Too Many Witnesses

Have you noticed that the only presidential candidate really talking about making the nation better is the incumbent?

While there is an awful lot of nonstop campaigning for the Republican nomination going on, the men seeking the nod all like to blather on and on about "taking our country back," or "returning the nation to what the founding fathers intended," or in some way or another "restoring the freedoms we have lost."

But, really, there are too many witnesses who know firsthand about the shortcomings of the past to want that as a future for their children and grandchildren. I am not talking about slavery, sweat shops or child labor.

Those are all documented historic facts reflecting conditions in the United States that were sanctioned as official policy for decades or centuries. Yet, most of the victims of those systems are gone.

I'm talking about protective covenants in housing; glass ceilings and discrimination in hiring, promotions and other personnel matters, funding inequities in education and health care; discretionary law enforcement in cases of rape, sexual abuse, domestic violence and other crimes; racial profiling, lending and finance and the provision of basic services for socially, physically, or economically disadvantaged populations.
 
There are still millions of people alive who can speak first-hand of such injustices.

The founding fathers had the wisdom to ensure that an independent judiciary would have the final say on all constitutional matters.  Federal judges, and by extension, the Supreme Court have the right and the obligation to periodically reexamine laws and issues to determine whether, based upon reason and the times, certain aspects of American life warrant institutional review, revocation or change.

The problem is that freedom and equality have not always meant the same thing in this country. I've written before about property rights, voting rights, and human rights. People are entitled to all of these things whether they agree with you politically, morally, socially or not.

Religious freedom is not just for Christians, Jews and Muslims, it's also for Buddhists, Wiccans and Satanists.  Local standards and majority customs cannot define who can participate nor can any group force any individual to keep their own beliefs silent in the interests of not offending the majority.

Public education is not just for the gifted, the average and the able-bodied. It is something that is supposed to be universally offered and provided. Yet, more times than not, the courts or advocates have to fight tooth and nail to make sure that some children have access to the programs and services they need.

Women are still fighting for the right to maintain control over when and if they become pregnant, even as some would deny them the choice of whether to become parents.  We are taught that women have the right to say no and expect it to mean no. Now, some politicians are saying "I don't think so." 

Equal access in the job market remains a real challenge for many.  Growing numbers of men and women have learned during the Great Recession that the playing field is not level, and age, race, body type, sexual orientation and other factors can mean the difference between getting or keeping a job, and waiting for calls that never come.

Those who would seek to reign in courts, deregulate business, and limit the rights of the small to challenge the mighty do not offer a free and equal world. Instead they offer an America stripped of many of the protections that have gradually shifted us toward being a nation of greater universal freedoms.

They also promise their would be supporters a future they envision that those who have ever lived with the indignity of exclusion simply cannot allow. If justice is not blind, it is good to have laws and courts to offer her guidance.

 

Gradual Shakeout

We already know the Democratic presidential candidate will run on his record.     

 The Great Recession ended under his watch, and despite congressional gridlock, the nation's economy is slowly turning around.

Whether the incumbent is opposed by Mitt or Newt, we will hear loads of promises about job creation, lower taxes and increased opportunity. The problem with that is neither has a track record of making that happen.

Selling off the assets of floundering companies may create limited profits, but it does not put people back to work.Instead, people with jobs are declared surplus, and the machines they used to run to turn out products are shipped abroad for use in sweat shops.

Deregulation that makes outsourcing easier takes away the incentives for domestic growth as quickly as raising taxes.  Contract workers cost about one-third less than permanent staffers and have none of the protections of employees.

Luckily, private sector job creation  is up, and first time unemployment claims are down. All the negative ads and campaign talking points in the world cannot change reality.

The Nation Needs Great Works

"When more and more people are thrown out of work , unemployment results."-- Calvin Coolidge, U.S. President, 1923-1929

 

Those words made headlines in the Roaring Twenties, they were uttered by a committed deregulator in an era when irrational exuberance dominated the mood of investors, large and small.  Did I mention that the quote came shortly before the Wall Street Crash that led to the Great Depression?

