar bailout failed precisely because of the well earned absence of trust for office holders. The American public simply do not trust those in office in Washington, D.C., or those who run the huge financial institutions and give themselves tens of millions of dollars for failing! Why should any of us trust these people when the only thing we can trust is that they will rip the taxpayer off every chance they can get for their own aggrandizement? If we trusted them, we would be the fools.
Citizen distrust is the consequence of the repeated misbehaviors of those in politics in America for a long time. It did not happen overnight and the misbehavior extends to the office holders in both political parties, and among the Administration. The distrust is present in the absolutely dismal numbers that reflect how Congress and the President are viewed by Americans:
1. 79 percent of Americans think the Country is going in the wrong track!
2. 67 percent disapprove of the job Bush is doing as President.
3. 75 percent disapprove of the job Congress is doing.
Of course, the office holders in Washington, DC seem perfectly capable of arguing that these numbers apply to everyone but themselves. That is an aspect of their behavior that makes us trust them even less. Everything they say is calculated for its effect, not its candor or truthfulness, so why would we trust any of them?
This same lack of trust for our decision makers permeates the rest of the world as well. The polls abroad show overwhelming support for Barack Obama for President. Why? The Bush Administration has all but used up all of the accumulated goodwill that people around the world have had for the United States of America and its government. Barack Obama, whose color most of the rest of the world does not care about, is clearly NOT George Bush or John McCain. Today, nearly half of all the citizens of 23 countries survey by the BBC say that the United States is a negative influence in the world, and that is a six point improvement over the year before.
Dealing with the Problem of Distrust with the Bailout:
Congress and the President can have their bailout authority, but they have to confront the distrust directly – not stay in the “denial” that shapes their thinking. Americans do not trust the Department of the Treasury to hand out this huge amount of money fairly, and they do not trust Congress to provide proper oversight. We have all become use to the enormous fiscal scandals that surface well after the money is gone – in Iraq, Afghanistan, tax loop holes, and every other government giveaway to private interests. Again, we have no real reason to trust any of these people. They have earned our distrust a hundred times over!
But the financial problem remains. We certainly need the government to step in, but it cannot do that unless we trust the process established for using the taxpayers’ money. We have an unprecedented problem, of enormous scope, in a period of rampant and well earned distrust. What to do?
One solution, not part of the Perot proposal (which generally makes good sense to me), is to establish an Independent Oversight Board with extraordinary authority, a full and well funded professional staff, and composed of people selected for their knowledge, true independence, and trustworthiness. You see, we Americans really do still trust many people; just not the ones with authority in Washington, DC or Wall Street.
The authority issue is easy. Provide the Commission the right to review and audit every transaction of the Department of the Treasury, making the deliberate withholding of information a criminal offense, and granting the Commission, under the Attorney General’s Office, the right to institute criminal proceedings against people who violate the law, falsify documents or information, or lie under oath, after a subpoena, to the Commission. Require the Commission to provide full and complete transparency with monthly reports – to the Administration, Congress and the American People-- for the first year during the most intense part of the crisis. Give the Commission the role of approving the rules of process by which these financial transactions are decided and undertaken.
It costs money to spend $700 Billion, or even much less than that, and auditing the process is expensive. This Commission will need a sizeable staff of accountants and lawyers, serving the interests of the Commission and taxpayers.
The Commission would report to the Administration through the President, and to Congress through the senior leaders in both parties. The Commission would be housed directly in the Department of the Treasury where most of its work would be done, but its prosecutorial function would be in the Department of Justice, reporting to the Attorney General and using all of the investigatorial powers of that office.
The true independence of the commission, however, is a product of the trustworthy character of the Commissioners themselves. The Chairman should be a person not affiliated with either political party. A Bill Gates comes immediately to mind, or perhaps Ross Perot, although he is getting on in age (that is anyone older than me, since I turn 67 on Thursday).
There should be four other members, none of them current office holders, with two Democrats and two Republicans. I would, however, force the nominees of either party to be elected by a majority of the members of both parties in Congress. That would eliminate the intense partisanship that characterizes so many processes in Washington, DC. Former Senator George Mitchell is a Democrat who fits the requirements perfectly, or perhaps former Secretary of State James Baker for the Republicans.
The crisis that we have created is an international crisis that threatens to undermine the economies of the rest of the world. Moreover, a part of the proposal involves buying the failed securities from foreign banks as well as domestic ones, since most of the large banks today are really international banks. Given the lack of trust in the rest of the world for the United States and its decisions, I would invite two international figures who are above reproach to sit as ex officio, non voting members of the Commission. However, I would require these members to issue a separate, periodic international report to comment both on the process and the outcomes of the purchases of securities.
Basically, this type of structure is necessary precisely because we do not trust those in office to execute this process fairly and without unfair influence from lobbyists and other sources. If the bailout is the proper way to proceed, it cannot be accomplished without a process that removes or substantially lessens our distrust. By bringing in international members, we begin the process of restoring somewhat our international standing among the other nations. It also helps us establish and environment in which we can get cooperation on this issue from the rest of the world.
Restoring Trust in Office Holders and Government:
I have not detailed here all of the ways that the politicians and office holders in contemporary America have earned our distrust. We have faced such periods in the past in our history, and we have largely overcome the influences that were undermining the operation of our democracy – huge private monopolies that used economic power to rip off the consumer, with the help of politicians, political machines that used the labor of public employees to guarantee their unfettered access to our money, laws that prohibited women and African Americans to vote, etc.
Today, we are faced with the ugly and venal manipulation of our politics with interests who buy their way into the taxpayer’s Treasury through the funding of the campaigns of incumbents of both parties. This is a topic for another day, however.
The problem, of course, is that the things which might restore a higher level of trust in office holders are things that run directly counter to the self-interest of office holders who consistently seek to eliminate competition and to insure that they can stay in office, unchallenged, for as long as they like. That is why campaign funding reform never goes anywhere serious!
The Presidential Election in the Midst of Crisis:
This crisis obviously works to the advantage of Senator Barack Obama, and the polls show it. In the past two weeks, he has gone from an average three point deficit to a five to seven point lead among the major national polls. This is partially due to the financial crisis, which is obviously somewhat more a Republican problem than a Democratic one, and it also due to the growing crisis of confidence around McCain’s Vice Presidential nominee, Gov. Sarah Palin.
When the national media starts to call for her removal for lacking competence, you know that she is in trouble in a way that cannot be properly defended by her Republican proponents. The collective judgment is being rendered among opinion leaders in the United States – she is simply not competent to serve as Vice President – and that judgment will become more widespread and deeper as the perception finds its way into the public consciousness. John McCain’s rash decision is being exploited as an example of his poor temperament and judgment, and he is injured by Palin and will, fortunately for Obama, not admit it.
The Republican strategists thought that they could “hide and train” her sufficiently to get through the short election season that remains after the conventions. They were wrong; but this only adds one more thing to the long list of things about which they have been wrong over the past eight years.
The Presidential election has tipped sharply in Obama’s favor in the past two weeks, and he is much more likely to be elected President today that a short time ago. He might even win by a comfortable margin. That has become more likely than his losing at this point. He will have to overcome the prejudice against his race to win; just as John Kennedy overcame the prejudice against his Catholicism to win in 1960. In my mind, the single most desirable outcome of his success will be the removal of the 3000 to 4000 Republican appointees that operate within the various administrative agencies. We should be able to return to a system where a person’s religious conviction or lack therein is no longer the single most important criteria in their selection to high office.
Just my Opinion
Gordon Black
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Sunday, September 28, 2008
The Impact of the First Obama/McCain Debate
Interpreting the Impact of the First Debate:
The first debate is over, overshadowed by the specter of an economy coming apart at the seams. John McCain, who is now running behind Barack Obama in the most recent polls, needed to win. He didn’t! Barack Obama needed only a tie or to look knowledgeable and capable – Presidential, it is called. He got what he needed on both counts.
The three polls following the debate all give the debate by varying margins to Barack Obama; (1) CBS by 39 percent thinking Obama the winner, 25 percent thinking that McCain the winner, and 36 percent in a tie, (2) CNN where 51 percent thought Obama did better, 38 percent who thought McCain did better, and (3) Insider advantage that had the outcome at a virtual tie, 42 percent for Obama, 41 percent for McCain, and 17 percent undecided. As in the past, the results were mostly a reflection of the existing candidate loyalties with which people viewed the polls. Obama supporters thought Obama won, and McCain voters thought he won.
The on air partisan pundits were quite predictable after the debate. Every Republican analyst extolled the McCain performance while the Democrats all praised the success of Obama. I wonder why anyone bothers putting any of these people on the air. It is such a waste of good air time with people who cannot and will not give any response other than the Party line. It is one of the ways that politics seems to make liars (only they call it spin) out of everyone, and cynics out of the electorate.
On the whole, the professional media analysts bent over backwards to be balanced, and CNN, where I watched the event in Paris, provided useful background on the usual distortions. On this score, McCain did worse and seemed much more manipulative to me. McCain finally lost as well on the tactic of saying repeatedly that “Obama just doesn’t understand.” I lost track of counting the number of times, but it clearly exceeded the capacity of the audience to tolerate it, and it fell very flat with a performance by Obama that was knowledgeable, thoughtful and concise, and where he clearly did understand a whole lot more than McCain wanted to give him credit for.
The Impact of the Debate Tends to Widen Over Time
The media aftermath is very important to the debates. I am not in the United States at the moment and I do not have the opportunity to sample the responses of the media. In general, I believe that the aftermath with favor Obama on several grounds: (1) his overall performance was simply better – more polished, articulate, even handed and balanced, a fact noted in the lead story this evening (Paris time) on Yahoo where McCain got a B- from the professional evaluator and Obama an A-, (2) Obama really did not have to win, but he needed to persuade viewers that he could lead the country and he did that for the most part, and (3) the media replay will tend to favor Obama with the larger network media, with the exception of Fox News and the radio talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh.
Of course, if they held the election in Europe, Obama would win by a 75 percent to 25 percent margin. They care more about what is in his head over here, and much less about the color of his skin. He seems to be as well thought of over here as Bush and McCain are disliked. The race clearly matters a lot to the Europeans and their sympathies are almost entirely with Obama.
The Outcome of the Performance:
This poll will not change the numbers too much, although one might expect to see the current 3 to 4 point national advantage for Obama grow by a point or two, as a few more undecided voters move into the category of supporting one of the two candidates.
Obama is catching up in many of the state wide polls, which tend to lag the national trends by a week to 10 days because the polls are not as frequent. This is true across the Board, but the McCain leads in Virginia, Florida, and Ohio have been reduced to nothing and Obama’s leads in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and other battle ground states have grown appreciably. If Obama’s lead widens nationally, that will be reflected in most of the state by state data, pulling more states in Obama’s direction.
Overall, most voters have generally made up their minds on this contest, and the debate will more reinforce existing preferences than change anyone’s minds. Where the debate caused any movement at all, it had to be modestly in Obama’s direction. If anything, the debate created the impression that Obama is the likely next President of the United States, and despite all the reservations, that he might just be up to the task.
The Importance of the Vice Presidential Debate:
McCain’s clear failure to dominate and win over Obama creates a high bar and ups the stakes for Governor Sarah Palin. The McCain/Bush handlers have been very careful to limit Palin’s independent exposure to the national media, trying hard to train her as best they can in the short time they have available. She will probably do alright against Senator Joe Biden, but, unfortunately, alright is just not good enough. The persistent doubt about her basic competency in foreign policy and military matters has gradually undermined her initially high standing with the electorate, and nothing the McCain camp has done to date has eliminated the doubts. Doubts that are based on real hard facts are hard for partisans to undermine with their rhetoric and specious claims.
Barack Obama, who is also challenged on his experience and knowledge, has had 18 grueling months of training on the campaign trail, including nearly two dozen debates against some reasonably competent opponents, and endless news conferences where he fielded all questions. Frankly, the long campaign showed in his knowledge and composure in the first debate. I doubt seriously that he could have done that well six months or a year ago. Long campaigns are clearly a form of “on the job” training.
Sarah Palin, by contrast, has had less than a month to prepare, and she may well be a quick study, but it is not enough. Intensive training for a month, with no dress rehearsal, will leave some gaping holes, and some of them are likely to emerge in the debate. She is going up against Senator Joe Biden, who is not the best debater with his often long winded answers, but you are very unlikely to find any gaping holes in Biden’s knowledge or experience. There are questions about Biden, but not about his experience, intelligence and knowledge – all areas where Palin has yet to convince anyone other than her most ardent supporters and advocates.
Palin actually needs to win to make up for McCain’s failure to win, and that will prove very difficult and unlikely. She will most certainly put in a respectable performance, particularly under the circumstances, but a respectable performance simply will not bring a lot of votes to the ticket. The equally likely outcome is that she falls into some of the deep pits that the questions will create, undermining the ticket and proving McCain’s selection a disaster.
The Other Debates – More of the Same:
The second and third debates are usually anti-climatic. The public wears out hearing the same things over and over again; the size of the audience shrinks dramatically and there simply are fewer voters to be persuaded one way or the other. The first debate certainly did not put any dent into the momentum that Obama has gained in the past 10 days, and the Vice Presidential Debate has a real likelihood that it will contribute to that momentum.
The simple facts of Palin’s education, background, experience or views do not support the claim that she is well prepared to serve as President of the United States. The Republican strategists can repeat their nonsense about her competency as much as they like, repeating it ad nausea, and it will not persuade the many serious, relatively fair minded and less partisan people out there that they are right.
There are many well educated people and fair minded people in American, who are just not that naïve or stupid. There is a constant undercurrent of commentary from the main stream intellectual leadership that is horrified about the choice, and you hear it constantly. In Europe, where I am at the moment, they are shouting it from the rooftops in virtually every publication and media outlet.
Of course, you can adopt the position taken by the Bush and Cheney Administration when they unilaterally decided to attack Iraq that the good opinions of mankind are irrelevant to an all powerful United States, lead by the most parochial leaders in my lifetime. The French and the Germans were quite right about Iraq and told us so, nicely at first and then more stridently. Maybe it would be good to listen to them about Sarah Palin.
