Saturday, December 04, 2010

OBAMA GIVES AWAY MORE OF THE STORE

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Sending the President out to make a deal is like telling Lady Gaga to fix the trade deficit for you. The results won't be pretty. Though he’s erroneously been portrayed as a master Chicago-type fixer, he’s proved over and over again that he’s one of the very worst negotiators west of Iraq. If Obama were haggling for a forty-dollar rug it would cost him ten thousand plus tax, carrying charges, and the shopkeeper’s serving of lukewarm tea.

Recently he froze the salaries of federal workers for the next two years, giving Republicans something they wanted and screwing a lot of Democratic union members in exchange for . . . nothing. He and his advisors apparently never stopped to think that if they really wanted to do this thing it could be part of a deal that would, say, help him extend jobless benefits for the millions who’ve already started to lose them. If LBJ were around to see this he’d ask to return to hell. Not extending these benefits has already started working its way through the economy like a giant dust storm. It’s hard to find sane economists who think it was a good idea, but Republicans and their blue dog allies don’t listen to economists, scientists, and the like, who have a pernicious habit of trying to warn them about facts.

Obama and his people have already signaled he’s ready to cave and let Republicans and conservative blue dogs who claim to be concerned about the deficit to extend tax cuts for millionaires and cost the treasury $700 billion over the next ten years. Don’t expect him to get much out of the deal. If you sent him out to sell your cow he’d probably trade her for a few beans.

We know all abut his quickness to cave on the public option in the health care bill, which meant greed-o-maniacal insurance thieves would be free to continue slicing off their huge mob-sized vigorish from chunks of funds supposed to go toward medical care.

When Obama does try to act like a wheeler-dealer the results are even worse than when he surrenders before sitting down to the table. He owed Janet Napolitano a favor when she campaigned for him against Hillary so he made her Homeland Security secretary. This was wrong for two very big reasons. One, she stinks at the job. When they caught the underwear bomber already on the plane with the explosives she said it shows the system “is working.” Under her wise stewardship we continue frisking elderly white women at airports.

But more important? When Democrat Napolitano joined the Cabinet she stepped down as Arizona governor with two years still left on her term, handing the baton to next-in-line Jan Brewer, a tea party Republican maniac who sees invisible heads in the Arizona desert, who wages personal war on busboys and housemaids, who thinks it’s a good idea for rednecks to carry concealed firearms into bars and churches, and who lately ruled that a 32-year-old father will have to die because the state can’t afford a liver transplant. Remember when the Republicans warned us about death panels? Well Brewer is a one-woman death panel.

Obama appointed a deficit commission loaded with weasels and let ex-Senator Alan Simpson, a vicious lap dog for the financial oligarchy, take center stage to preach in favor of adding additional financial burdens on the bottom 99 percent while corporations and the fabulously wealthy are handed even more breaks. Those who oppose his plan, he said, are the forces of "darkness," and he said it in such a way that news media treated his rap as though it had some element of truth. And where was Obama? Ceding ground.

Democrats in Congress are very much aware that there’s something screwy about the way the president handles these situations, and it robs them of morale and energy, killing any momentum they might have built. Why bust your butt trying to save people’s paychecks, mortgages, and benefits if the president’s going to let them get screwed anyway?

Not all this is Obama’s fault. The public, when it takes its eyes off Dancing with the Stars and such, is fed the Republican line that Democrats don’t care about deficits at the same time Republicans are spilling red ink everywhere to help out their fat-cat pals. And news media either fail to clarify the picture or, if they’re part of the Fox-Murdoch empire or their clone outfits like CNBC, paint one that unmistakably blames everything on the Democrats, including a global financial collapse and subsequent bailout that took place on Bush’s watch. But a president is supposed to be a leader, to make the tough choices and explain them and fight for them and get people behind them. That’s not happening, and after two years of fumbling, looks less and less likely.

Monday, November 15, 2010

PACQUIAO HAS STRATEGY FOR OBAMA


DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

President Obama could learn a valuable lesson from Manny Pacquiao, a member of the Philippines Congress and also of course the best fighter in the world. The lesson would be the art of the counterpunch.

All great fighters counterpunch. Just as the opponent tries to throw something, they slip in their own shot first. If it’s executed properly, the counterpunch will come in so fast and hard that the opponent’s punch, even though it went out first, will freeze before it lands because his neuro-biological structure couldn’t handle what struck him. And an opponent is never so vulnerable as when he’s punching. With a fist out there on the attack, he has to be wide open somewhere. And that’s precisely where the counterpuncher lands -- sometimes two, three, four shots. This isn’t chess. You don’t have to wait your turn.

Often the opponent learns, like Pavlov’s dogs did, what sort of reaction follows a certain action. When he throws, he gets punished, so he pulls in and pretty much stops putting out punches. Antonio Margarito, desperate to prove his mettle, didn’t do that. He kept trying, which is why his face turned to dogfood. Pacquiao’s previous opponent, Joshua Clottey, was quickly tamed and basically just tried to survive, covering up, retreating, and throwing few shots.

Now what does this have to do with Obama? You already guessed. He doesn’t hit back, so opponents have nothing to lose by insulting him and his policies and opposing and lying about them. Also, Obama doesn’t, as so many other presidents have done in modern times, send his vice president out to slam the opposition. Obama gives fighters what they call a free lunch, making him, unfortunately, a chump.