(Photo By: Debra Davis-Holly)

I had really good history teachers in school and my love of the subject has helped me during more than 40 years as a journalist. While the technology changes from one era to the next, many of the problems are basically the same.  

Lessons Learned: When you turn the nation's future over to business, you roll the dice with leaders who are only accountable to their major stockholders. If things don't work out, a lot of little people lose out. 

 

Over the next nine months, we will hear a lot about freeing up business to create jobs and put Americans back to work. I'd love to see more jobs and more Americans working, but the people talking about that don't have real track records of creating good, permanent private sector jobs here at home.  

I'm not talking about part-time positions with no benefits, and I am definitely not talking about contract opportunities that pay by the day and leave workers twisting in the wind on taxes, unemployment insurance and healthcare.

 

Yes, lots of people need jobs, but the Great Recession has ended. Banks that were on the ropes are stabilizing and big manufacturing is rebounding. General Motors is once again the number one manufacturer of automobiles,  less than four years after a government bailout. Most of the Troubled Asset Relief Program funds have been paid back, but there's still a lot of work to be done, and much of that work could be projects literally right in your own backyards.

Drive through your community, or most any community in the nation, and you will see the results of bold infrastructure projects begun or completed as a result of public investment with the help of private labor. 

Examples? The interstate Highway System,  most major commercial airports, courthouses, schools, canals, ports, railroads, bridges, tunnels and water and sewage systems.

Photo By: Derrill Holly

When we have not invested in such things, the nation has suffered. When the world economy has stalled, those projects, financed by debt have kept people working and kept the nation moving forward.  They are productive pursuits that reap huge public benefits and tangible results.

Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton were builders. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter and two guys named Bush were not.  

 

My conservative friends will note that this is a bipartisan list. It includes visionaries who saw value in using the nation's infrastructure needs to put idle people to work. It also includes a number of "stand patters" who saw no need to modernize. One group looked ahead and the other sought savings that now clearly were not reinvested in the nation's future.

There are obviously no guarantees in life, but if business leaders-- you know, the ones throwing all of  that money into Super PACs-- aren't ready to hire Americans for full-time permanent jobs, I just don't see giving them the reins to the future.

The Great Recession: We Survived

The economic downturn that began in 2007 statistically ended in 2009. While the human suffering and the struggle to recover has continued, somewhere along the line, that two-year period became a defining era.

The Associated Press, arbiters of journalistic style, and the hardest working collective group of 4,500  journalists in the world now refers to the period as the Great Recession. That means it is on a par with other benchmark events of the past 160 years. Those include the Civil War, World War I, the Great Depression and World War II.

When you look around the room take pride in the fact that despite your diminished circumstances, your derailed retirement plans and the assorted boomerang children you may still be harboring, the fact of the matter is that you survived.

Seventy-five years from now, when people start reviewing the personal data of the 2010 U.S. Census, the details of your survival will become more than statistics. It will be part of the historic record and available to anyone who cares to look.

One of my brothers is a retired journalist who has used his talents for genealogical research in recent years. He has been able to look back on census date from 1930 and learn a lot about how my own family weathered the Great Depression.

It turns out that my maternal grandfather once was a member of my maternal grandmother's father's household. While I only knew my grandfather as an old man and great provider, he was once a young man dependent upon his wife's family for his very survival.

It's funny what history and official documents will be able to tell future generations about you and the people in your life. Very few of us will look back upon the Great Recession as "the good old days," but it is likely some of our children will remember it as a time when people of all types rediscovered the meaning of family.

Climbing out of the misery, and slowly watching people we care about find jobs and hope for better futures, some of us can look back at the spiraling collapse of the first decade of the 21st century. As we turn our thoughts to God and all the strength he helped to pull from deep within our souls, we can give thanks, smile inwardly and breathe the fresh breezes of relief.