Democrats Breathing a Sigh of Relief:
There is always great tension building up to the first debate, but the fiscal crisis really took much of the wind out of this one and put it in perspective. The fiscal crisis has helped Obama, as McCain clearly understands, and he feels pretty helpless to do much about it. The fiscal crisis reinforces the terrible problems caused mostly by the Bush Administration, and Obama is today thought of as more likely to deal well with the economy. And why not? It is farfetched to assume that John McCain is going to change the policies of Bush, especially when he spends a lot of time telling everyone that he won’t.
This is still going to be a close election, but perhaps a little less close than it would have been 10 days ago. The fact that it would not be close if it were not for the color of Obama’s skin is mostly irrelevant. Obama only has to win by one electoral vote to serve as President, and he will have the House and the Senate with him and four years to prove that he can govern.
Democrats might well be able to breathe a sigh of relief now that the first debate is over, but they cannot let down their guard for a moment. The really ugly part of the Republican attack is just beginning, brought to you by their client groups, and there are still a few people who will be persuaded by the ugliness.
No matter what the candidates pretend, each Presidential campaign seems to get uglier and nastier than the previous one. The use of the Internet has opened the process more fully to everyone; creating a veritable army of smear artists who can circulate the outrageous the virtual impunity. There is also more money available to the so-called, “independent campaign committees,” most of whom are party clones by a different name, so media buys in key states are more common.
As I predicted last spring, these committees are attempting to make Obama’s friendships an issue, but they have miscalculated this time. The impact of Reverend Wright has happened already. It is old news, and nasty reminders are not going to be of much use except to those who have already been affected.
One of the real advantages of the protracted primary system was the fact, now beneficial, that Obama has become known to most Americans, for better or for worse. His errors and weaknesses are already noted and known to most of the electorate, as are his strengths. The sense of knowing who he is today serves as an armor that protects him against some of the mud that his opponents will throw.
Just my opinion,
Gordon Black
The first debate is over, overshadowed by the specter of an economy coming apart at the seams. John McCain, who is now running behind Barack Obama in the most recent polls, needed to win. He didn’t! Barack Obama needed only a tie or to look knowledgeable and capable – Presidential, it is called. He got what he needed on both counts.
The three polls following the debate all give the debate by varying margins to Barack Obama; (1) CBS by 39 percent thinking Obama the winner, 25 percent thinking that McCain the winner, and 36 percent in a tie, (2) CNN where 51 percent thought Obama did better, 38 percent who thought McCain did better, and (3) Insider advantage that had the outcome at a virtual tie, 42 percent for Obama, 41 percent for McCain, and 17 percent undecided. As in the past, the results were mostly a reflection of the existing candidate loyalties with which people viewed the polls. Obama supporters thought Obama won, and McCain voters thought he won.
The on air partisan pundits were quite predictable after the debate. Every Republican analyst extolled the McCain performance while the Democrats all praised the success of Obama. I wonder why anyone bothers putting any of these people on the air. It is such a waste of good air time with people who cannot and will not give any response other than the Party line. It is one of the ways that politics seems to make liars (only they call it spin) out of everyone, and cynics out of the electorate.
On the whole, the professional media analysts bent over backwards to be balanced, and CNN, where I watched the event in Paris, provided useful background on the usual distortions. On this score, McCain did worse and seemed much more manipulative to me. McCain finally lost as well on the tactic of saying repeatedly that “Obama just doesn’t understand.” I lost track of counting the number of times, but it clearly exceeded the capacity of the audience to tolerate it, and it fell very flat with a performance by Obama that was knowledgeable, thoughtful and concise, and where he clearly did understand a whole lot more than McCain wanted to give him credit for.
The Impact of the Debate Tends to Widen Over Time
The media aftermath is very important to the debates. I am not in the United States at the moment and I do not have the opportunity to sample the responses of the media. In general, I believe that the aftermath with favor Obama on several grounds: (1) his overall performance was simply better – more polished, articulate, even handed and balanced, a fact noted in the lead story this evening (Paris time) on Yahoo where McCain got a B- from the professional evaluator and Obama an A-, (2) Obama really did not have to win, but he needed to persuade viewers that he could lead the country and he did that for the most part, and (3) the media replay will tend to favor Obama with the larger network media, with the exception of Fox News and the radio talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh.
Of course, if they held the election in Europe, Obama would win by a 75 percent to 25 percent margin. They care more about what is in his head over here, and much less about the color of his skin. He seems to be as well thought of over here as Bush and McCain are disliked. The race clearly matters a lot to the Europeans and their sympathies are almost entirely with Obama.
The Outcome of the Performance:
This poll will not change the numbers too much, although one might expect to see the current 3 to 4 point national advantage for Obama grow by a point or two, as a few more undecided voters move into the category of supporting one of the two candidates.
Obama is catching up in many of the state wide polls, which tend to lag the national trends by a week to 10 days because the polls are not as frequent. This is true across the Board, but the McCain leads in Virginia, Florida, and Ohio have been reduced to nothing and Obama’s leads in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and other battle ground states have grown appreciably. If Obama’s lead widens nationally, that will be reflected in most of the state by state data, pulling more states in Obama’s direction.
Overall, most voters have generally made up their minds on this contest, and the debate will more reinforce existing preferences than change anyone’s minds. Where the debate caused any movement at all, it had to be modestly in Obama’s direction. If anything, the debate created the impression that Obama is the likely next President of the United States, and despite all the reservations, that he might just be up to the task.
The Importance of the Vice Presidential Debate:
McCain’s clear failure to dominate and win over Obama creates a high bar and ups the stakes for Governor Sarah Palin. The McCain/Bush handlers have been very careful to limit Palin’s independent exposure to the national media, trying hard to train her as best they can in the short time they have available. She will probably do alright against Senator Joe Biden, but, unfortunately, alright is just not good enough. The persistent doubt about her basic competency in foreign policy and military matters has gradually undermined her initially high standing with the electorate, and nothing the McCain camp has done to date has eliminated the doubts. Doubts that are based on real hard facts are hard for partisans to undermine with their rhetoric and specious claims.
Barack Obama, who is also challenged on his experience and knowledge, has had 18 grueling months of training on the campaign trail, including nearly two dozen debates against some reasonably competent opponents, and endless news conferences where he fielded all questions. Frankly, the long campaign showed in his knowledge and composure in the first debate. I doubt seriously that he could have done that well six months or a year ago. Long campaigns are clearly a form of “on the job” training.
Sarah Palin, by contrast, has had less than a month to prepare, and she may well be a quick study, but it is not enough. Intensive training for a month, with no dress rehearsal, will leave some gaping holes, and some of them are likely to emerge in the debate. She is going up against Senator Joe Biden, who is not the best debater with his often long winded answers, but you are very unlikely to find any gaping holes in Biden’s knowledge or experience. There are questions about Biden, but not about his experience, intelligence and knowledge – all areas where Palin has yet to convince anyone other than her most ardent supporters and advocates.
Palin actually needs to win to make up for McCain’s failure to win, and that will prove very difficult and unlikely. She will most certainly put in a respectable performance, particularly under the circumstances, but a respectable performance simply will not bring a lot of votes to the ticket. The equally likely outcome is that she falls into some of the deep pits that the questions will create, undermining the ticket and proving McCain’s selection a disaster.
The Other Debates – More of the Same:
The second and third debates are usually anti-climatic. The public wears out hearing the same things over and over again; the size of the audience shrinks dramatically and there simply are fewer voters to be persuaded one way or the other. The first debate certainly did not put any dent into the momentum that Obama has gained in the past 10 days, and the Vice Presidential Debate has a real likelihood that it will contribute to that momentum.
The simple facts of Palin’s education, background, experience or views do not support the claim that she is well prepared to serve as President of the United States. The Republican strategists can repeat their nonsense about her competency as much as they like, repeating it ad nausea, and it will not persuade the many serious, relatively fair minded and less partisan people out there that they are right.
There are many well educated people and fair minded people in American, who are just not that naïve or stupid. There is a constant undercurrent of commentary from the main stream intellectual leadership that is horrified about the choice, and you hear it constantly. In Europe, where I am at the moment, they are shouting it from the rooftops in virtually every publication and media outlet.
Of course, you can adopt the position taken by the Bush and Cheney Administration when they unilaterally decided to attack Iraq that the good opinions of mankind are irrelevant to an all powerful United States, lead by the most parochial leaders in my lifetime. The French and the Germans were quite right about Iraq and told us so, nicely at first and then more stridently. Maybe it would be good to listen to them about Sarah Palin.
Democrats Breathing a Sigh of Relief:
There is always great tension building up to the first debate, but the fiscal crisis really took much of the wind out of this one and put it in perspective. The fiscal crisis has helped Obama, as McCain clearly understands, and he feels pretty helpless to do much about it. The fiscal crisis reinforces the terrible problems caused mostly by the Bush Administration, and Obama is today thought of as more likely to deal well with the economy. And why not? It is farfetched to assume that John McCain is going to change the policies of Bush, especially when he spends a lot of time telling everyone that he won’t.
This is still going to be a close election, but perhaps a little less close than it would have been 10 days ago. The fact that it would not be close if it were not for the color of Obama’s skin is mostly irrelevant. Obama only has to win by one electoral vote to serve as President, and he will have the House and the Senate with him and four years to prove that he can govern.
Democrats might well be able to breathe a sigh of relief now that the first debate is over, but they cannot let down their guard for a moment. The really ugly part of the Republican attack is just beginning, brought to you by their client groups, and there are still a few people who will be persuaded by the ugliness.
No matter what the candidates pretend, each Presidential campaign seems to get uglier and nastier than the previous one. The use of the Internet has opened the process more fully to everyone; creating a veritable army of smear artists who can circulate the outrageous the virtual impunity. There is also more money available to the so-called, “independent campaign committees,” most of whom are party clones by a different name, so media buys in key states are more common.
As I predicted last spring, these committees are attempting to make Obama’s friendships an issue, but they have miscalculated this time. The impact of Reverend Wright has happened already. It is old news, and nasty reminders are not going to be of much use except to those who have already been affected.
One of the real advantages of the protracted primary system was the fact, now beneficial, that Obama has become known to most Americans, for better or for worse. His errors and weaknesses are already noted and known to most of the electorate, as are his strengths. The sense of knowing who he is today serves as an armor that protects him against some of the mud that his opponents will throw.
Just my opinion,
Gordon Black
Friday, September 26, 2008
Who is "Trustworthy" in Washington, D.C?
Why Should We Trust the Wholly Untrustworthy?
I am still in the questioning stage with regard to the $700 Billion Dollar “bailout” of somebody. I say “somebody” because it is not entirely clear to me, or probably anyone else, who precisely we are bailing out, and that is only the beginning of my discomfort. Are we “bailing out” the shareholders, the really incompetent CEOs, the mortgagees, the politicians, or their employees, the lobbyists?
My problem is simply this. I know precisely what is going on in Washington, D.C., on this issue at this moment, and I do not need to be there to see it directly. We have all seen it so many times that we should not need to be reminded. The people we have elected, who do not trust any of us at all or each other, are telling us once again why they have to restore “trust” and “confidence” in our name. They have never really trusted us, but we are expected once again the trust them.
Given the incentive of $700 Billion, a horde of locusts and vultures have descended on that City and they are engaged in the process of attempting to eat alive anyone and everyone who stands between them and the $700 Billion. This horde of locusts and vultures is composed of the lobbyists and lawyers who are working around the clock to shape this legislation to favor the economic interests that they represent. They are present in the hundreds and even thousands, and they do not care one dime about the taxpayers in the Country. In truth, they are scornful and laugh at our “trust” and they believe that we, the taxpayers, are simply country bumpkins to be fleeced by the big city slickers from New York City and Washington, DC.
In theory, of course, our friendly national legislators are supposed to stand between the locusts and vultures and their objectives, but no one with a ounce of brains believes this to be the case in this modern world of politics. Most of the legislators are there for the show and for the eventual cushy retirement benefits they will earn. They are only in Washington, D.C. because they took the handouts from these same special interests that helped fund their campaigns. They are not going to bite the hands that feed them with great and consistent regularity. Now, they will fain “concern” with great fanfare and show to protect the supposed interests of the taxpayers. They have not protected us for eight years from these predators; why would anyone but a real fool expect them to start now.
Please remember that these are the same locusts and vultures, who with the help of Congress and this Administration, that designed the previous financial oversight system; that worked so hard to protect the interests of their deep pocket Wall Street clients; that found the money to secure the successful reelection of their close friends on the Hill.
They are the furthest thing from innocent bystanders in a process of robbing the public to pay off their friends and clients. To them, $700 Billion is the blood they cannot resist, and you can see them there on the Hill in their $500 shoes, $3000 Armani suits, slick smiles and friendly gestures to all, working tirelessly to fleece the taxpayers once again for their clients.
It would be fun to have an official requirement that demanded that no legislator be allowed to sit on this giveaway, or any, unless they took no campaign contributions from the interests involved. My guess is that you could not get a quorum in the House or the Senate! Moreover, many of the locusts and vultures are "retired" members of Congress who now represent the very interests that are appearing before Congress and the Administration.
These special interests have purchased with substantial contributions a seat at a table where none of the rest of us are represented. If you think we should “trust” them to look out for our interests, then, as the comic says, I have a wonderful bridge in Brooklyn that you can buy for a song. The Paulson Plan will produce processes that will be established to benefit the interests of the lobbies and wholly devoid of anything we should trust, so give us a good reason why we should trust any of them at all.
The only thing you can trust is their total lack of trustworthiness! The only thing you can trust is their singular and passionate focus on the self-interest of the people they represent; the people who are demanding that we pay for their mistakes with your children’s good money. Of course, since they are borrowing all of the money to pay off the vultures, it really isn’t your money we are talking about. It is simply another enormous debt that they all, collectively get to pass on to our children and grandchildren.