In fact, he begins to surrender as soon as the opponent threatens to punch. It’s happened again and again, on the public option part of the health-care plan, for example. Without it, insurance companies can careen down the price road without braking, and if they run over somebody, tough luck. The plan that got passed was an improvement over what we had, but it should have been better. Now there’s early Obama surrender on the tax cuts for the super-rich doled out by Bush the Second and his compliant Congress. And the counterpunch is so obvious. It’s like an uppercut begging to be thrown underneath a lazy hook, but it doesn’t happen.

The Republicans’ main complaint is the deficit. So how do they solve it? By running it up higher to do favors for the people who least need them.

The Republicans vow to repeal “Obamacare,” but the health-care plan cuts the deficit too -- you know, that thing the Republicans claim to despise so much.

Then there’s their cure for banks. Deregulation. A powerless, stupid jab just aching for a right hand over the top. There should be no argument about any of this because there are facts on one side and lies on the other. No economist who isn’t a crackpot will tell you that cutting taxes for the super-rich is a good way to stimulate the economy or be fair to the public. And the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office states flatly that the health-care act will pare the deficit. Incidentally, it's true that families making $250,00 and living in big metropolitan areas aren't super-rich. We need more tax brackets. People making $5 million should pay a stiffer rate than those making $250,000.

As for personal attacks, it’s correct just to ignore some of them. Others should be addressed by Joe Biden, who can do a couple rounds once in a while for his boss. He’s willing. He knows what his job is supposed to be, but Obama won’t send him out do it. These stories are slow, dumb punches perfect for a vice president to feast on – allusions and downright statements that the president was born in Indonesia or Kenya, that he’s a Muslim, that he’s the wrong kind of Christian, that he’s a fascist, socialist, communist out to undermine America.

Lots of voters loved Obama when he was a candidate, but they didn’t expect him to be a president who goes out there round after round and hunkers down without throwing any punches. People want a leader who fights for what’s right, does it clean, with hard, quick shots.

Obama learned over the years that it’s dangerous to be an angry black man. It stimulates the fear and loathing among many whites that Hunter Thompson discovered in so many places around America. But screw race. We need a Pacquiao who explains the facts to opponents in ways they can understand. They’ll be so busy covering up and getting pasted that no one will be aware of the champ’s race. They’ll just know America won.

For more allusions to boxing and life, click on The Barfighter on the right corner of this page. For more allusions to politics and life, click on Exit Blue.

Sunday, September 26, 2010

YOU MEAN STARVING THE GOVERNMENT WON'T PRODUCE EDUCATED WORK FORCE?

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

You’d think some of these cold-blooded toads running global corporations would have at least an elementary understanding that causes will produce effects, but no, now they’re complaining they can’t find workers with elementary math and reading skills.

Greed-head companies hand billions each year to political prostitutes in Washington and state capitals to keep their taxes low. Then they’re surprised that public schools, community colleges, and universities starved for cash can’t provide them with an educated work force.

Also, when you strip funding from social service, health, and parks and recreation agencies, you end up with more kids joining gangs and doing crack. Such children don’t generally grow up to be model employees. But corporations can’t seem to make that connection either.

The National Association of Manufacturers, one of the most rabid anti-tax lobbying groups on the planet, recently griped to The New York Times that in one of its surveys, 32 percent of companies reported “moderate to serious” skills shortages despite our republic's teeming population of unemployed workers. That percentage jumped to 45 percent for energy-related firms and 63 percent for companies making life science products. Because manufacturing has become more complex, companies say they can’t find people to read instructions or blueprints or to operate machinery.

The hypocrisy gets worse. In many cases the firms making these complaints put together lobbying groups whose job is to deliberately mis-educate the public so its members will swallow ignorant concepts -- to believe, for example, that polluting activities have no effect on the climate. They also align themselves with anti-science forces that reject evolution, stem-cell research, and even research in general, backing ignorant hacks like Sarah Palin who slam government funding of fruit fly research -- research that’s already reaped enormous benefits to humankind in fighting disease.

You can’t get informed voters to support, for example, an altogether crazy Republican Pledge to America that seeks to keep taxes low for the rich while raving about cutting government debt. So you try to get yourself an uninformed, uneducated populace incapable of the most elementary critical thinking. Then what do you do? Why you complain that employee applicants are uneducated louts incapable of the most elementary critical thinking.

Monday, September 13, 2010

ARMY OF HACKS PUSHES FORWARD

DIGGING DEEPER By Ivan G. Goldman
Ever wonder why we can’t seem to get away from the furor over President Obama’s mild proposal to take back some of the immense tax cuts for the rich that Bush the Second slid through Congress?

We’re only talking about people who earn more than $250,000 a year – 2 percent of the population, and they’d get to keep those windfall tax cuts for the first $250,000 of their income. Someone who earns $260,000 in gross adjusted income would see taxes go up only on that last $10,000. So the only people sustaining any real damage would be those whose earnings are in the millions. But how do you damage someone making $40 million? The answer is, you don’t – not by asking them to pay 39.6 percent on those last few millions. The top rate now is 35 percent. Incidentally, when Eisenhower was president the top rate was 91 percent.

So why all the fuss? Because those few people who sit atop the asset pyramid have, particularly over the last few decades, created a vast army of hacks whose principal job is to convince the rest of us that any legislative moves to establish fairness, by undermining these plutocrats, would somehow hurt all of us. So for the next couple weeks we’re going to hear a lot about how taking back some tax cuts for incomes over $250,000 will cripple the country and wreck “small business” (Joe the Plumbers) even though owners of small businesses are an entirely separate group of people who’d be untouched by the proposal. Don’t expect the corporate media to correct the fallacy. The weak-minded and ill-informed are quicker to accept it, but hammer away at decently intelligent people hard enough and often enough and even they might start to believe two and two is five, particularly when they become desperate, as so many American are these days.

