Against Their Interests

 "History repeats itself." That adage is familiar to most of us. It can often explain why people who otherwise should have "no dog in a fight" will risk everything they have by taking up a cause that is not their own.

Terms like "class struggle" and "politics of envy" are being used to paint a curious picture of the wealthiest Americans as victims of some unfair conspiracy designed to strip them of their hard-earned riches.

The logic is that "fair-minded people" will see this as a great crusade to redistribute their wealth and rally to their aid by voting for candidates who won't allow such injustices to occur.

The way the last few years have shaken out, we have expanding poverty and we also have expanding wealth. While the number of poor in this country has grown, the richest Americans have seen their net worth expand.

In the center, is the so-called middle class. Most statistics indicate that they have lost ground. Some of them have slipped back into poverty and others have hung on, marking time and hanging tough against the battering waves of  economic  turbulence.


America has been this way before. History tells us that the Civil War nearly destroyed the union. Ninety years after the birth of the nation, more than 618,000 people died in four bloody years of fighting. Slavery and economics were central causes, and rhetoric about states rights fanned the flames and passions between North and South.

Yet, only 7 percent of southerners owned slaves in 1860. That slave owning class represented perhaps one or two percent of the total population of  the nation. Still millions marched off to war willing do die to defend the rights of a very exclusive club.

Now, as then, we have inflammatory rhetoric, enraged passions, and dramatic struggles for support of divisive causes. On the one hand, there are calls for social and economic justice, on the other, there are  demands that we return to or preserve the values and institutions of the past.

 The nation is gripped by the words, voices and images of politicians, the admonitions and warnings of orators and the harsh realities of economic uncertainty. The world is changing and those who prospered most under the old system seek to maintain or restore it, even as others call out for something more.

In such times, it is the extremists whose voices rise above the fray, but in the end, the decisions rests in the hands of the center, and where they choose to stand and fight when their comforts are at stake.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." 

-- George Santayana, U.S. Philosopher, 1865-1952

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.

Thinning Field

There is an ideological struggle underway as a back story to the race for the GOP nomination.

On the one-hand, you have very angry voters who have dug in their heels behind a vision of America where the people they disagree with do not matter.

On the other hand, you have Republicans who still perceive themselves as moderates. They control a lot of Grand Old Party money. They control a bunch of Political Action Committee donations, and they like to think they control what happens at the Republican National Committee Convention, especially when there is no incumbent seeking the nomination.


In the past, it was this faction of the party that deep-sixed the presidential aspirations of Pat Robertson and  twice got rid of Patrick Buchanan. They assured the first nomination of Ronald Reagan, brought us the compassionate conservatism of George Herbert Walker Bush, and financed the unsuccessful White House quests of Bob Dole and John McCain.

As the battle for the GOP nomination plays out,  the struggle between the angry wing of the party and its wealthy supporters will produce excellent drama. Some candidates will head out on the stump with varied speeches that seem to ask "who are we gonna hate or blame this week? Others will smile and talk about their electability and having the "best chance of beating Obama."

Neither of those themes offer much in the way of new ideas. As we watch the thinning field, just remember that it took the first 12 years of the 21st century to bring the nation to this point. What has happened in the last three was essentially just a few steps toward righting the mistakes of the previous decade.

Voters may be impatient for change, but life is not a sit-com or a made-for-TV movie. You cannot wrap up huge problems into a tidy solution in the last few minutes of a half-an-hour, or the final scenes of DVD.  That means whatever happens Nov. 6, we will still be in the midst of correcting a floundering course. 

So even if you don't have much interest in the opening act for Campaign 2012, tune in to the game from time to time. It will produce some great one-liners, a few interesting quotes, and hopefully, a lot of insight into what these people really think.

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.

Greed: Is it a Bad Word?

12/13/

The frontrunners are calling each other greedy. Is it interesting, curious, or just truth in campaigning?