I am all for “trust” and “confidence,” and we are well aware that both qualities has been shaken around the world. The Bush Administration is the single most distrusted Administration in the rest of the world in modern history, largely because they elevated lying and distortion to a grand level unmatched by any Administration we can remember. This Administration has given us absolutely no evidence of its “trustworthiness” about anything serious. I am still smarting about the $1 Trillion or more that they ripped us off for with their weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I am still smarting by a 50 percent devaluation of the dollar. I am still smarting about the half trillion dollar deficit.
Just why is the Secretary of the Treasury somehow more trustworthy than the rest of this ship of scoundrels and fools? The whole eight years of this administration has been about huge payouts to the special interests that feed at the public trough – the weapons manufacturers, the oil interests, the mining interests, and the financial sector and so on. Now, suddenly, we should “trust” that they do this for us – the little people who are always asked to pay for their mistakes.
The Things About Which I am Certain:
There are many things that I do trust and know with certainty in this situation. I know with certainty the enormous efforts that will be made by the special interests to limit financial oversight, reward their powerful benefactors, and steer as much money as they can into the hands of the rich to the detriment of the taxpayers.
I know with certainly that you and I as taxpayers have no way to defend our economic interests in this process, no matter what George Bush tells you. I know that the proponents of this giveaway will overstate and exaggerate the consequences of what will happen if we do not give them the money, precisely because they have done this so many times in the past. George Bush and Dick Cheney are the living embodiment of “Chicken Little,” who told us how many times the sky was “falling.”
I know that the beneficiaries of this giveaway will work tirelessly to get as large a share as they can, giving up as little as they can, taking as much as they can for their already overpaid and highly pampered CEO’s, Boards and other executives.
There is a Light At the End of the Tunnel
I do not trust any of these people because they have never given me any reason to trust them. What I am willing to trust is the following. The only really honest broker in this entire mess will be a person who has not fed at the interest group trough. The only possibility of real trust is a candidate who has not sold out to the campaign contributions of these people. The only people you can trust are men and women who are not simply the circulating lobbyists who go from representing big interests to running the campaigns of those on whom they will eventually feed.
We do have a choice, or we will have one soon. Senator Barack Obama has not taken their campaign contributions, he does not run his campaign with an army of paid lobbyists, and his supporters are less tainted by conflicts of interests than any campaign in memory. That is a reality into which I could put some faith. But putting faith in Bush, Cheney, Paulson and John McCain is about as foolish as believing that the Moon is made of Green Cheese. Trusting the totally untrustworthy is eating the bitter fruit of disappointment wrapped in experience.
I have said this before in my blog. Senator Barack Obama has funded his campaign without recourse to those who have routinely bought and sold public policy in the United States. That is something that can be trusted! It is about the only thing that you can trust, and that is precisely why those interests find him such a dangerous candidate. He has not been purchased, bought and paid for by the special interests, and that is very frightening to those who only know how to buy their candidates wholesale.
Just my opinion,
Gordon Black
I am still in the questioning stage with regard to the $700 Billion Dollar “bailout” of somebody. I say “somebody” because it is not entirely clear to me, or probably anyone else, who precisely we are bailing out, and that is only the beginning of my discomfort. Are we “bailing out” the shareholders, the really incompetent CEOs, the mortgagees, the politicians, or their employees, the lobbyists?
My problem is simply this. I know precisely what is going on in Washington, D.C., on this issue at this moment, and I do not need to be there to see it directly. We have all seen it so many times that we should not need to be reminded. The people we have elected, who do not trust any of us at all or each other, are telling us once again why they have to restore “trust” and “confidence” in our name. They have never really trusted us, but we are expected once again the trust them.
Given the incentive of $700 Billion, a horde of locusts and vultures have descended on that City and they are engaged in the process of attempting to eat alive anyone and everyone who stands between them and the $700 Billion. This horde of locusts and vultures is composed of the lobbyists and lawyers who are working around the clock to shape this legislation to favor the economic interests that they represent. They are present in the hundreds and even thousands, and they do not care one dime about the taxpayers in the Country. In truth, they are scornful and laugh at our “trust” and they believe that we, the taxpayers, are simply country bumpkins to be fleeced by the big city slickers from New York City and Washington, DC.
In theory, of course, our friendly national legislators are supposed to stand between the locusts and vultures and their objectives, but no one with a ounce of brains believes this to be the case in this modern world of politics. Most of the legislators are there for the show and for the eventual cushy retirement benefits they will earn. They are only in Washington, D.C. because they took the handouts from these same special interests that helped fund their campaigns. They are not going to bite the hands that feed them with great and consistent regularity. Now, they will fain “concern” with great fanfare and show to protect the supposed interests of the taxpayers. They have not protected us for eight years from these predators; why would anyone but a real fool expect them to start now.
Please remember that these are the same locusts and vultures, who with the help of Congress and this Administration, that designed the previous financial oversight system; that worked so hard to protect the interests of their deep pocket Wall Street clients; that found the money to secure the successful reelection of their close friends on the Hill.
They are the furthest thing from innocent bystanders in a process of robbing the public to pay off their friends and clients. To them, $700 Billion is the blood they cannot resist, and you can see them there on the Hill in their $500 shoes, $3000 Armani suits, slick smiles and friendly gestures to all, working tirelessly to fleece the taxpayers once again for their clients.
It would be fun to have an official requirement that demanded that no legislator be allowed to sit on this giveaway, or any, unless they took no campaign contributions from the interests involved. My guess is that you could not get a quorum in the House or the Senate! Moreover, many of the locusts and vultures are "retired" members of Congress who now represent the very interests that are appearing before Congress and the Administration.
These special interests have purchased with substantial contributions a seat at a table where none of the rest of us are represented. If you think we should “trust” them to look out for our interests, then, as the comic says, I have a wonderful bridge in Brooklyn that you can buy for a song. The Paulson Plan will produce processes that will be established to benefit the interests of the lobbies and wholly devoid of anything we should trust, so give us a good reason why we should trust any of them at all.
The only thing you can trust is their total lack of trustworthiness! The only thing you can trust is their singular and passionate focus on the self-interest of the people they represent; the people who are demanding that we pay for their mistakes with your children’s good money. Of course, since they are borrowing all of the money to pay off the vultures, it really isn’t your money we are talking about. It is simply another enormous debt that they all, collectively get to pass on to our children and grandchildren.
I am all for “trust” and “confidence,” and we are well aware that both qualities has been shaken around the world. The Bush Administration is the single most distrusted Administration in the rest of the world in modern history, largely because they elevated lying and distortion to a grand level unmatched by any Administration we can remember. This Administration has given us absolutely no evidence of its “trustworthiness” about anything serious. I am still smarting about the $1 Trillion or more that they ripped us off for with their weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I am still smarting by a 50 percent devaluation of the dollar. I am still smarting about the half trillion dollar deficit.
Just why is the Secretary of the Treasury somehow more trustworthy than the rest of this ship of scoundrels and fools? The whole eight years of this administration has been about huge payouts to the special interests that feed at the public trough – the weapons manufacturers, the oil interests, the mining interests, and the financial sector and so on. Now, suddenly, we should “trust” that they do this for us – the little people who are always asked to pay for their mistakes.
The Things About Which I am Certain:
There are many things that I do trust and know with certainty in this situation. I know with certainty the enormous efforts that will be made by the special interests to limit financial oversight, reward their powerful benefactors, and steer as much money as they can into the hands of the rich to the detriment of the taxpayers.
I know with certainly that you and I as taxpayers have no way to defend our economic interests in this process, no matter what George Bush tells you. I know that the proponents of this giveaway will overstate and exaggerate the consequences of what will happen if we do not give them the money, precisely because they have done this so many times in the past. George Bush and Dick Cheney are the living embodiment of “Chicken Little,” who told us how many times the sky was “falling.”
I know that the beneficiaries of this giveaway will work tirelessly to get as large a share as they can, giving up as little as they can, taking as much as they can for their already overpaid and highly pampered CEO’s, Boards and other executives.
There is a Light At the End of the Tunnel
I do not trust any of these people because they have never given me any reason to trust them. What I am willing to trust is the following. The only really honest broker in this entire mess will be a person who has not fed at the interest group trough. The only possibility of real trust is a candidate who has not sold out to the campaign contributions of these people. The only people you can trust are men and women who are not simply the circulating lobbyists who go from representing big interests to running the campaigns of those on whom they will eventually feed.
We do have a choice, or we will have one soon. Senator Barack Obama has not taken their campaign contributions, he does not run his campaign with an army of paid lobbyists, and his supporters are less tainted by conflicts of interests than any campaign in memory. That is a reality into which I could put some faith. But putting faith in Bush, Cheney, Paulson and John McCain is about as foolish as believing that the Moon is made of Green Cheese. Trusting the totally untrustworthy is eating the bitter fruit of disappointment wrapped in experience.
I have said this before in my blog. Senator Barack Obama has funded his campaign without recourse to those who have routinely bought and sold public policy in the United States. That is something that can be trusted! It is about the only thing that you can trust, and that is precisely why those interests find him such a dangerous candidate. He has not been purchased, bought and paid for by the special interests, and that is very frightening to those who only know how to buy their candidates wholesale.
Just my opinion,
Gordon Black
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Money, Money Everywhere . . .
Some Scary Thoughts for a Scary Time
I am in Paris, now watching the events unfold in Washington, D.C., realizing once again just how uncertain the world can be, even for we ever optimistic Americans. It is hard to keep my thoughts silent, especially when you listen to the media and realize just how extraordinary the situation is and how truly little most so-called experts know about dealing with it. Since I am not an economist, I will not offer even an opinion at this point, but I would like to ask some questions that occur to me.
The Deficit and the National Debt:
I am going to assume that you know what the deficit and the national debt are. At the moment, the Federal Government is forced to finance through borrowing between $400 and $500 Billion more per year (the deficit), and we have in the last eight years increased the total national debt from about $4.6 Trillion to nearly $10 Trillion. I suppose that we should feel relieved that our “leaders” did not reach the number of $15 or $20 Trillion in eight years because there is little evidence that anyone in Washington, D.C .cares about the deficit or the national debt.
Am I wrong, but does the Paulson Plan for shoring up bad mortgages amount to an additional loan on top of the already $500 Billion we are running in deficits, taking the single year record deficit potentially to $1.2 Trillion or more?
There is a truly delicious irony in the Paulson Plan; it does not require one tiny bit of sacrifice from any of us – not one cent. No new taxes; no new fiscal restraint; no program reductions; absolutely nothing. We have a massive “debt” problem, created by those in politics, and they propose to solve the problem with a massive infusion of more “debt.” Am I missing something here?
The Republicans will see to it that the shareholders are “bailed out;” and the Democrats will bail out the bankrupt mortgagees; but no one in this generation has to pay for it – just our children and grandchildren. Where is the sacrifice? What kind of people are we Americans that we so willingly take everything we can get and leave it to our children and grandchildren to pay for it?
I know that these are unknowable numbers to all of us. They are so large that it is very difficult to get any sense of reality about them, and I have yet to hear any expert explain just how much debt will eventually break the back of the Country. If one includes the “unfunded federal and state liabilities” for programs and pensions, the actual “national debt” is in the tens of trillions of dollars, all of which comes due in the future for our children and grandchildren to pay.
It is a truly “inspired” system that those in office have created. They offend no current voters, providing them with benefits without anyone paying for these benefits, and they pass the entire payment on to future generations, who cannot vote today and when they can eventually vote, this generation of office holders will be long gone to their pensions. This is the new “morality” of Washington decision makers, but we voters share it.
But a question does occur to me. What happens if the people who purchase those US Treasury Bills (the Chinese, Oil Countries, Russia, you know, our good friends, etc) simply find that they have less or no confidence in our willingness to back those debts with the full faith and credit for the United States Government? What happens then? And where is it written that these buyers of our national debt will stay buyers if we flood of the market with our securities? And why would they want to continue buying our Treasury Bonds when it has become the national policy of the United States of American to deliberately “devalue” our currency so that we “devalue” all of their holdings?
I know enough economics to know that the “interest rates” on those securities would have to rise, perhaps substantially, to produce buyers, or it might occur that the world markets simply will not tolerate our flood of Treasury bills any longer. I have listened to economists argue, even persuasively, that the deficit and national debt do not matter too much, but is there a point where they do start to matter? We have not heard much complaint about the devaluation of the dollar, which actually devalues our debt, but what happens when the 50 percent current devaluation over the past eight years reaches 80 or 90 percent. And please do not tell me that it simply cannot happen! It is happening, as we watch!
What if the small handful of creditor nations decide that they have had enough of American foreign policy, enough of American “go-it-alone” war policy; enough of our intervention in everyone else’s affairs; and maybe enough of our totally irresponsible form of cowboy capitalism. Could they simply shift much of their collective holdings into other currencies, say the Euro, or into commodities like oil and gold, or somewhere else where their funds are safer than in bellicose American dollars? This is all a bit hypothetical, of course, but the events of last week were all hypothetical just two weeks ago or so. However, the 50 percent decline of the dollar over the past eight years Is absolutely real, which has itself fueled the rising price of oil and is a reflection that this shift of “confidence” and “trust” is actually taking place.
But If You Think the Bush Administration is Frightening, Just Wait?
Anyone with any intelligence at all knows that the stakes of our future just went up sharply during the past week. “Confidence” and “trust” are ephemeral things, but without them, the entire international financial system could easily grind to a halt. It has happened many times before, when trust and confidence declined rapidly. Since every expert talking head on television over the past two weeks have stressed how critical it is to restore both “confidence” and “trust”, those ephemeral qualities have moved to the dead center of Presidential politics.
As my brother use to tell me, half of the American people have an IQ of less than 100, so do not expect too much from them! That is a very sobering thought in these difficult times. So, I am sure that a large portion of the American electorate is not going to figure out about “confidence” and “trust”, and just how much the stakes went up, until it is way too to do anything about the votes they will cast.