Just who are the hacks spreading this bullshit and where do they reside? Some of their lairs can be found in the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, the John Templeton Foundation, thousands of corporate lobbying groups in Washington and state capitals (including sinister institutions that labor for “families,” all the Murdoch enterprises, and thousands of legislative offices in Washington and state capitals. They all pay good wages for spreading propaganda and have recruited an entire army of mercenaries who write unceasing op-ed page pieces, snag “news” show interviews within the corporate media and repeat and repeat their Big Lies. Typically they don't stay in one job but ride a cutthroat career circuit. Their opponents are backed by far less generous resources.

I’m paid nothing for this blog. I started it because I felt I had to do something when Bush Junior sent my son to Iraq (twice). I also use it as a feeble attempt to sell my books (check out two of them on the right side of the page). But when I used to work as a straight-ahead journalist and my political opinions weren’t known, I was offered Dark Side positions on editorial boards and in congressional committee offices. I’d be lying if I said the temptation wasn’t strong, and I know plenty of people who went over. A good friend recently signed on with one of the institutions I named in the previous paragraph. Ethical positions that pay decently are fewer and fewer as print media die. And why try to work on the side of the angels when even a victory doesn’t spell victory? Lately victory just slows down the betrayal. Allow me to explain.

Sorry to keep hammering on this, but why did Obama select Frank and Jesse James (Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers) to drive the economic train? Probably for the same reason the Clintons wrecked the welfare system, rammed through world Trade Organization and NAFTA agreements that enriched mega-corporations at the expense of everyone else and worked closely with Republican Dick Armey to retract FDR’s cherished Glass-Steagall Act that prevented banks from making wild bets with their depositors’ money. But The Republicans still impeached Bill for lying about a few stray blowjobs. You can’t buy these people off. And Obama won't be able to placate them either. The army is in place and the tanks are fueled and on the move.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

IS THERE REALLY A ZULU, HIPPIE, ATHEIST CONSPIRACY TO CRIPPLE AMERICA?

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

How did it come to pass that Fox News and its screaming pals on the talk-radio circuit have convinced so many Americans to forsake their own interests so they can combat a nonexistent Zulu hippie atheist conspiracy to cripple America?

It’s because our population is more ignorant and poorly educated than it used to be, and the problem grows worse as our trickle-down economy beats up more and more on the shrinking, confused middle class. People incapable of critical analysis are easier to manipulate, particularly as increasingly sophisticated mass media blend news, gossip, advertising, and propaganda into a mess of commingled goo. So voters pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. People barely scraping through the ruins of our economy actually support politicians who vote against saving the jobs of teachers and in favor of tax cuts for the super-wealthy.

As Robert Reich recently pointed out, in 2007, 23.5 percent of U.S. income went to the top 1 percent of earners. They soaked up a relatively more benign 9 percent of income in 1980. Yet if you pay any attention to these statistics you’re considered “un-American” by the zombie minions who favor mindless war and pollution and disfavor medical care for the disadvantaged. Of course there's also a moral question here, but it's something these people either don't see or can't bear to examine.

The College Board recently reported that the U.S., once the world’s leader in the percentage of young people with college degrees, has fallen to 12th among 36 developed nations. The U.S. ranks behind Canada, South Korea, Russia, Japan, New Zealand, Ireland, Norway, Israel, France, Belgium and Australia.

A growing percentage of students who do get an education here are from other lands. After graduation most of them will return home to enrich their own countries with their knowledge.

But even if we were to regain our Number One status, the problem goes deeper. According to Dan Poynter and Erma Bombeck, only 42 percent of America’s college graduates will ever read another book after they leave school. I consider that statistic reasonably accurate because many respondents lie to pollsters to look better, meaning the truth could be even worse. Many students stumbling through to a degree see it as a social/financial tool and have little intellectual curiosity.

On August 3, 71 percent of Missouri voters approved a ballot measure designed to thwart the federal government from establishing the newly enacted health care plan inside the state. At last count, fourteen states have sued in an effort to escape the terrible tentacles of limited health care reform so they can nestle safely in the bosom of unimpeded insurers and drug manufacturers.

The ability to apply critical thought to the most transparently fallacious propaganda is rapidly disappearing. Yes, Obama is an imperfect leader, but who among us could solve a broken economy, a rigged tax system, two crazy wars, a melting planet, and a nonexistent health policy before the next set of midterm elections?

What this administration’s opponents don’t tell their deluded followers is the true content of their strategy, which is to combine the worst elements of the Hoover, Reagan, and Bush Junior administrations. Republicans like Bobby Jindal, Mitch McConnell and ex-Governor Sarah obtain their ideas from people like dope-addled college dropout Rush Limbaugh. They figure they don’t need to take the time to find out what they’re talking about as long as their contributions keep rolling in. Maybe they’re right.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

AN ADMIRAL'S INSUBORDINATION AND OTHER EXTRAORDINARY EVENTS


DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
Here's something extraordinary: Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently echoed the tea-partiers' claim that the greatest threat to our nation is its national debt, meaning that we must kill all programs conservatives don’t like, including Social Security.

Remarkably, no one in the big-time media or the Obama Administration noticed the significance of Mullen’s remarkably insubordinate, gratuitous statement. Apparently this guy's setting up a political campaign inside the Pentagon.

It's also extraordinary that Obama has followed in Nixon's footsteps by expanding a pointless, hopeless war that he inherited from a predecessor, particularly since it's clear if we leave Afghanistan 10 days from now or 10 years from now the result will be the same.