Confronted with the all too real hardships of the Great Recession, we survived.

The Business of Governing

While you can try to run a nation like a family, you really can't run one like a business.  The motivations are different.

Families take care of each other.  They recognize strengths and weaknesses and act with empathy on behalf of members in need.  They also keep a place for the rowdy and disagreeable even when it's not easy.

 Businesses try to make a profit. Now there's nothing wrong with profits, but often getting there means neglecting the weak and casting off the disagreeable.  Anybody whose ever worked for a company or in an industry forced to change its business model knows the drill.

"We are downsizing... it's a business decision."  One way businesses have prospered in recent years is to absorb struggling firms, sell off what doesn't work, compromise the old pension plan and contract out production.  "We'll keep the brand, but slap the nameplates on something we made overseas."

Running the nation like a business is a scary approach.  Can you imagine selling off Cleveland, or Buffalo, or St. Louis just because aging urban centers are no longer profitable?

Coming out of the Great Depression, people did not have a lot of faith in bankers. They also expected businesses to change.  Very little of the change that followed was voluntary.

Much of the New Deal wound up before the Supreme Court. While everything the president came up with did not work. Those things that did, have worked well for more than sixty years.

I'm not ready to trust a banker. I also do not want to see the country run like a business.  That kind of mandate could lead to some very good people being declared surplus.

All About Jobs

The first ten years of the 21st Century will be remembered as the Decade of the Deep Hole.

After closing out the Clinton era with surpluses, huge job gains and solid consumer confidence, we hit some big bumps.  Besides two long wars and an unbridaled, irrational spending spree for domestic security, there were policy decisions made to neglect the cities, deregulate business and force the poor to find jobs with limited preparation.  Promises from corporate leaders to create jobs at home never happened.

Many of the offshore jobs they provided collapsed when Americans stopped spending and a worldwide recession took hold.  TARP was suggested and passed as a "Hail Mary" play by leaders who noticed the problems much too late.

The remnants of the 20th Century economy were dashed against the rocks.  Sears, Kmart, Pontiac, Merrill Lynch and dozens of other familiar brands either shrank dramatically or disappeared.

My conservative friends often tell me that government cannot create private sector jobs.  But when you think about it, government contracts in the last decade creates and sustained a whole lot of private sector companies.

It would be simplistic and perhaps unfair to blame the world's problems on Bush 43.  Presidents have power, but they are often at the mercy of world events.  President Obama took charge of a sick economy in a troubled world, but I can say "I am better off now than I was four years ago."  That's one question we won't likely hear asked by the opposition this election cycle.
 
The big issue during Campaign 2012 will be jobs: Getting them and keeping them.

Anyone who openly campaigns by saying they "like to fire people" makes me a little more than nervous.  It says to me that they believe in a world where investors have money and power, and workers and families don't matter.

I am all for change, but I think positive change should create opportunities.  We are now in decade two of the 21st Century.  Most of the TARP money has been paid back, more jobs are being created, and Congress is now in full blown campaign mode.

the one hand, we have a president who inherited the playbook mandated by TARP and made the best of it.  He is working against a recalcitrant Congress to offer leadership during a period of unproductive gridlock.

On the other hand you have six guys who have yet to outline any really better ideas.  Besides the guy who sees value in job elimination, there's the primary architect of 1990s welfare reform that never seemed to accomplish his stated goals.

There's another guy who wants to talk about welfare as those it is a "black thing," there's a guy from Utah who appears to be running because he looks presidential. And then there are my friends from Texas.

One has always been a little quirky but when he starts appealing to more than the fringe it stops being a laughing matter.  The other is a governor who doesn't seem to know the difference between a good job in the oil patch and spatula flipping at Whataburger. I think the difference is probably about 35 grand a year.

Let the campaign continue. America is watching, and some Americans are waiting for jobs.