I personally think that Senator Barack Obama will just sneak by in the close election, made close only by “the color of his skin,” and we will at least (America and the rest of the world) have the knowledge that we have a leader of demonstrated great intelligence and calm to take us through these turbulent times. However, I can tell you with absolute certainty that the alternatives to Obama and Biden just got quite horrifying – for America and for everyone else around the world.
If Senator John McCain were to sneak by, the consequences and the possible future events become a real nightmare, more than any of us could possibly have contemplated just two weeks ago. Before two weeks ago, this election was about a whole lot of things that seem absolutely trivial today. I won’t recount them all. You can do it better than me.
If Senator John McCain is the President of the United States, we will face a year of economic crisis, real crisis and not the imagined kind dreamed up to sell books or television shows, with a Democrat controlled House and Senate, and a Republican President.
If that is not a sure recipe for Deadlock, I do not know what is. How much “confidence” and “trust” do you think there will be – internationally, in financial markets, among our creditor nations, etc., in an American Government that is deadlocked? I know some of you think divided government is a good thing on the theory that the less the government can function, the better off we are. But in a real crisis, when the government itself has to lead the way out of the crisis, is that what we really want? I cannot believe that it is, but it easily could happen.
I want to give you even worse nightmares. I know that a great many voters think that Sarah Palin is the cat’s meow. Senator John McCain is an old man, older than me at 72, and he has many of an old man’s failings. He is a stubborn, intemperate man of demonstrably meager intellectual talent (5th from the bottom of his class at Annapolis) who does not have the physical fitness to go through night after night of a real crisis, which will not go away. Neither did Franklin Roosevelt, with much greater talent, of course, and he was very sick and died before the end of the War, leaving the nuclear decision to Harry Truman, a man he had not even briefed on the existence of the bomb.
The Presidency during a crisis is likely to sicken or even to kill John McCain, leaving us with a totally unqualified human being to occupy that position. Sarah Palin has virtually no qualification by education, training and experience to serve in that office and her presence will terrify all of the people around the world who need to be reassured about America to get us through this mess. Those who defend her credentials are people who are want to win at any cost to the rest of us, but they are helpless to dissuade the people whose “trust and confidence” we require.
I listened last evening to a Republican strategist on CNN compare Palin’s lack of experience with Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan. He did this with a straight face and the interviewer did not laugh out loud. Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar and a governor for many years of a state with people in it. Ronald Reagan ran the Screen Actors Guild, a union with ten time more people than Palin’s little village, and he was the Governor of California for eight years.
If, however, a majority of the American people unwisely are persuaded that Sarah Palin is a qualified understudy to an aging President, she will be elected and that will be their collective stupidity. I can tell you this with absolute certainty – none of the people that matter in this crisis, the important international media, the heads of state of our adversaries, the heads of state of our allies, the people who control the purchase of US Treasury notes (our deficit), the financial markets and money managers, the holders of Trillions of our debt, etc., will have any confidence or trust in her at all. They are simply not that stupid and ignorant, and very few of them are American or Republican!
Sarah Palin is not remotely a serious player for hard and serious times, and anyone who argues otherwise is just smoking hot air or something worse. Her presence will embolden our adversaries and frighten our friends. That is the truth of it, and all the voters supporting her are just plain wrong. The opinion leaders outside of the United States are saying this every day, in every way they can, in the vague hope that many some voters inside America will listen.
Whatever either candidates says, the next President of the United States is going to have to first clean up the mess that has been created by a lot of arrogant, naïve and foolish people for the past eight years. That means very simply this – higher taxes on most of us, reduced spending for many of us, and a very difficult time for all of us if this game we are all in falls apart. Forget about health care reform for a while. Forget about all of the wonderful, but costly programs that erupt in elections.
There is simply NO MORE MONEY for much of anything other than getting our financial house in order. The truth is we cannot afford Iraq, and we might not even be able to afford Afghanistan. We cannot be in a position to resolve anyone else’s problems until we take care of our own disorderly house. The simple reality is that the Bush Administration has basically wasted all of the money that might have been spent on health care reform, energy independence, infrastructure rebuilding and all of the rest.
Of course, if John McCain is President, that will make the right wing and Rush Limbaugh very happy, but it will horrify all of the financial decision makers in the world outside who are involved in deciding our collective fate. The decision makers know what all of us really know: Sarah Palin is simply not equipped to deal with a financial crisis in our world, much less have her finger on the nuclear trigger. Her nomination by McCain and the Republican strategists is one of the most amusing insults to their estimate of the intelligence of the American voter of all time. If the American electorate wants to completely destroy all “confidence” and “trust” from the rest of the world, just elect these two in November. That will do it!
We have a very short time to get our fiscal house in order. If we can act decisively to curb our deficit, we might make it through – but just barely. By doubling the deficit in one bold stroke, we did not make the process any easier. Electing McCain and Palin will make it that much worse, but whatever will be, will be, as the song says.
Just my opinion,
Gordon Black
I am in Paris, now watching the events unfold in Washington, D.C., realizing once again just how uncertain the world can be, even for we ever optimistic Americans. It is hard to keep my thoughts silent, especially when you listen to the media and realize just how extraordinary the situation is and how truly little most so-called experts know about dealing with it. Since I am not an economist, I will not offer even an opinion at this point, but I would like to ask some questions that occur to me.
The Deficit and the National Debt:
I am going to assume that you know what the deficit and the national debt are. At the moment, the Federal Government is forced to finance through borrowing between $400 and $500 Billion more per year (the deficit), and we have in the last eight years increased the total national debt from about $4.6 Trillion to nearly $10 Trillion. I suppose that we should feel relieved that our “leaders” did not reach the number of $15 or $20 Trillion in eight years because there is little evidence that anyone in Washington, D.C .cares about the deficit or the national debt.
Am I wrong, but does the Paulson Plan for shoring up bad mortgages amount to an additional loan on top of the already $500 Billion we are running in deficits, taking the single year record deficit potentially to $1.2 Trillion or more?
There is a truly delicious irony in the Paulson Plan; it does not require one tiny bit of sacrifice from any of us – not one cent. No new taxes; no new fiscal restraint; no program reductions; absolutely nothing. We have a massive “debt” problem, created by those in politics, and they propose to solve the problem with a massive infusion of more “debt.” Am I missing something here?
The Republicans will see to it that the shareholders are “bailed out;” and the Democrats will bail out the bankrupt mortgagees; but no one in this generation has to pay for it – just our children and grandchildren. Where is the sacrifice? What kind of people are we Americans that we so willingly take everything we can get and leave it to our children and grandchildren to pay for it?
I know that these are unknowable numbers to all of us. They are so large that it is very difficult to get any sense of reality about them, and I have yet to hear any expert explain just how much debt will eventually break the back of the Country. If one includes the “unfunded federal and state liabilities” for programs and pensions, the actual “national debt” is in the tens of trillions of dollars, all of which comes due in the future for our children and grandchildren to pay.
It is a truly “inspired” system that those in office have created. They offend no current voters, providing them with benefits without anyone paying for these benefits, and they pass the entire payment on to future generations, who cannot vote today and when they can eventually vote, this generation of office holders will be long gone to their pensions. This is the new “morality” of Washington decision makers, but we voters share it.
But a question does occur to me. What happens if the people who purchase those US Treasury Bills (the Chinese, Oil Countries, Russia, you know, our good friends, etc) simply find that they have less or no confidence in our willingness to back those debts with the full faith and credit for the United States Government? What happens then? And where is it written that these buyers of our national debt will stay buyers if we flood of the market with our securities? And why would they want to continue buying our Treasury Bonds when it has become the national policy of the United States of American to deliberately “devalue” our currency so that we “devalue” all of their holdings?
I know enough economics to know that the “interest rates” on those securities would have to rise, perhaps substantially, to produce buyers, or it might occur that the world markets simply will not tolerate our flood of Treasury bills any longer. I have listened to economists argue, even persuasively, that the deficit and national debt do not matter too much, but is there a point where they do start to matter? We have not heard much complaint about the devaluation of the dollar, which actually devalues our debt, but what happens when the 50 percent current devaluation over the past eight years reaches 80 or 90 percent. And please do not tell me that it simply cannot happen! It is happening, as we watch!
What if the small handful of creditor nations decide that they have had enough of American foreign policy, enough of American “go-it-alone” war policy; enough of our intervention in everyone else’s affairs; and maybe enough of our totally irresponsible form of cowboy capitalism. Could they simply shift much of their collective holdings into other currencies, say the Euro, or into commodities like oil and gold, or somewhere else where their funds are safer than in bellicose American dollars? This is all a bit hypothetical, of course, but the events of last week were all hypothetical just two weeks ago or so. However, the 50 percent decline of the dollar over the past eight years Is absolutely real, which has itself fueled the rising price of oil and is a reflection that this shift of “confidence” and “trust” is actually taking place.
But If You Think the Bush Administration is Frightening, Just Wait?
Anyone with any intelligence at all knows that the stakes of our future just went up sharply during the past week. “Confidence” and “trust” are ephemeral things, but without them, the entire international financial system could easily grind to a halt. It has happened many times before, when trust and confidence declined rapidly. Since every expert talking head on television over the past two weeks have stressed how critical it is to restore both “confidence” and “trust”, those ephemeral qualities have moved to the dead center of Presidential politics.
As my brother use to tell me, half of the American people have an IQ of less than 100, so do not expect too much from them! That is a very sobering thought in these difficult times. So, I am sure that a large portion of the American electorate is not going to figure out about “confidence” and “trust”, and just how much the stakes went up, until it is way too to do anything about the votes they will cast.
I personally think that Senator Barack Obama will just sneak by in the close election, made close only by “the color of his skin,” and we will at least (America and the rest of the world) have the knowledge that we have a leader of demonstrated great intelligence and calm to take us through these turbulent times. However, I can tell you with absolute certainty that the alternatives to Obama and Biden just got quite horrifying – for America and for everyone else around the world.
If Senator John McCain were to sneak by, the consequences and the possible future events become a real nightmare, more than any of us could possibly have contemplated just two weeks ago. Before two weeks ago, this election was about a whole lot of things that seem absolutely trivial today. I won’t recount them all. You can do it better than me.
If Senator John McCain is the President of the United States, we will face a year of economic crisis, real crisis and not the imagined kind dreamed up to sell books or television shows, with a Democrat controlled House and Senate, and a Republican President.
If that is not a sure recipe for Deadlock, I do not know what is. How much “confidence” and “trust” do you think there will be – internationally, in financial markets, among our creditor nations, etc., in an American Government that is deadlocked? I know some of you think divided government is a good thing on the theory that the less the government can function, the better off we are. But in a real crisis, when the government itself has to lead the way out of the crisis, is that what we really want? I cannot believe that it is, but it easily could happen.
I want to give you even worse nightmares. I know that a great many voters think that Sarah Palin is the cat’s meow. Senator John McCain is an old man, older than me at 72, and he has many of an old man’s failings. He is a stubborn, intemperate man of demonstrably meager intellectual talent (5th from the bottom of his class at Annapolis) who does not have the physical fitness to go through night after night of a real crisis, which will not go away. Neither did Franklin Roosevelt, with much greater talent, of course, and he was very sick and died before the end of the War, leaving the nuclear decision to Harry Truman, a man he had not even briefed on the existence of the bomb.
The Presidency during a crisis is likely to sicken or even to kill John McCain, leaving us with a totally unqualified human being to occupy that position. Sarah Palin has virtually no qualification by education, training and experience to serve in that office and her presence will terrify all of the people around the world who need to be reassured about America to get us through this mess. Those who defend her credentials are people who are want to win at any cost to the rest of us, but they are helpless to dissuade the people whose “trust and confidence” we require.
I listened last evening to a Republican strategist on CNN compare Palin’s lack of experience with Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan. He did this with a straight face and the interviewer did not laugh out loud. Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar and a governor for many years of a state with people in it. Ronald Reagan ran the Screen Actors Guild, a union with ten time more people than Palin’s little village, and he was the Governor of California for eight years.
If, however, a majority of the American people unwisely are persuaded that Sarah Palin is a qualified understudy to an aging President, she will be elected and that will be their collective stupidity. I can tell you this with absolute certainty – none of the people that matter in this crisis, the important international media, the heads of state of our adversaries, the heads of state of our allies, the people who control the purchase of US Treasury notes (our deficit), the financial markets and money managers, the holders of Trillions of our debt, etc., will have any confidence or trust in her at all. They are simply not that stupid and ignorant, and very few of them are American or Republican!
Sarah Palin is not remotely a serious player for hard and serious times, and anyone who argues otherwise is just smoking hot air or something worse. Her presence will embolden our adversaries and frighten our friends. That is the truth of it, and all the voters supporting her are just plain wrong. The opinion leaders outside of the United States are saying this every day, in every way they can, in the vague hope that many some voters inside America will listen.
Whatever either candidates says, the next President of the United States is going to have to first clean up the mess that has been created by a lot of arrogant, naïve and foolish people for the past eight years. That means very simply this – higher taxes on most of us, reduced spending for many of us, and a very difficult time for all of us if this game we are all in falls apart. Forget about health care reform for a while. Forget about all of the wonderful, but costly programs that erupt in elections.
There is simply NO MORE MONEY for much of anything other than getting our financial house in order. The truth is we cannot afford Iraq, and we might not even be able to afford Afghanistan. We cannot be in a position to resolve anyone else’s problems until we take care of our own disorderly house. The simple reality is that the Bush Administration has basically wasted all of the money that might have been spent on health care reform, energy independence, infrastructure rebuilding and all of the rest.
Of course, if John McCain is President, that will make the right wing and Rush Limbaugh very happy, but it will horrify all of the financial decision makers in the world outside who are involved in deciding our collective fate. The decision makers know what all of us really know: Sarah Palin is simply not equipped to deal with a financial crisis in our world, much less have her finger on the nuclear trigger. Her nomination by McCain and the Republican strategists is one of the most amusing insults to their estimate of the intelligence of the American voter of all time. If the American electorate wants to completely destroy all “confidence” and “trust” from the rest of the world, just elect these two in November. That will do it!