It's extraordinary that the Obama Administration expects Afghans to place faith in Hamid Karzai, someone they’ve watched bungle, cheat, and lie for nine years.

It's extraordinary that Karzai has the chutzpah to demand that all U.S. aid be channeled through him. Can he account for any of the money we’ve given him so far?

It's extraordinary that Karzai would steal over a million votes in an election in which citizens risked their lives to cast ballots.

It's extraordinary that our administration appears to be telling the Brits they’re not giving it enough time when they let it be known that they’d like to pull out of Afghanistan by 2015, which would make it a 13-year commitment.

It's extraordinary that we still have troops in Iraq, Okinawa, and Germany. Is there ever a place we pull out of?

It's extraordinary that Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner call the shots on banking and economic policy. It's like hiring Jesse James to drive the train.

It's extraordinary that the Obama Administration still places its faith in WTO and NAFTA agreements that are nearly bereft of protections for workers and are beating us into the ground by importing junk and exporting jobs.

And remarkably, our tax code still subsidizes corporations that send U.S. jobs overseas.

It's extraordinary that conservative lawmakers believe they can gain votes and support by torturing unemployed people and withholding their benefits. Remarkably, in many congressional districts these lawmakers have gauged their constituents correctly.

It's extraordinary that no one in the media asks conservatives who demand that jobless benefits be offset by cuts elsewhere why they have no trouble voting for crazy boondoggles (Star Wars, for example, 19 years after the collapse of the USSR) and outright gifts to the super-wealthy (killing the estate tax, for example).

It's extraordinary that we must wait four more years for “pre-existing condition” to be wiped out of the insurance-industry vernacular.

Friday, July 02, 2010

JOBLESSNESS, FILIBUSTERS & RENT


DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

It’s unlikely any of those Republican senators who this week mounted a successful filibuster against jobless benefits thought about it, but they cut off funding just in time to make over a million families miss their mortgages, rent, and car payments for the month of July.

The senators then went home to enjoy another one of their two-week congressional holidays. Incidentally, you’d think someone would start to ask questions about how anyone gets away with taking off two weeks for Independence Day – a holiday whose one-day duration is stated right in its title. This is like quitting your work station for the weekend so you can go on a fifteen-minute coffee break.

It’s impossible to know how many families will go homeless because of the cavalier attitude of senators who make $174,000 a year plus almost unimaginable perks that include using proceeds from their legalized extortion rackets to “hire” family members at six-figure salaries. Just about every one of the fast-buck artists in the Senate who refused help to laid-off workers are the same legislators who killed a proposal to make big banks pay insurance fees against their own failure.

These are incredible back-to-back actions – working in behalf of the bankers who wrecked the world economy and then voting to withhold help from families impoverished by the bankers’ criminal incompetence. You’d think the constituents of some of these senators would catch on, but con men like Saxby Chambliss of Georgia take it for granted that they can get away with murder, and they do. All they have to do is lie about it. Sure, the mass media will also report what the liars’ adversaries say about an issue, but the two sides will be presented as though they’re both valid arguments even in instances when two minutes of Google research would expose the unassailable truth.

Besides which, millions of Americans get their news from Fox and other media that don’t even bother to report the true side of an argument.

Chambliss, Orrin Hatch, etc. claimed, for example, that we would all suffer terribly if we were to alter the worst health care system in the civilized world, and the media presented that side of the argument as an equally thoughtful viewpoint to counterbalance the force of reason.

Senators who cut estate taxes for the super-rich and fund Star Wars and all sorts of other corporate scams only notice the deficit when someone proposes a budget item that might actually do some good. But news stories don’t put two and two together.

As we celebrate a day that commemorates a revolution against tyranny, perhaps we can spend a moment or two thinking about all the Americans who this month will lose their battle to pay the rent.

My recent novel Exit Blue (Black Heron; 2010) is available at Amazon and elsewhere.

Friday, June 18, 2010

OBAMA FOLLOWS NIXON TRAIL INTO AFGHANISTAN

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

All the bad news out of the Gulf of Mexico is masking another series of awful facts developing on the ground in Afghanistan that could put Rush Limbaugh and Co. over the top, making Barack Obama a one-term president.


Obama’s frightfully imbecilic Afghanistan policy is slowly fashioning him into a 21st century Richard Nixon. Both men inherited wars from their predecessors that they could have extricated themselves from at the outset of their terms, but neither had the guts. In our topsy-turvy politics it’s easier to ride a mindless war policy downhill toward disaster than it is to slam on the brakes.


Nixon, like Obama, tried escalation for awhile, turning the Air Force loose on Cambodia and bombing the hell out of a jungle filled with innocents in hopes that some of the ordnance would strike the enemy and disrupt his supply lines. Obama has upped his ante from approximately 35,000 troops to almost three times that amount plus lots and lots of extremely expensive private contractors doing jobs that used to be done by people in uniform. And casualties are climbing, with the U.S. death rate now approaching two lives a day.


Eventually Nixon, crippled by Watergate, began to disengage from his war under the cloak of “Vietnamization.” Still, we lost approximately 20,000 U.S. lives during his turn at the wheel. All for nothing.


The Nixonites used to put out the same kind of blather we’re hearing from Obama and Company. Really meaningless crap. If we’re to believe this Administration, the corrupt, blundering Hamid Karzai, a disturbed personality and a hopeless liar, will lead the Afghan people toward democracy. It’s just possible Americans will accept that incredible whopper for awhile, but tell it to the Afghans, who’ve watched this guy up close for eight years already.