We have a very short time to get our fiscal house in order. If we can act decisively to curb our deficit, we might make it through – but just barely. By doubling the deficit in one bold stroke, we did not make the process any easier. Electing McCain and Palin will make it that much worse, but whatever will be, will be, as the song says.
Just my opinion,
Gordon Black
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Mea Culpa on Sarah Palin
Mea Culpa on Sarah Palin
Clearly, I was wrong about the impact of Governor Sarah Palin on the ticket of John McCain. As of today, the ticket of Barack Obama and Joe Biden has fallen very slightly behind that of John McCain and Sarah Palin in the latest polls. The “bounce” in the polls after the Democratic Convention declined under the “bounce” in polling numbers produced by the Republican Convention and the nomination of Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. It appears now that we have a very close race with a relatively small (5 to 13 percent) number of “undecided” voters, depending largely on how the “undecided” voters are probed by pollsters for which way they are “leaning.”
The polling numbers themselves are hard to interpret. Some polls are publishing results and others are using "likely voters," i.e., the people who are most likely to vote. That makes comparing one poll with another difficult, but they all confirm that McCain has pulled slightly ahead. However, do not expect him to pull well out in front because they are simply not many voters left to convert. Ahead is ahead, of course, and it is better to be moving up and with a lead than falling behind, and trailing.
I do not much like being wrong; a congenital problem that I have carried a long time, but I like even less what this situation says about the voting public. With so much going wrong with the economy, particularly the mortgage market; and so much having gone wrong over the past eight years (the War in Iraq, the deterioration of the international standing of the United States, the growth of “big government”, corruption, and public debt and deficits, the widespread feeling among the public that the Country is moving in the “wrong direction, etc.), it is still hard for me to believe that my fellow citizens would return a Republican Administration to power. But, they might!
But, as we say, wrong is wrong and I have to admit it. The election is going should stay close and McCain and Palin clearly can win. The Republican tacticians are proceeding very carefully with Sarah Palin; keeping her with McCain much of the time where she cannot get into too much trouble and scheduling her to limit her exposure, and they probably can get away with it. After all, they only have to hide her for about six weeks or so, helping to keep her from opportunities to stumble, and the national media can only complain so much. The real focus of the election will return to Obama and McCain, and not the Vice Presidential candidates, although Palin is getting far more coverage than normal and Joe Biden has all but disappeared.
They so-called remaining “undecided voters” are a wide mixture of people, but they are not exactly the kind of people in whom anyone would like to place the fate of their country. In general, they are younger, less politically involved, less likely to vote and operating with less information than most voters, but they are largely more moderate in their political views than either McCain or Obama voters.
Most of the voters with the more information and motivation have largely already made up their minds. The actual percentage of voters who will switch at least once during the next 50 some days is larger than this group of “undecided” voters, so there is some room for change that will diminish as we move past the debates, when opinion will harden even more.
Elections Are Not About Truth, Justice and the American Way
The great Greek tragic dramatist, Aeschylus, writing about 500 BC, stated: “In War, truth in the first casualty.” That is just as accurate for politics, only more so in this modern age of 15 and 30 second attack advertising and highly paid, and effective, spin doctors. modern politics also seems to be only about winning, whatever the cost. America has a long history of elections fraught with enmity over serious and trivial things, but few seem much more consequential than this one. The Democrats want a campaign about issues, which favor them, and the Republicans want a campaign about personalities and other things , which favor them.
Truth is even more elusive when candidates are able to stand behind professional managers and publicists, preserved from the public fire that occurs in a prolonged primary system, protected by the words of professional speech writers, and not permitted even the normal questions in a press conference. Sarah Palin is likely to go down in history as the single most protected and pampered (and least examined)Vice Presidential candidate of all time – a nearly complete blank slate, free of substance and ideas, endowed with a pretty face, where Bush speech writers can put words and funny lines into her mouth. This is probably unfair, but that is the way the McCain tacticians see her since they are the people providing the protection and not the rest of us.
The truth will come out slowly, but the “undecided” are usually the very last people to hear it and often the least concerned about it. The protagonists for both Obama and McCain are reaching that point where they turn off their eyes and ears to new information, especially if it runs counter to what they wish to believe. In truth, we are all like that in the way we do or do not process information. Our interest in new information wanes when we have made up our minds. Searching for new information is normally a costly exercise, and we all avoid it where we can.
“Belief, strongly held”, is also a powerful deterrent to the acquisition of conflicting information. Palin’s Pentecostal roots are only now being examined on the national news, a church where they apparently “talk in tongues”, “directly to God” and anticipate the Armageddon that marks the end of civilization. That will make some people very happy and others equally unhappy, but does it really matter to anyone who understands relatively little about the various sects of Evangelical religions? I'm not so sure!
Her desire to impose censorship on her librarian, who stood up to her and whom she attempted to fire, is now well documented. That is a mixed event politically, however. It outrages anyone with liberal or libertarian views and is cherished by a whole range of Evangelicals who would impose censorship everywhere, if they could. Censorship is a fault line that has run through Civilization and most religions for hundreds of generations, separating the “children of the Enlightenment” from the book burners, like the monk Savronola, who delighted in burning books in Florence until he himself got burned at the stake. This aspect of the modern culture “war” has been with us since the beginning of America and even long before, and the struggle only waxes and wanes, but never really goes away.
She apparently believes in the virtues of teaching creationism in the public schools, another position which educated moderates and liberals hate, but in which the Evangelical Right rejoices. Our children cannot competitively perform math, science and reading in contrast with the rest of the world; but maybe we can verse them in Genesis as a substitute. They might not be able to compete with those pesky Asians and Europeans any more, but “creationism” might make our children and their families feel reassured and happy even as their children’s ability to compete in the modern world erodes.
Contrary to McCain, at least in the past, she would, as President, make it impossible to use fetal stem cells under any circumstances, a fact that should make everyone, like me, who suffers from a chronic illness at least a little uncomfortable, but the public probably won’t realize it until too late. We certainly did not realize until too late that George Bush and Dick Cheney would spend a Trillion dollars, lying to all of us at the time, on an unnecessary war in Iraq, a war which Sarah Palin has asserted is an expression of “God’s will.”
Her rise to the Presidency will, in truth, not affect the stem cell issue very much. Virtually all of the money, jobs, and progress with stem cell research will occur outside of the control of the United States, much of it in Asia, where religiously imposed sensitivities and scruples cannot be imposed by the President of the United States, who has no ability, whatsoever, to stop the flow of research and progress.
For the record, the world today is one huge competitive market where knowledge, skills, and money move across international borders at will. If we have not learned that, as Obama particularly seems not to have learned, we know nothing at all. The good news is that neither the President nor Sarah Palin can block the use of stem cells in research labs across the world. The bad news is that they can easily force the shift in the resources, opportunities, skill sets and jobs, to markets abroad where religious sensitivities do not interfere with basic science and research. The giant, multi-national pharmaceutical companies have labs everywhere and many are not even American, and research dollars follow their investments. Stem cell research will occur, only the knowledge and the jobs will not be American and we will slowly lose our preeminence in that area of research.
The world is watching closely this “play” in the history of our American Democracy. If McCain wins, and he might, there will be a great sadness among our friends in this world. Our allies in this world, and we still have some, will have little or nothing to do with the outcome; they are just spectators, but it affects their lives just as it does ours. According the the international polls, they are hoping overwhelmingly for the “change” that will come only with Barack Obama; not the continuity of current staff, interest groups, contracting companies and lobbies that will be delivered by John McCain. Of course, you might accept the view of too many in the Bush Administration: “With friends like these (the Germans and the French), who needs enemies?”
Finally, the big lobby money is clearly invested overwhelmingly in the McCain campaign, a campaign run largely by the very lobbyists he now decries. They will get their payday as promised, only if he wins, because they have almost no money in the Obama campaign. There have been countless billions stolen from the Federal Treasury over the past eight years, and that is gone, whether Obama gets the job or not. On the other hand, Obama is stating a complete fiction when he argues that we can reach energy independence without using all of our resources, and not just the "green" ones which the Democrats prefer. As I said, truth is the first casualty, often for everyone.
Just my opinion,
Gordon Black
Clearly, I was wrong about the impact of Governor Sarah Palin on the ticket of John McCain. As of today, the ticket of Barack Obama and Joe Biden has fallen very slightly behind that of John McCain and Sarah Palin in the latest polls. The “bounce” in the polls after the Democratic Convention declined under the “bounce” in polling numbers produced by the Republican Convention and the nomination of Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. It appears now that we have a very close race with a relatively small (5 to 13 percent) number of “undecided” voters, depending largely on how the “undecided” voters are probed by pollsters for which way they are “leaning.”
The polling numbers themselves are hard to interpret. Some polls are publishing results and others are using "likely voters," i.e., the people who are most likely to vote. That makes comparing one poll with another difficult, but they all confirm that McCain has pulled slightly ahead. However, do not expect him to pull well out in front because they are simply not many voters left to convert. Ahead is ahead, of course, and it is better to be moving up and with a lead than falling behind, and trailing.
I do not much like being wrong; a congenital problem that I have carried a long time, but I like even less what this situation says about the voting public. With so much going wrong with the economy, particularly the mortgage market; and so much having gone wrong over the past eight years (the War in Iraq, the deterioration of the international standing of the United States, the growth of “big government”, corruption, and public debt and deficits, the widespread feeling among the public that the Country is moving in the “wrong direction, etc.), it is still hard for me to believe that my fellow citizens would return a Republican Administration to power. But, they might!
But, as we say, wrong is wrong and I have to admit it. The election is going should stay close and McCain and Palin clearly can win. The Republican tacticians are proceeding very carefully with Sarah Palin; keeping her with McCain much of the time where she cannot get into too much trouble and scheduling her to limit her exposure, and they probably can get away with it. After all, they only have to hide her for about six weeks or so, helping to keep her from opportunities to stumble, and the national media can only complain so much. The real focus of the election will return to Obama and McCain, and not the Vice Presidential candidates, although Palin is getting far more coverage than normal and Joe Biden has all but disappeared.
They so-called remaining “undecided voters” are a wide mixture of people, but they are not exactly the kind of people in whom anyone would like to place the fate of their country. In general, they are younger, less politically involved, less likely to vote and operating with less information than most voters, but they are largely more moderate in their political views than either McCain or Obama voters.
Most of the voters with the more information and motivation have largely already made up their minds. The actual percentage of voters who will switch at least once during the next 50 some days is larger than this group of “undecided” voters, so there is some room for change that will diminish as we move past the debates, when opinion will harden even more.
Elections Are Not About Truth, Justice and the American Way
The great Greek tragic dramatist, Aeschylus, writing about 500 BC, stated: “In War, truth in the first casualty.” That is just as accurate for politics, only more so in this modern age of 15 and 30 second attack advertising and highly paid, and effective, spin doctors. modern politics also seems to be only about winning, whatever the cost. America has a long history of elections fraught with enmity over serious and trivial things, but few seem much more consequential than this one. The Democrats want a campaign about issues, which favor them, and the Republicans want a campaign about personalities and other things , which favor them.
Truth is even more elusive when candidates are able to stand behind professional managers and publicists, preserved from the public fire that occurs in a prolonged primary system, protected by the words of professional speech writers, and not permitted even the normal questions in a press conference. Sarah Palin is likely to go down in history as the single most protected and pampered (and least examined)Vice Presidential candidate of all time – a nearly complete blank slate, free of substance and ideas, endowed with a pretty face, where Bush speech writers can put words and funny lines into her mouth. This is probably unfair, but that is the way the McCain tacticians see her since they are the people providing the protection and not the rest of us.
The truth will come out slowly, but the “undecided” are usually the very last people to hear it and often the least concerned about it. The protagonists for both Obama and McCain are reaching that point where they turn off their eyes and ears to new information, especially if it runs counter to what they wish to believe. In truth, we are all like that in the way we do or do not process information. Our interest in new information wanes when we have made up our minds. Searching for new information is normally a costly exercise, and we all avoid it where we can.
“Belief, strongly held”, is also a powerful deterrent to the acquisition of conflicting information. Palin’s Pentecostal roots are only now being examined on the national news, a church where they apparently “talk in tongues”, “directly to God” and anticipate the Armageddon that marks the end of civilization. That will make some people very happy and others equally unhappy, but does it really matter to anyone who understands relatively little about the various sects of Evangelical religions? I'm not so sure!
Her desire to impose censorship on her librarian, who stood up to her and whom she attempted to fire, is now well documented. That is a mixed event politically, however. It outrages anyone with liberal or libertarian views and is cherished by a whole range of Evangelicals who would impose censorship everywhere, if they could. Censorship is a fault line that has run through Civilization and most religions for hundreds of generations, separating the “children of the Enlightenment” from the book burners, like the monk Savronola, who delighted in burning books in Florence until he himself got burned at the stake. This aspect of the modern culture “war” has been with us since the beginning of America and even long before, and the struggle only waxes and wanes, but never really goes away.
She apparently believes in the virtues of teaching creationism in the public schools, another position which educated moderates and liberals hate, but in which the Evangelical Right rejoices. Our children cannot competitively perform math, science and reading in contrast with the rest of the world; but maybe we can verse them in Genesis as a substitute. They might not be able to compete with those pesky Asians and Europeans any more, but “creationism” might make our children and their families feel reassured and happy even as their children’s ability to compete in the modern world erodes.
Contrary to McCain, at least in the past, she would, as President, make it impossible to use fetal stem cells under any circumstances, a fact that should make everyone, like me, who suffers from a chronic illness at least a little uncomfortable, but the public probably won’t realize it until too late. We certainly did not realize until too late that George Bush and Dick Cheney would spend a Trillion dollars, lying to all of us at the time, on an unnecessary war in Iraq, a war which Sarah Palin has asserted is an expression of “God’s will.”
Her rise to the Presidency will, in truth, not affect the stem cell issue very much. Virtually all of the money, jobs, and progress with stem cell research will occur outside of the control of the United States, much of it in Asia, where religiously imposed sensitivities and scruples cannot be imposed by the President of the United States, who has no ability, whatsoever, to stop the flow of research and progress.