We watched Bush for eight years. How many people at the end of his second term would believe he could suddenly turn into a fine leader making wise decisions at every turn? See what I mean? It’s all ridiculous insulting propaganda, junk food for foolish or preoccupied minds. Only one out of ten Afghan police recruits can read. Yet we’re supposed to spend billions and billions turning it into a Central Asian Nebraska? Don’t hold your breath.


Our poor troops on the ground are supposed to convince the Afghans that we’re going to stay. They’re not dumb enough to believe that either. Because at some point we will leave, and when we do, whether it’s tomorrow or ten thousand U.S. lives from now, the result will be the same.


It would be nice to civilize Afghanistan and bring it peace and democracy. But even if those goals were possible, the price would be much too high. The time to win there was right after Nine-Eleven, when we had Bin Laden trapped. But most intelligence people believe he’s been across the border in Pakistan for years. If we pursue wars wherever Al Qaeda establishes a safe house for a while we’d now be at war with the United Kingdom and Germany, among other countries.


Where do you think those 100,000 troops would do us more good? Fighting a stupid fight in Afghanistan or cleaning up the Gulf State beaches? I rest my case.


My recent novel Exit Blue (Black Heron; 2010) is available at Amazon and elsewhere.

Friday, June 11, 2010

TRADE OLBERMANNN TO MEXICO



DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Brave journalists in Mexico and Russia are getting murdered for trying to print real news. But here in the U.S., journalists safe from such atrocities write about who's going to win American Idol and speculate on why Al and Tipper broke up.
Or they behave like MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, the supposedly liberal antidote to right-wing Fox.

Olbermann is a clumsy, would-be clown who mimics Fox and other far-right personalities in a silly voice that has about as much entertainment value as taking out the garbage. Then there’s his MSNBC colleague Rachel Maddow who’s supposed to be a cut above the rest because she reads the news with a smirk.

These and other media gatekeepers are searching frantically for something to take the place of the BP-sponsored disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, which is depressing and devoid of sex appeal. They might consider checking out why we're stuck in two wars and being barbecued by huge global banks, oil and drug corporations, and anyone else who knows how to channel legal bribes to political weasels.

This dereliction of duty by the media adds to American confusion on what constitutes news and what constitutes gossip and helps explain why Tiger Woods had to apologize to everybody for screwing waitresses but no one has to explain why they pursue crazy wars or, like Obama’s chief economic advisor Lawrence Summers, slither back and forth between government and Wall Street leaving a slime trail of betrayal.

The giant banking corporations have siphoned off so much of the economy under our klept-o-cratic government that their share now threatens to exceed Limbaugh’s weight. The top four banks have assets equal to 52 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. They didn’t siphon off all this wealth by natural selection or free enterprise. They paid off people in government to put the fix in, fashioning legislation that made it inevitable. These banks need to be taken apart, the same way we took apart AT&T almost thirty years ago.

The AT&T suit was initiated by the Justice Department in 1974 under a Republican administration. In those days Republican leaders were conservative, not crazy.

But the financial reform bills moving around committees in the Senate and House won’t break up the big banks or even re-establish a separation between broker-financiers and plain-vanilla banks that served us well from the FDR years until “moderate” Bill Clinton gave Wall Street free rein in 1999 when he killed the Glass-Steagall Law. His Treasury Secretary (Guess who?) Lawrence Summers was fanatically in favor of the crazy decision to fix a banking system that wasn’t broken.

In his new position Summers is still “fixing” things. And he’ll get away with it too because the global corporations that own U.S. news media spend their resources on clowns like Olbermann and Maddow instead of crusading Mexican journalists like Valentín Valdés, a crime reporter for Zócalo de Saltillo. He was grabbed off the street January 8, thrown into an SUV, tortured, and shot to death. Valdés was 29 years old.

Olbermann gets $7 million a year plus perks. Valdés did a lot more for a lot less.
My recent novel Exit Blue (Black Heron; 2010) is available at Amazon and elsewhere.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

THERE'S A DECENT WAY TO CONTROL IMMIGRATION

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman


During his visit to Washington, Mexican President Felipe Calderon used coded language to assert once again that the best U.S. immigration policy along our southern border is not to have any. That’s been Mexico’s unofficial policy for decades, and all major political parties there support it.

The U.S. is a terrific safety valve for Mexico’s unemployed, and the dollars its displaced laborers send home keeps the place going. Adherents on both sides of the border, Calderon among them, figure anyone who’s managed to get inside the U.S.A. one way or another ought to be allowed to stay, especially if they stop looking for scarce jobs in Mexico and send money.

In my last post, when I juxtaposed Hitler’s infamous Nuremberg laws with the new Arizona law designed to catch and deport aliens, many readers seemed to think I sided with Calderon. I don’t. A country needs to control its borders. Otherwise, why be a country? We’d be attracting not just people looking for legitimate opportunities and freedom but also a wide range of felons and terrorists.

But stopping people and asking them for their papers because they look somehow foreign is a grievous practice that doesn’t reflect what our country is supposed to stand for. The solution to this quandary is in your wallet in the form of your high-tech ATM card. We need Social Security cards that, like ATM cards, can’t be forged and can be plugged into a central data bank. Anyone who employs people who don’t have the card should suffer serious penalties.

Under this logical system many people here illegally would go home and far fewer people would try to sneak in. But this very obvious solution is opposed by civil liberties advocates on the left and right because they fear it would infringe on our civil rights. They’re allied with greedhead corporations that don’t want to pay people what they’re worth.

We all know the current system. Would-be employees produce fake or borrowed Social Security cards printed with nineteenth century technology. They can be produced with a few clicks of a mouse. The corporations wink at these silly cards, record the bogus numbers for the IRS, and eventually, if the worker doesn’t skip to another job, the feds may catch the discrepancy, but then the employer can plead he did exactly what he was supposed to, so don’t blame him. Meanwhile the worker has moved on to another job site with the same bogus card or perhaps another one, starting the process all over again.

The meat-packing industry, for example, pays its lobbyists to keep the system in place so it can continue to hire eminently exploitable undocumented aliens to do dirty jobs for half their economic worth. Working on offshore oil rigs and mining coal that’s deep underground are dirty, dangerous jobs. Americans fill them because those industries pay what the jobs are worth.

If all industries did this it would raise the price of some goods – lettuce, for example -- but it would also create good-paying jobs for people who need them and we wouldn’t be saddled with a system that makes no sense.

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-New York) and Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-South Carolina) have a bill in the hopper that would create what they call a “high-tech, fraud-proof Social Security card” that would be required for all employees in the United States. But their bill specifically prohibits the information from being plugged into a national data bank, making it pretty much unworkable. The fact is, we need to know that people working in this country have a legal right to do so, and if people like Calderon don’t like it, they can earn the right to influence our domestic policies by applying for U.S. citizenship.

My new political satire Exit Blue (Black Heron Press; 2010) is now available online and in stores.

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

ARIZONA CAN FIND GUIDANCE IN NUREMBERG


DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Now that Arizona cops will be stopping people with brown skin and asking to see their papers, there’s consternation among state authorities who must follow the will of the voters. Just how will they fulfill these grave new responsibilities in their brave new white world?

Well, there’s no reason to re-invent the wheel. All they have to do is study how similar governments in the past executed their own citizen-defining policies. For this, there’s no better standard than the German Reich of 1933-45, which also had to identify and deal with a portion of the population whose position was no longer tenable.

There are differences, of course. The Arizona law makes the very existence of some people illegal. In Germany being Jewish wasn’t illegal, just penalized. But there are enough similarities between Nazi Germany and 21st century Arizona to learn from past mistakes and successes.

Also of use to Arizona will be the Nuremberg Laws that defined who could hold certain jobs or study at certain schools and all manner of other matters that will soon come up.

In order to exact the penalties required by law, the German government found it useful to require all Jews to wear yellow stars. This necessitated sending the Gestapo and other thugs out into the neighborhoods asking questions so that all those who ought to be wearing yellow stars were properly identified first. It worked fine. There were always neighbors around happy to cooperate with the process. Clearly there are plenty of civic-minded Arizonans willing to provide similar services to police.

Jews that wore stars could be rounded up because they wore stars. Jews that didn’t wear stars could be rounded up for not wearing stars. After arriving in the camps they received tattoos on their arms to help guards ascertain just who was who.

At first the Reich thought it might be a little touchy if they were to round up Jewish World War I veterans along with the other Jews, so they were given a pass. But eventually the population got used to Jews being rounded up and no longer made such distinctions, so the government, unimpeded, rounded up veterans too. Anne Frank's father Otto Frank was one of these veterans. Similarly in Arizona when the cops stop brown veterans and ask them for their papers it might weigh on the consciences of some white Arizonans, but like the good Germans, they'll get used to it in time.

Yellow stars and tattoos would be particularly useful in Arizona when it comes time to break up those families in which some brown people are citizens and some aren’t. When the state sends people back over the border, if they’ve received the appropriate tattoos it will make the identifying process oh so much easier should any of them try to return.

I hope I’ve eased the minds of Arizonans who feared they may have to solve all these questions on their own.

Exit Blue, a political satire by Ivan G. Goldman (Black Heron Press; 2010), is now available. See http://blackheron.mav.net/Exit%20Blue.html for more information.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

FORECAST CLOUDY FOR TEA-PARTIERS


DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman


The political forecast is cloudy with a chance of sanity.

Yes, Sarah Palin gathers big crowds and extracts millions of dollars from her tea-party zombies. At the same time an Associated Press poll released this week found that one-third of those surveyed consider themselves tea-party supporters. A New York Times poll released simultaneously said 18 percent of Americans identify themselves as tea-party supporters.

The difference between 18 and 33 percent is huge, statistically speaking. One or both polls must be way off. But the discrepancy is also understandable. Just look at the placards these people produce. Many crowd members are functional crazies, and their answers to questions are liable to change minute to minute. What remains constant is their unreliability and susceptibility to nutty ideas that have little or no factual foundation.

A Massachusetts tea-party chieftain, complaining about high taxes, was recently confronted with the reality that Obama has cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans. How did she react? She said she doesn’t believe it. You can’t change the minds of these people with mere facts. They’re governed by the fear and loathing the late, great Hunter Thompson found in so many corners of our nation.

It’s a little scary to know loonies walk among us and register to vote. They also get elected to Congress. But here’s another statistic worth noting: Demographers say that 2010 will be the tipping point – the first year in which more non-white babies are born in the U.S. than white ones. Just how many non-white faces did you spot at those tea-party rallies? Exactly. A party and a movement that excludes so many Americans is doomed to fail.

Each succeeding generation is less bigoted than the one before. The world is closing in on these jerks. They know it, they feel it, and it makes them crazier.

Now the bad news: The public is poorly educated, and increasingly, so are teachers and journalists. The public is fed more and more news that runs the gamut from sloppy and puerile to downright false. As resources grow scarce, so does good schooling, and the ignorance builds on itself, making the public easier to fool. Goofy slogans crush thoughtful positions.

Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck don’t have three semesters of college between them, and they’re not voracious readers either. They appear to secure their facts through bouts of mysticism that, at least in Limbaugh’s case, are heavily fueled by drug use. They don’t seem to know or care that they don’t know what they’re talking about, and their followers (that includes most of the Republicans in Congress) don’t care either.

The recent Supreme Court ruling allowing corporations to spend as much money as they like on political ads is an ax hanging over the heads of politicians who might otherwise be tempted to do good work. Cross Exxon-Mobil or GlaxoSmithKline and they can come after you in the next election with millions of dollars. That threat alone will help these corporations get what they want at the expense of everyone else. I hope I’m wrong, but I expect, for example, air, water, food, and medicine to grow increasingly dangerous while Congress concentrates on decoy issues like gay marriage, which is really none of its business.

My new political satire Exit Blue (Black Heron Press; 2010) is available online and at better stores everywhere.

Thursday, April 08, 2010

WHAT ABOUT GIVING SECESSION AOTHER CHANCE?

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Republicans and their govnoed legions, crazier than Cubs fans, are so distraught that health care will now become available to more Americans that some of them are pining for the good old days of the Confederacy.

Govnoed, by the way, is what members of the old Soviet intelligence apparatus used to call people dumb enough to believe their bullshit. It means, literally, shit eaters. Govnoed, many of them in the West, would battle against their own self-interest even though, unlike well-placed party officials and KGB/GRU agents, they received no special perks in exchange for their efforts. Kind of an apt word for tea-party-ers and other right-wing goofballs who act as shock troops for the corporate country-clubbers still running the GOP. How do you explain these crazies? As Voltaire pointed out approximately 250 years ago, it’s difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

New York Times columnist Gail Collins recently worried over Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell’s proclamation urging citizens to spend the month recalling the state’s days as a member of the Confederate States of America, you know, back when certain kinds of people he was too polite to categorize more precisely knew their place. The Georgia State Senate recently passed a bill to dedicate April to remembering the Confederacy, and there are similar nostalgic murmurs sweeping across the old Confederacy like the aroma of mint juleps in springtime. It’s becoming apparent that a black president in the White House enacting any of his agenda at all is just too much to take for these folks. And this go-it-alone sentiment isn’t confined to the South. Ex-Gov. Palin’s hubby has been known to pine for Alaskan independence, for example.


Good liberal Collins says she’d worry less about a “national discussion” of Civil War history “as long as we could start by agreeing that the whole leaving-the-union thing was a terrible idea.” Wait. Let’s back up a minute. Why should we automatically assume secession by some of our wackier states is a bad thing? Bear in mind that barely populated places like Wyoming and Utah have two senators apiece. Check out the voting records and character of their senators sometime. Who needs 'em? If any of these backward regions and their shit-eating camp followers elect to leave the union in a fair election, then what, may I ask, are Collins’ grounds for resistance? Think how much sweeter our country would be if we no longer had to try to compromise with right-wing maniacs? We might have a government that actually cares about its citizens.

The Republicans’ answer for the broken global economy, the broken health care system, and virtually every domestic problem we face is to deregulate corporations, mutilate social programs, and trim taxes for the very rich. When it comes to foreign policy questions, their answer is to shoot first and figure the rest out later. Climate change? Easy to fix. Just pretend it’s not there. And think how much more coal we could mine if owners didn’t have to answer to those pointy-headed safety inspectors. Church versus state? No problemo. The church is the state, and visa versa. At least that’s the way they think it oughta be.


In my new novel Exit Blue (warning: shameless plug follows) the union breaks up in another way. A too-familiar Texas dynasty retakes the White House and promptly invades Denmark, calling it the central front in the war on terror. The Blue States, having had enough, secede. How does that work out? I won’t spoil it for you.


But the fact is, the Constitution we’re taught to revere veered off well to the right of true democracy when it established a system that now gives voters in Idaho approximately 90 times the clout in the Senate as voters in New York or California. So should we be surprised that the Senate made things even worse by making sure nothing important can get passed without approval by 60 senators? That same inequality is also reflected in the Electoral College, which is why George W. Bush was handed the keys to the White House even though Al Gore won approximately 540,000 more votes. A key drawback to allowing crazy states to secede is that it would leave their sane minorities at the mercy of the marjority lunatics.


Republicans have veered so far to the right in the last few decades that their long-time friends the British Tories are creating as much distance from them as they can in the looming UK election. That's because Tories are actual conservatives, whereas Republicans, having purged their party of moderates, are mostly reactionaries. They want to return to the pre-New Deal era, and some of them, as Ms.Collins points out, seem to be flirting with the pre-Emancipation Proclamation era.


Note that I don't claim Democratic politicians are pure. Many of them, for example, tickled to pick up contributions from Wall Street greedheads, are helping Republicans block banking reform even as we speak. But if corrupt blowhards like Saxby Chambliss and Orrin Hatch could go do their own thing somewhere else it might breathe some fresh air on our polluted landscape, literally and figuratively. Or at least, as Hemingway’s Jake told Lady Brett, isn’t it pretty to think so?


Political satire Exit Blue by Ivan G. Goldman (Black Heron; 2010) is available at virtual stores everywhere.


Monday, March 15, 2010

SATIRICAL NOVEL ENVISIONS TWO-STATE SOLUTION IN 2019 AMERICA (And One of Them Invades Denmark! )

Exit Blue, by Ivan G. Goldman (Black Heron Press; 2010)

Imagine a vice president who conducts business as he paces in front of a Citizen Kane-sized fireplace clutching a shotgun and a bottle of Jack Daniels. Now imagine a White House that plants a friendly male hooker in presidential press conferences. Which idea is more absurd? More factual?