For the record, the world today is one huge competitive market where knowledge, skills, and money move across international borders at will. If we have not learned that, as Obama particularly seems not to have learned, we know nothing at all. The good news is that neither the President nor Sarah Palin can block the use of stem cells in research labs across the world. The bad news is that they can easily force the shift in the resources, opportunities, skill sets and jobs, to markets abroad where religious sensitivities do not interfere with basic science and research. The giant, multi-national pharmaceutical companies have labs everywhere and many are not even American, and research dollars follow their investments. Stem cell research will occur, only the knowledge and the jobs will not be American and we will slowly lose our preeminence in that area of research.
The world is watching closely this “play” in the history of our American Democracy. If McCain wins, and he might, there will be a great sadness among our friends in this world. Our allies in this world, and we still have some, will have little or nothing to do with the outcome; they are just spectators, but it affects their lives just as it does ours. According the the international polls, they are hoping overwhelmingly for the “change” that will come only with Barack Obama; not the continuity of current staff, interest groups, contracting companies and lobbies that will be delivered by John McCain. Of course, you might accept the view of too many in the Bush Administration: “With friends like these (the Germans and the French), who needs enemies?”
Finally, the big lobby money is clearly invested overwhelmingly in the McCain campaign, a campaign run largely by the very lobbyists he now decries. They will get their payday as promised, only if he wins, because they have almost no money in the Obama campaign. There have been countless billions stolen from the Federal Treasury over the past eight years, and that is gone, whether Obama gets the job or not. On the other hand, Obama is stating a complete fiction when he argues that we can reach energy independence without using all of our resources, and not just the "green" ones which the Democrats prefer. As I said, truth is the first casualty, often for everyone.
Just my opinion,
Gordon Black
Saturday, September 6, 2008
About Governor Sarah Palin
To The Reader:
I have never posted nor sent out anything that was not my own, other the the references to Perot's Charts and an occasional article on which I was commenting. This is too significant not to bring it to your attention. I feel a little sorry for Annie Kilkenny because there will be an effort to discredit her personally as this piece circulates and gets into the public arena, which it will. She is probably a little naive about the forces in national politics, but she is likely to experience a firestorm of outrage by the right wing in American politics -- paid for and supported by the special interest that today cling to their last hope, Senator John McCain.
The stakes in this election are enormous -- perhaps more than at any time in my experience. The situation is dire, affecting all of us for many years to come. The choice is the most clear cut that I can imagine, and the outcome is very uncertain. The nomination of Governor Sarah Palin upped the stakes for everyone -- not just the liberals who will be appalled at her social positions, but also those who have an ingrained sense of responsibility about the management of foreign policy, our military policy and weaponry in a nuclear age.
As a Political Scientist by training, I think the Founding Fathers would be turning over in their collective graves at her nomination -- not because she is a woman, which is irrelevant, but because she has provided no demonstration at all that she has the education, experience and judgment to deal with the international challenges that we face. We have witnessed many remarkable women who rose to positions of power, including Margaret Thatcher. Sarah Palin is no Margaret Thatcher! Certainly not yet, and maybe never.
I have no problem with her ambition, either. President Lincoln's law partner once said that: "His ambition is a little engine that will not stop." But President Lincoln was a man vetted by the process by which he became President. He became a national figure debating the most important issue of his generation, slavery, throughout Illinois against one of the most powerful figures of his generation, Senator Stephen Douglas. He won approval of the Eastern establishment with one of the most powerful and moving speeches ever delivered in American Politics, the famous Cooper's Union Address, written entirely by his own hand. He earned his position in American history the hard way; it was not handed to him as a cynical ploy to capture an election.
The problem we face is that only 50 odd days remain before the choice is rendered at the ballot machine. Given the ability of sophisticated and experienced speech writers to put words in her mouth, as they did at the convention, we face a formidable task -- a fact that they understood at the time of her nomination. We all have a limited number of things that we can do: (1) contribute financially to the Obama/Biden campaigns, (2) get every available person we can registered to vote in the election, especially young people who are often thoughtless about their voting behavior and rights, (3) circulate our information and views as widely as possible, particularly to those who might not be so well informed, and (4) work where we can on the campaign itself, particularly by volunteering to go to the swing states and work on registration and voting itself.
As you may realize, I am not a Democrat, nor do I have any involvement with either party. I do believe that I love my Country as much as anyone, and I am not less of a patriot because I never served in the military. I want a smart and principled person to serve as President; and a Vice President who can add to the strength of the Administration and serve should anything happen to the President. Color of skin and gender are neither a recommendation nor a reason for supporting or opposing anyone.
We all have to confront the choice that we are given; and we equally have to confront the fact that our choice is a choice that binds our children and grand children, who cannot participate in the choice for the future that we deliver to them. The choice in this instance could not be clearer, at least for me; but mine is a very small voice in the midst of much more powerful interests that would manipulate this election for their own personal financial benefit.
The powerful voices of financial self-interest today confront a candidate whom they have not purchased, whom they cannot buy, and who will change the people who today dole out the hundreds of billions in payments to special interests. Beating them is a formidable task, but if we lose, we will ask ourselves for many years how we could have allowed this failure to occur on our watch. Please read what this Alaskan has to say about Sarah Palin and judge for yourself what it means. If you think that she is qualified to be the leader of the free world, I will disagree, but freedom of choice is basically what America is all about.
Just my opinion,
Gordon Black
pollster@hotmail.com
From: Anne Kilkenny
Date: September 1, 2008 12:20:01 AM PDT
Subject: re: SARAH PALIN
Dear friends,
So many people have asked me about what I know about Sarah Palin in the last 2 days that I decided to write something up . . .
Basically, Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton have only 2 things in common: their gender and their good looks. :)
You have my permission to forward this to your friends/email contacts with my name and email address attached, but please do not post it on any websites, as there are too many kooks out there . . .
Thanks,
Anne
ABOUT SARAH PALIN
I am a resident of Wasilla, Alaska. I have known Sarah since 1992.
Everyone here knows Sarah, so it is nothing special to say we are on a first-name basis. Our children have attended the same schools. Her father was my child's favorite substitute teacher. I also am on a first name basis with her parents and mother-in-law. I attended more City Council meetings during her administration than about 99% of the residents of the city. She is enormously popular; in every way she's like the most popular girl in middle school. Even men who think she is a poor choice and won't vote for her can't quit smiling when talking about her because she is a "babe".
It is astonishing and almost scary how well she can keep a secret. She kept her most recent pregnancy a secret from her children and parents for seven months. She is "pro-life". She recently gave birth to a Down's syndrome baby. There is no cover-up involved, here; Trig is her baby. She is energetic and hardworking. She regularly worked out at the gym. She is savvy. She doesn't take positions; she just "puts things out there" and if they prove to be popular, then she takes credit.
Her husband works a union job on the North Slope for BP and is a champion snowmobile racer. Todd Palin's kind of job is highly sought-after because of the schedule and high pay. He arranges his work schedule so he can fish for salmon in Bristol Bay for a month or so in summer, but by no stretch of the imagination is fishing their major source of income. Nor has her life-style ever been anything like that of native Alaskans. Sarah and her whole family are avid hunters. She's smart.
Her experience is as mayor of a city with a population of about 5,000 (at the time), and less than 2 years as governor of a state with about 670,000 residents. During her mayoral administration most of the actual work of running this small city was turned over to an administrator. She had been pushed to hire this administrator by party power-brokers after she had gotten herself into some trouble over precipitous firings which had given rise to a recall campaign.
Sarah campaigned in Wasilla as a "fiscal conservative". During her 6 years as Mayor, she increased general government expenditures by over 33%. During those same 6 years the amount of taxes collected by the City increased by 38%. This was during a period of low inflation (1996-2002). She reduced progressive property taxes and increased a regressive sales tax which taxed even food.
The tax cuts that she promoted benefited large corporate property owners way more than they benefited residents. The huge increases in tax revenues during her mayoral administration weren't enough to fund everything on her wish list though, borrowed money was needed, too. She inherited a city with zero debt, but left it with indebtedness of over $22 million.
What did Mayor Palin encourage the voters to borrow money for? Was it the infrastructure that she said she supported? The sewage treatment plant that the city lacked? Or a new library? No. $1m for a park. $15m-plus for construction of a multi-use sports complex which she rushed through to build on a piece of property that the City didn't even have clear title to, that was still in litigation 7 yrs later--to the delight of the lawyers involved!
The sports complex itself is a nice addition to the community but a huge money pit, not the profit-generator she claimed it would be. She also supported bonds for $5.5m for road projects that could have been done in 5-7 yrs without any borrowing. While Mayor, City Hall was extensively remodeled and her office redecorated more than once. These are small numbers, but Wasilla is a very small city.
As an oil producer, the high price of oil has created a budget surplus in Alaska. Rather than invest this surplus in technology that will make us energy independent and increase efficiency, as Governor she proposed distribution of this surplus to every individual in the state. In this time of record state revenues and budget surpluses, she recommended that the state borrow/bond for road projects, even while she proposed distribution of surplus state revenues: spend today's surplus, borrow for needs.
She's not very tolerant of divergent opinions or open to outside ideas or compromise. As Mayor, she fought ideas that weren't generated by her or her staff. Ideas weren't evaluated on their merits, but on the basis of who proposed them. While Sarah was Mayor of Wasilla she tried to fire our highly respected City Librarian because the Librarian refused to consider removing from the library some books that Sarah wanted removed. City residents rallied to the defense of the City Librarian and against Palin's attempt at out-and-out censorship, so Palin backed down and withdrew her termination letter. People who fought her attempt to oust the Librarian are on her enemies list to this day.
Sarah complained about the "old boy's club" when she first ran for Mayor, so what did she bring Wasilla? A new set of "old boys". Palin fired most of the experienced staff she inherited. At the City and as Governor she hired or elevated new, inexperienced, obscure people, creating a staff totally dependent on her for their jobs and eternally grateful and fiercely loyal--loyal to the point of abusing their power to further her personal agenda, as she has acknowledged happened in the case of pressuring the State's top cop (see below).
As Mayor, Sarah fired Wasilla's Police Chief because he "intimidated"her, she told the press. As Governor, her recent firing of Alaska's top cop has the ring of familiarity about it. He served at her pleasure and she had every legal right to fire him, but it's pretty clear that an important factor in her decision to fire him was because he wouldn't fire her sister's ex-husband, a State Trooper. Under investigation for abuse of power, she has had to admit that more than 2 dozen contacts were made between her staff and family to the person that she later fired, pressuring him to fire her ex-brother-in-law. She tried to replace the man she fired with a man who she knew had been reprimanded for sexual harassment; when this caused a public furor, she withdrew her support.
She has bitten the hand of every person who extended theirs to her in help. The City Council person who personally escorted her around town introducing her to voters when she first ran for Wasilla City Council became one of her first targets when she was later elected Mayor. She abruptly fired her loyal City Administrator; even people who didn't like the guy were stunned by this ruthlessness.Fear of retribution has kept all of these people from saying anything publicly about her.
When then-Governor Murkowski was handing out political plums, Sarah got the best, Chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission: one of the few jobs not in Juneau and one of the best paid. She had no background in oil & gas issues. Within months of scoring this great job which paid $122,400/yr, she was complaining in the press about the high salary. I was told that she hated that job: the commute, the structured hours, the work. Sarah became aware that a member of this Commission (who was also the State Chair of the Republican Party) engaged in unethical behavior on the job. In a gutsy move which some undoubtedly cautioned her could be political suicide, Sarah solved all her problems in one fell swoop: got out of the job she hated and garnered gobs of media attention as the patron saint of ethics and as a gutsy fighter against the "old boys' club" when she dramatically quit, exposing this man's ethics violations (for which he was fined).
As Mayor, she had her hand stuck out as far as anyone for pork from Senator Ted Stevens. Lately, she has castigated his pork-barrel politics and publicly humiliated him. She only opposed the "bridge to nowhere" after it became clear that it would be unwise not to.
As Governor, she gave the Legislature no direction and budget guidelines, then made a big grandstand display of line-item vetoing projects, calling them pork. Public outcry and further legislative action restored most of these projects--which had been vetoed simply because she was not aware of their importance--but with the unobservant she had gained a reputation as "anti-pork".
She is solidly Republican: no political maverick. The State party leaders hate her because she has bit them in the back and humiliated them. Other members of the party object to her self-description as a fiscal conservative.
Around Wasilla there are people who went to high school with Sarah. They call her "Sarah Barracuda" because of her unbridled ambition and predatory ruthlessness. Before she became so powerful, very ugly stories circulated around town about shenanigans she pulled to be made point guard on the high school basketball team. When Sarah's mother-in-law, a highly respected member of the community and experienced manager, ran for Mayor, Sarah refused to endorse her.
As Governor, she stepped outside of the box and put together of package of legislation known as "AGIA" that forced the oil companies to march to the beat of her drum.
Like most Alaskans, she favors drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. She has questioned if the loss of sea ice is linked to global warming. She campaigned "as a private citizen" against a state initiative that would have either a) protected salmon streams from pollution from mines, or b) tied up in the courts all mining in the state (depending on who you listen to). She has pushed the State's lawsuit against the Dept. of the Interior's decision to list polar bears as threatened species.
McCain is the oldest person to ever run for President; Sarah will be a heartbeat away from being President. There has to be literally millions of Americans who are more knowledgeable and experienced than she.
However, there's a lot of people who have underestimated her and are regretting it.
CLAIM VS FACT
*"Hockey mom": true for a few years
*"PTA mom": true years ago when her first-born was in elementary school, not since.
*"NRA supporter": absolutely true.
*social conservative: mixed. Opposes gay marriage, BUT vetoed a bill that would have denied benefits to employees in same-sex relationships (said she did this because it was unconstitutional).
*pro-creationism: mixed. Supports it, BUT did nothing as Governor to promote it.
*"Pro-life": mixed. Knowingly gave birth to a Downs syndrome baby BUT declined to call a special legislative session on some pro-life legislation
*"Experienced": Some high schools have more students than Wasilla has residents. Many cities have more residents than the state of Alaska. No legislative experience other than City Council. Little hands-on supervisory or managerial experience; needed help of a city administrator to run town of about 5,000.
*political maverick: not at all.
*gutsy: absolutely!
*open & transparent: ??? Good at keeping secrets. Not good at explaining actions.
*has a developed philosophy of public policy: no!
*"a Greenie": no. Turned Wasilla into a wasteland of big box stores and disconnected parking lots. Is pro-drilling off-shore and in ANWR.
*fiscal conservative: not by my definition!
*pro-infrastructure: No. Promoted a sports complex and park in a city without a sewage treatment plant or storm drainage system. Built streets to early 20th century standards.
*pro-tax relief: Lowered taxes for businesses, increased tax burden on residents.
*pro-small government: No. Oversaw greatest expansion of city government in Wasilla's history.
*pro-labor/pro-union. No. Just because her husband works union doesn't make her pro-labor. I have seen nothing to support any claim that she is pro-labor/pro-union.
WHY AM I WRITING THIS?
First, I have long believed in the importance of being an informed voter. I am a voter registrar. For 10 years I put on student voting programs in the schools. If you google my name (Anne Kilkenny +Alaska), you will find references to my participation in local government, education, and PTA/parent organizations.
Secondly, I've always operated in the belief that "Bad things happen when good people stay silent". Few people know as much as I do because few have gone to as many City Council meetings.
Third, I am just a housewife. I don't have a job she can bump me out of. I don't belong to any organization that she can hurt. But, I am no fool; she is immensely popular here, and it is likely that this will cost me somehow in the future: that's life.
Fourth, she has hated me since back in 1996, when I was one of the 100 or so people who rallied to support the City Librarian against Sarah's attempt at censorship.
Fifth, I looked around and realized that everybody else was afraid to say anything because they were somehow vulnerable.
CAVEATS: I am not a statistician. I developed the numbers for the increase in spending & taxation 2 years ago (when Palin was running for Governor) from information supplied to me by the Finance Director of the City of Wasilla, and I can't recall exactly what I adjusted for: did I adjust for inflation? for population increases? Right now, it is impossible for a private person to get any info out of City Hall--they are swamped. So I can't verify my numbers.
You may have noticed that there are various numbers circulating for the population of Wasilla, ranging from my "about 5,000", up to 9,000. The day Palin's selection was announced a city official told me that the current population is about 7,000. The official 2000 census count was 5,460. I have used about 5,000 because Palin was Mayor from 1996 to 2002, and the city was growing rapidly in the mid-90's.
Anne Kilkenny
annekilkenny@hotmail.com
August 31, 2008
I have never posted nor sent out anything that was not my own, other the the references to Perot's Charts and an occasional article on which I was commenting. This is too significant not to bring it to your attention. I feel a little sorry for Annie Kilkenny because there will be an effort to discredit her personally as this piece circulates and gets into the public arena, which it will. She is probably a little naive about the forces in national politics, but she is likely to experience a firestorm of outrage by the right wing in American politics -- paid for and supported by the special interest that today cling to their last hope, Senator John McCain.
The stakes in this election are enormous -- perhaps more than at any time in my experience. The situation is dire, affecting all of us for many years to come. The choice is the most clear cut that I can imagine, and the outcome is very uncertain. The nomination of Governor Sarah Palin upped the stakes for everyone -- not just the liberals who will be appalled at her social positions, but also those who have an ingrained sense of responsibility about the management of foreign policy, our military policy and weaponry in a nuclear age.
As a Political Scientist by training, I think the Founding Fathers would be turning over in their collective graves at her nomination -- not because she is a woman, which is irrelevant, but because she has provided no demonstration at all that she has the education, experience and judgment to deal with the international challenges that we face. We have witnessed many remarkable women who rose to positions of power, including Margaret Thatcher. Sarah Palin is no Margaret Thatcher! Certainly not yet, and maybe never.
I have no problem with her ambition, either. President Lincoln's law partner once said that: "His ambition is a little engine that will not stop." But President Lincoln was a man vetted by the process by which he became President. He became a national figure debating the most important issue of his generation, slavery, throughout Illinois against one of the most powerful figures of his generation, Senator Stephen Douglas. He won approval of the Eastern establishment with one of the most powerful and moving speeches ever delivered in American Politics, the famous Cooper's Union Address, written entirely by his own hand. He earned his position in American history the hard way; it was not handed to him as a cynical ploy to capture an election.
The problem we face is that only 50 odd days remain before the choice is rendered at the ballot machine. Given the ability of sophisticated and experienced speech writers to put words in her mouth, as they did at the convention, we face a formidable task -- a fact that they understood at the time of her nomination. We all have a limited number of things that we can do: (1) contribute financially to the Obama/Biden campaigns, (2) get every available person we can registered to vote in the election, especially young people who are often thoughtless about their voting behavior and rights, (3) circulate our information and views as widely as possible, particularly to those who might not be so well informed, and (4) work where we can on the campaign itself, particularly by volunteering to go to the swing states and work on registration and voting itself.
As you may realize, I am not a Democrat, nor do I have any involvement with either party. I do believe that I love my Country as much as anyone, and I am not less of a patriot because I never served in the military. I want a smart and principled person to serve as President; and a Vice President who can add to the strength of the Administration and serve should anything happen to the President. Color of skin and gender are neither a recommendation nor a reason for supporting or opposing anyone.
We all have to confront the choice that we are given; and we equally have to confront the fact that our choice is a choice that binds our children and grand children, who cannot participate in the choice for the future that we deliver to them. The choice in this instance could not be clearer, at least for me; but mine is a very small voice in the midst of much more powerful interests that would manipulate this election for their own personal financial benefit.
The powerful voices of financial self-interest today confront a candidate whom they have not purchased, whom they cannot buy, and who will change the people who today dole out the hundreds of billions in payments to special interests. Beating them is a formidable task, but if we lose, we will ask ourselves for many years how we could have allowed this failure to occur on our watch. Please read what this Alaskan has to say about Sarah Palin and judge for yourself what it means. If you think that she is qualified to be the leader of the free world, I will disagree, but freedom of choice is basically what America is all about.
Just my opinion,
Gordon Black
pollster@hotmail.com
From: Anne Kilkenny
Date: September 1, 2008 12:20:01 AM PDT
Subject: re: SARAH PALIN
Dear friends,
So many people have asked me about what I know about Sarah Palin in the last 2 days that I decided to write something up . . .
Basically, Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton have only 2 things in common: their gender and their good looks. :)
You have my permission to forward this to your friends/email contacts with my name and email address attached, but please do not post it on any websites, as there are too many kooks out there . . .
Thanks,
Anne
ABOUT SARAH PALIN
I am a resident of Wasilla, Alaska. I have known Sarah since 1992.
Everyone here knows Sarah, so it is nothing special to say we are on a first-name basis. Our children have attended the same schools. Her father was my child's favorite substitute teacher. I also am on a first name basis with her parents and mother-in-law. I attended more City Council meetings during her administration than about 99% of the residents of the city. She is enormously popular; in every way she's like the most popular girl in middle school. Even men who think she is a poor choice and won't vote for her can't quit smiling when talking about her because she is a "babe".
It is astonishing and almost scary how well she can keep a secret. She kept her most recent pregnancy a secret from her children and parents for seven months. She is "pro-life". She recently gave birth to a Down's syndrome baby. There is no cover-up involved, here; Trig is her baby. She is energetic and hardworking. She regularly worked out at the gym. She is savvy. She doesn't take positions; she just "puts things out there" and if they prove to be popular, then she takes credit.
Her husband works a union job on the North Slope for BP and is a champion snowmobile racer. Todd Palin's kind of job is highly sought-after because of the schedule and high pay. He arranges his work schedule so he can fish for salmon in Bristol Bay for a month or so in summer, but by no stretch of the imagination is fishing their major source of income. Nor has her life-style ever been anything like that of native Alaskans. Sarah and her whole family are avid hunters. She's smart.
Her experience is as mayor of a city with a population of about 5,000 (at the time), and less than 2 years as governor of a state with about 670,000 residents. During her mayoral administration most of the actual work of running this small city was turned over to an administrator. She had been pushed to hire this administrator by party power-brokers after she had gotten herself into some trouble over precipitous firings which had given rise to a recall campaign.
Sarah campaigned in Wasilla as a "fiscal conservative". During her 6 years as Mayor, she increased general government expenditures by over 33%. During those same 6 years the amount of taxes collected by the City increased by 38%. This was during a period of low inflation (1996-2002). She reduced progressive property taxes and increased a regressive sales tax which taxed even food.
The tax cuts that she promoted benefited large corporate property owners way more than they benefited residents. The huge increases in tax revenues during her mayoral administration weren't enough to fund everything on her wish list though, borrowed money was needed, too. She inherited a city with zero debt, but left it with indebtedness of over $22 million.
What did Mayor Palin encourage the voters to borrow money for? Was it the infrastructure that she said she supported? The sewage treatment plant that the city lacked? Or a new library? No. $1m for a park. $15m-plus for construction of a multi-use sports complex which she rushed through to build on a piece of property that the City didn't even have clear title to, that was still in litigation 7 yrs later--to the delight of the lawyers involved!
The sports complex itself is a nice addition to the community but a huge money pit, not the profit-generator she claimed it would be. She also supported bonds for $5.5m for road projects that could have been done in 5-7 yrs without any borrowing. While Mayor, City Hall was extensively remodeled and her office redecorated more than once. These are small numbers, but Wasilla is a very small city.
As an oil producer, the high price of oil has created a budget surplus in Alaska. Rather than invest this surplus in technology that will make us energy independent and increase efficiency, as Governor she proposed distribution of this surplus to every individual in the state. In this time of record state revenues and budget surpluses, she recommended that the state borrow/bond for road projects, even while she proposed distribution of surplus state revenues: spend today's surplus, borrow for needs.
She's not very tolerant of divergent opinions or open to outside ideas or compromise. As Mayor, she fought ideas that weren't generated by her or her staff. Ideas weren't evaluated on their merits, but on the basis of who proposed them. While Sarah was Mayor of Wasilla she tried to fire our highly respected City Librarian because the Librarian refused to consider removing from the library some books that Sarah wanted removed. City residents rallied to the defense of the City Librarian and against Palin's attempt at out-and-out censorship, so Palin backed down and withdrew her termination letter. People who fought her attempt to oust the Librarian are on her enemies list to this day.
Sarah complained about the "old boy's club" when she first ran for Mayor, so what did she bring Wasilla? A new set of "old boys". Palin fired most of the experienced staff she inherited. At the City and as Governor she hired or elevated new, inexperienced, obscure people, creating a staff totally dependent on her for their jobs and eternally grateful and fiercely loyal--loyal to the point of abusing their power to further her personal agenda, as she has acknowledged happened in the case of pressuring the State's top cop (see below).
As Mayor, Sarah fired Wasilla's Police Chief because he "intimidated"her, she told the press. As Governor, her recent firing of Alaska's top cop has the ring of familiarity about it. He served at her pleasure and she had every legal right to fire him, but it's pretty clear that an important factor in her decision to fire him was because he wouldn't fire her sister's ex-husband, a State Trooper. Under investigation for abuse of power, she has had to admit that more than 2 dozen contacts were made between her staff and family to the person that she later fired, pressuring him to fire her ex-brother-in-law. She tried to replace the man she fired with a man who she knew had been reprimanded for sexual harassment; when this caused a public furor, she withdrew her support.
She has bitten the hand of every person who extended theirs to her in help. The City Council person who personally escorted her around town introducing her to voters when she first ran for Wasilla City Council became one of her first targets when she was later elected Mayor. She abruptly fired her loyal City Administrator; even people who didn't like the guy were stunned by this ruthlessness.Fear of retribution has kept all of these people from saying anything publicly about her.
When then-Governor Murkowski was handing out political plums, Sarah got the best, Chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission: one of the few jobs not in Juneau and one of the best paid. She had no background in oil & gas issues. Within months of scoring this great job which paid $122,400/yr, she was complaining in the press about the high salary. I was told that she hated that job: the commute, the structured hours, the work. Sarah became aware that a member of this Commission (who was also the State Chair of the Republican Party) engaged in unethical behavior on the job. In a gutsy move which some undoubtedly cautioned her could be political suicide, Sarah solved all her problems in one fell swoop: got out of the job she hated and garnered gobs of media attention as the patron saint of ethics and as a gutsy fighter against the "old boys' club" when she dramatically quit, exposing this man's ethics violations (for which he was fined).
As Mayor, she had her hand stuck out as far as anyone for pork from Senator Ted Stevens. Lately, she has castigated his pork-barrel politics and publicly humiliated him. She only opposed the "bridge to nowhere" after it became clear that it would be unwise not to.
As Governor, she gave the Legislature no direction and budget guidelines, then made a big grandstand display of line-item vetoing projects, calling them pork. Public outcry and further legislative action restored most of these projects--which had been vetoed simply because she was not aware of their importance--but with the unobservant she had gained a reputation as "anti-pork".
She is solidly Republican: no political maverick. The State party leaders hate her because she has bit them in the back and humiliated them. Other members of the party object to her self-description as a fiscal conservative.
Around Wasilla there are people who went to high school with Sarah. They call her "Sarah Barracuda" because of her unbridled ambition and predatory ruthlessness. Before she became so powerful, very ugly stories circulated around town about shenanigans she pulled to be made point guard on the high school basketball team. When Sarah's mother-in-law, a highly respected member of the community and experienced manager, ran for Mayor, Sarah refused to endorse her.
As Governor, she stepped outside of the box and put together of package of legislation known as "AGIA" that forced the oil companies to march to the beat of her drum.