Yes, those of us who were paying attention know that the White House-connected male hooker story is genuine. His name was Jeff Gannon, and he had no prior journalism experience, but he was mysteriously granted press credentials and allowed to range freely through W’s news conferences for years until he was finally, if you’ll excuse the expression, exposed. The president used to call on him by name and then field the absurdly friendly questions that always followed.

With stuff like that going on, it pretty much takes the wind out of satire’s sails. Because it’s next to impossible to invent fiction that’s any goofier than the reality. But I persevered, refusing to give up writing crazy stuff just because the world is crazy.

The image of the vice president pacing in front of the fireplace may or may not be based on reality, but it figures in my novel EXIT BLUE, a roman à clef that comes out from Black Heron Press at the end of this month.

The book is based on the premise that the Bush family retakes the White House and this time declares war on Denmark, which it fingers as the central front in the war on terror. The title is derived from the next shoe to drop – secession by the Blue states. That’s when the story really gets started. It’s all told by a handsome Air Force veteran now working as a ghost writer who gets very close to the president and her twin sister. I can’t tell you any more without ruining it for you. I hope you have as much fun reading it as I had writing it.

Bush Handlers are working on a restoration even as we speak, and I meant EXIT BLUE as a cautionary tale akin to Friday the Thirteenth Part III: Jason Returns. Thanks to a zany electorate and the alarming chasm that continues growing between Red and Blue America, anything is possible. If the most recent Bush Administration taught us anything, it’s that talent and ambition aren’t necessarily meted out to individuals in proportionate quantities.

I took this humorous look at our possible future because after you’ve been hit by a bus, if you’re still breathing, probably the best thing to do is laugh. And when the Supreme Court gave the nod to the Bush-Cheney ticket in 2000, a bus ran us over and dragged us down a ragged road for eight long years. Election results, like lightning and wayward buses, are independent events. Just because you’ve been struck once doesn’t mean they can’t strike you again.

But I don’t let Democrats off the hook either. And as we watch the Obama Administration step gingerly through the wreckage of the previous two terms, many of us are learning once again that candidates can be a lot like those meal photos we see in fast-food ads. When they take office, that’s when we’re handed the real food.

EXIT BLUE is for everyone who watched the Bush-Cheney Administration as though it were a horror movie they couldn’t turn off. But I also hope to reach tea-baggers, Limbaugh fiends, and all the Fox News groupies, male and female. They need vehicles like this in order to keep hopping around purple angry. Besides, I empathize with them. Much of my research involved shouting back at TV news.

Exit Blue is available for pre-ordering at most bookseller sites. Amazon has a special pre-order rate of $16.29. Shipments begin at the end of March.
--- Ivan G. Goldman, Rancho Palos Verdes, California

Friday, February 12, 2010

SCRATCH SURFACE OF THESE 'U.S.' FIRMS & SEE WHAT YOU GET


DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
Some Democratic members of Congress have put together a bill to prevent foreign corporations from buying ads pertaining to domestic political issues. On the surface it looks like an intelligent response to the recent Supreme Court ruling by five Republican justices that proclaims corporations have the right to flood our political processes with all the political ads they want.

The attempt to water down the results of the ruling will run into tough sledding in a corporate-controlled Congress, but you also have to wonder if the lawmakers behind it are really so naïve as to believe, for example, that companies like Merck and Exxon-Mobil, which by their definition could still purchase issue ads, are U.S. corporations. Why? Because they have headquarters in New Jersey and Texas? Let's not get silly.

Merck sells its drugs for half-price in Canada and hands out legal bribes to members of Congress to make it illegal to re-import their products across the border. Does that sound like it’s run by a patriotic bunch of folks who have American interests at heart? Exxon-Mobil sets up phony scientific institutes to claim there’s no man-made global warming so its congressional lackeys can hide behind a curtain of lies as the planet (including its U.S. corner) bakes. It encouraged petroleum creatures Bush and Cheney to invade Iraq so it could grab the oil and sell it to Americans at the same world price it sets for anyone else with greenbacks to barter.

These aren’t American companies. They’re global corporations that care no more or less for us than they do for Bulgaria or Sri Lanka. We could arguably rank the good intentions of Merck and Exxon-Mobil higher than, say, the Chinese companies that seem to have a special fondness for poisoning the food, paint, drywall, and other commodities they ship to us. But firms that get our military kids killed and mutilated so they can make a few extra bucks are not on our side. Neither are firms that put the fix in so they can squeeze the U.S. government and its citizens with discriminatory pricing. Issue ads by these corporations will match their private agendas. There must be some real U.S. corporations somewhere, but it’s doubtful any of them are big enough to be listed among the Fortune 500.

We live in a country where payday loan shops charge their victims fifteen percent interest for a two-week loan. On an annual basis that comes out to 390 percent without figuring in the compounding, and most of their loans do get compounded week after week as the working poor fall deeper into the pit of usury. These heartless bastards can work right out in the open because they paid off our politicians to make sure there’s no law to stop them. They even put up billboards and neon signs to bring in more suckers. Does it really matter whether such companies are American or not? They couldn’t do more harm if they were owned by Al Qaeda.
My novel Exit Blue, a political satire, is set for release in March from Black Heron Press and can be ordered now at Amazon, BarnesandNoble.com, Powells.com, and elsewhere on the net.