Like most Alaskans, she favors drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. She has questioned if the loss of sea ice is linked to global warming. She campaigned "as a private citizen" against a state initiative that would have either a) protected salmon streams from pollution from mines, or b) tied up in the courts all mining in the state (depending on who you listen to). She has pushed the State's lawsuit against the Dept. of the Interior's decision to list polar bears as threatened species.
McCain is the oldest person to ever run for President; Sarah will be a heartbeat away from being President. There has to be literally millions of Americans who are more knowledgeable and experienced than she.
However, there's a lot of people who have underestimated her and are regretting it.
CLAIM VS FACT
*"Hockey mom": true for a few years
*"PTA mom": true years ago when her first-born was in elementary school, not since.
*"NRA supporter": absolutely true.
*social conservative: mixed. Opposes gay marriage, BUT vetoed a bill that would have denied benefits to employees in same-sex relationships (said she did this because it was unconstitutional).
*pro-creationism: mixed. Supports it, BUT did nothing as Governor to promote it.
*"Pro-life": mixed. Knowingly gave birth to a Downs syndrome baby BUT declined to call a special legislative session on some pro-life legislation
*"Experienced": Some high schools have more students than Wasilla has residents. Many cities have more residents than the state of Alaska. No legislative experience other than City Council. Little hands-on supervisory or managerial experience; needed help of a city administrator to run town of about 5,000.
*political maverick: not at all.
*gutsy: absolutely!
*open & transparent: ??? Good at keeping secrets. Not good at explaining actions.
*has a developed philosophy of public policy: no!
*"a Greenie": no. Turned Wasilla into a wasteland of big box stores and disconnected parking lots. Is pro-drilling off-shore and in ANWR.
*fiscal conservative: not by my definition!
*pro-infrastructure: No. Promoted a sports complex and park in a city without a sewage treatment plant or storm drainage system. Built streets to early 20th century standards.
*pro-tax relief: Lowered taxes for businesses, increased tax burden on residents.
*pro-small government: No. Oversaw greatest expansion of city government in Wasilla's history.
*pro-labor/pro-union. No. Just because her husband works union doesn't make her pro-labor. I have seen nothing to support any claim that she is pro-labor/pro-union.
WHY AM I WRITING THIS?
First, I have long believed in the importance of being an informed voter. I am a voter registrar. For 10 years I put on student voting programs in the schools. If you google my name (Anne Kilkenny +Alaska), you will find references to my participation in local government, education, and PTA/parent organizations.
Secondly, I've always operated in the belief that "Bad things happen when good people stay silent". Few people know as much as I do because few have gone to as many City Council meetings.
Third, I am just a housewife. I don't have a job she can bump me out of. I don't belong to any organization that she can hurt. But, I am no fool; she is immensely popular here, and it is likely that this will cost me somehow in the future: that's life.
Fourth, she has hated me since back in 1996, when I was one of the 100 or so people who rallied to support the City Librarian against Sarah's attempt at censorship.
Fifth, I looked around and realized that everybody else was afraid to say anything because they were somehow vulnerable.
CAVEATS: I am not a statistician. I developed the numbers for the increase in spending & taxation 2 years ago (when Palin was running for Governor) from information supplied to me by the Finance Director of the City of Wasilla, and I can't recall exactly what I adjusted for: did I adjust for inflation? for population increases? Right now, it is impossible for a private person to get any info out of City Hall--they are swamped. So I can't verify my numbers.
You may have noticed that there are various numbers circulating for the population of Wasilla, ranging from my "about 5,000", up to 9,000. The day Palin's selection was announced a city official told me that the current population is about 7,000. The official 2000 census count was 5,460. I have used about 5,000 because Palin was Mayor from 1996 to 2002, and the city was growing rapidly in the mid-90's.
Anne Kilkenny
annekilkenny@hotmail.com
August 31, 2008
Monday, September 1, 2008
The Blunder of All Blunders
The First Blunder of the Campaign
Sometimes the “Gods” do small favors. Senator Barack Obama got one on Friday. Over the past month, John McCain was able to pull virtually even with Barack Obama in the polls. Obama has been suffering the defection of working class White males, and he re-angered the most ardent of Hillary Clinton’s female voters by putting Senator Joe Biden on the ticket as Vice President. In pre-Democratic Convention polling, a sizeable percentage of Clinton primary voters, at least a third, indicated that they would either stay home or support Senator John McCain.
Coming into the Democratic National Convention, the contest was virtually a dead heat. While the brilliantly executed Democratic Convention would certainly result in a major bump in popularity for Obama, this campaign would likely have pulled very close again after the Republican Convention. To do that, however, McCain would have had to nominate a strong Vice Presidential candidate; someone who was clearly competent to step immediately and safely into his shoes should anything happen to him. He is, after all, 72 years old and not in the best of health and the selection of a competent Vice President could not have been more critical to his possible success.
Instead, I believe that McCain made a colossal political and electoral blunder that virtually seals his fate in the contest against Barack Obama. He named the female Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, a virtual unknown with little national and international experience, to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency.
In my opinion, he has all but assured that Obama will be elected the next President of the United States. Why do I believe this? I have been traveling over the past week or so, and that has given me the opportunity to talk with many Republicans and Independents to gain their reactions. The reaction was nearly uniform – amazement, disbelief, and even horror at the consideration of Governor Sarah Palin as the person who might have her finger on the nuclear trigger. Americans like soccer Moms, but they do not give them access to nuclear weapons – not even voting soccer Moms.
Sometimes the “Gods” do small favors. Senator Barack Obama got one on Friday. Over the past month, John McCain was able to pull virtually even with Barack Obama in the polls. Obama has been suffering the defection of working class White males, and he re-angered the most ardent of Hillary Clinton’s female voters by putting Senator Joe Biden on the ticket as Vice President. In pre-Democratic Convention polling, a sizeable percentage of Clinton primary voters, at least a third, indicated that they would either stay home or support Senator John McCain.
Coming into the Democratic National Convention, the contest was virtually a dead heat. While the brilliantly executed Democratic Convention would certainly result in a major bump in popularity for Obama, this campaign would likely have pulled very close again after the Republican Convention. To do that, however, McCain would have had to nominate a strong Vice Presidential candidate; someone who was clearly competent to step immediately and safely into his shoes should anything happen to him. He is, after all, 72 years old and not in the best of health and the selection of a competent Vice President could not have been more critical to his possible success.
Instead, I believe that McCain made a colossal political and electoral blunder that virtually seals his fate in the contest against Barack Obama. He named the female Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, a virtual unknown with little national and international experience, to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency.
In my opinion, he has all but assured that Obama will be elected the next President of the United States. Why do I believe this? I have been traveling over the past week or so, and that has given me the opportunity to talk with many Republicans and Independents to gain their reactions. The reaction was nearly uniform – amazement, disbelief, and even horror at the consideration of Governor Sarah Palin as the person who might have her finger on the nuclear trigger. Americans like soccer Moms, but they do not give them access to nuclear weapons – not even voting soccer Moms.
- Governor Palin, no matter what her partisan advocates will lamely contend, is simply not equipped by education or experience to serve either as Vice President or President, and McCain does not have sufficient time in two months either to educate her to her responsibilities or to persuade the electorate otherwise.
- Most Americans have a strong sense of responsibility about the importance and gravity of the choice of President; and the selection of Gov. Palin violates that sense of responsibility which will affect nearly everyone to some extent other than the most ardent Evangelicals.
- Most people (in the media and the electorate) will assume that she is on the ticket only in a cynical attempt to appeal to the dissatisfied, female Clinton supporters. However, her political views could not be further from those of Hillary Clinton voters: pro-life where they are pro-choice, ardent gun supporter where they are more moderate, religiously right wing where they religiously moderate, etc. I believe that she will instead repel many of these voters right back to Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Mitt Romney, who is clearly competent (no matter what you think of his politics), might have made it possible for a portion of these voters to cross over and support the Republican ticket, and Palin will have the opposite effect.
- Her presence on the ticket reduces McCain’s ability to argue that Obama is not sufficiently experienced to serve as President. Obama has had 18 months to convince the electorate that he is a remarkably able and talented man, regardless of his resume, and his speech accepting the nomination was one of the best ever, convincing even many of the doubters that he is tough enough to fill that office. Now, McCain – at 72 and not in perfect health – has placed a clearly inexperienced, right wing amateur one step away from running America’s American military and nuclear policies. Yes, it is frightening and an almost inconceivable lapse of judgment!
- The nomination of Sarah Palin undercuts McCain’s argument in several ways: the argument that he is prudent and reasonable, the argument that he is a centrist Republican, and the argument that he has good judgment.
McCain violated the first responsibility of a Presidential nominee, which is to nominate a Vice Presidential candidate who can serve as President in the event that the President dies or is disabled in office. Obama, by direct contrast, nominated an individual, Senator Joe Biden, who is widely recognized as someone who could serve to lead America should something happen to Obama. This is not trivial. After all, the Vice Presidents of Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Nixon all were called to serve, and attempts were made on the lives of Ford and Reagan. Thus, I believe that John McCain has committed a major blunder that will make his election a virtual impossibility.
What does this say about Senator John McCain? As a moderate, but responsible person, I no longer think that John McCain has either the intelligence nor the temperament to serve as the Commander-in-Chief, and I am equally certain that she does not have the requirements to serve in that role. The decision was stupid and ill-considered, made almost entirely by himself, and If you wish to embolden our adversaries, and we have many, think about the consequences if she is the one making the life and death decisions for all of us. If you wish to horrify our allies, just let McCain get ill and wonder what fear that possibility will produce among them.
While she clearly makes the radical and Evangelical right very happy, McCain has now upped the stakes for all of the rest of us in this election, insuring that Democrats and responsible Independents and Republicans will be galvanized into action to contribute to Obama’s campaign and turn out to reject this extraordinary foolishness. Why? Because there are tens of millions of American who dearly love their Country, even if they have disagreements with the Democrats and Barack Obama, and they are not going to turn our Country over to an old and ill man, whatever his heroism, and a woman that would be an embarrassment to all of us.
The Hillary Clinton women voters, who supported her with their hearts and enthusiasms, did so because Clinton was clearly a person competent enough to serve as President. Sarah Palin’s nomination is a direct insult to their intelligence and values. Does John McCain really hold those women in such low esteem that he would dream that they will be satisfied with a right wing woman, with no claim to expertise in international or military affairs? Quite the contrary, McCain has made it virtually impossible for the Clinton voters not to support Barack Obama – more than any speech by Hillary or Bill Clinton could ever produce.
The Response of Barack Obama and Joe Biden
Obama and Biden need do very little to make these points to the American people. The national media will make their case for them, although an ad about Sarah Palin and nuclear weapons is probably irresistible. The debates will make their points for them. They are already getting a major “bump” in the polls, but that bump will expand as the reality of McCain’s blunder sinks home on the voters.
The people I spoke with over my travels could not understand how he could make such a remarkable and short sighed decision. I did not have an answer. I was as amazed as they were. However, we all have watched people in power do terribly foolish things at times, perhaps because they lose sight of the underlying character and intelligence of the American electorate. George Bush did just that when he attacked Iraq even without any compelling evidence to support his position. When people in power listen only to the voices that support them, it is easy to lose touch with the rest of us —and reality.
I have argued repeatedly that this election would continue to be close, all the way to the final week. I have thought that Obama would win in a close election, where he would make up with the young and minorities the losses he would sustain among White working class men and some Clinton supporters. Today, I no longer think this at all. I am willing to predict that Obama will win by as much as ten points in the end, and that the election will not seem close at all after all the votes are counted. The American people are simply not as stupid, or prejudiced, or conservative as those in the Republican establishment assume.
The Impact of the Democratic Convention
The Thursday evening of the Democratic Convention was one of the best nights of political theater I have ever watched. Biden’s selection as Vice President now appears a work of genius. The speech by Al Gore might be the best I have ever seen him make. But the final speech by Barack Obama was a masterpiece of rhetoric and delivery – as good as it gets in American politics and in a class almost by itself since the days of Ronald Reagan. Moreover, the Democratic Party as a Party looked like a political party that was ready to “govern” the United States, with cohesion of message and unity that masked many of the divisions that have emerged in the past in the Party. They made John McCain seem old and befuddled; and they could not be a starker contrast to a Republican Party which would nominate Sarah Palin to be Vice President.
The only chance McCain ever had was to hug the Center, promote the view that he is a not George Bush the second, and nominate a Vice President that would reassure wavering voters that the Country would be in good hands if anything happened to him. Instead, he nominated a Vice Presidential candidate who can provide no such reassurance, and whose values and commitments pull McCain further toward the Evangelical and right wing of American politics.
A New Political Era is Nearly Upon Us
Ronald Reagan, beginning in 1980 and culminating in the landslide of 1984, ushered in the last “sea change” in the landscape of American politics. Barack Obama is going to usher in the next “sea change” in our politics – a change which is a direct contrast to the policies and the failures of the Administration of George Bush and his fellow Republicans. Obama is in the process of mobilizing a new electoral majority in American politics and McCain and Bush are presiding over the decline of the Republican Party to the status of a minority party for years to come. George Bush is the Herbert Hoover of this generation, although Hoover was brighter and more talented. The fact that McCain, Bush and Cheney have all contributed mightily to this debacle will remain lost on them to the very end. They lack the perspective that would allow them to understand what they have accomplished.
The Last Gasp of the Republicans in 2008
There are plenty of hard headed realists among the right wing in American politics, and they can read the tea leaves as well as I can. They know what is at stake – the end of Evangelical influence in the policies of the Federal Government, the loss of all of the well placed friends that the lobbyists have put in office to control and direct spending, the huge subsidies to those who have supported the party, the loss of their ability to reshape the Supreme Court, the loss of Republican incumbents at every level of government, and more.
There is really only one shot left for them, and that is to use as much money and advertising as they can to throw every kind of slim at Obama and Biden, in the hope that enough will stick to overcome Obama’s advantages. With Sarah Palin as the Vice President, however, they cannot prevail. The responsible Center of the American electorate will not accept the idea that Palin should control our military and nuclear policies, and with good and self-evident reason, and certainly not in war time.
Just my opinion,
Gordon Black
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