What About That Change?

I have numerous "issues" with our President.  Resignation to the idea that the unquestionable war-crimes committed by the prior administration must be covered up greatly disturbs me.  War crimes are war crimes.  I'm sorry - they must be pursued, regardless of the political inconvenience.  It cannot only be that they are attended to when it is others and they are in a position of subjugation, as with the losers in WWII.

Basically Obama seems to be acknowledging that the defense/security/industrial complex Eisenhower cautioned us about in his departing speech (a good case has been made that they took down JFK) has taken over our government, leaving the President a pawn, more or less a figurehead except when he touts for something the complex wants.

But, aside from that, Obama's pursuit of even more executive branch power, failure to back off wire-tap, torture, and executive-privilege heresy that was so characteristic of the Shrub administration is absolutely appalling.

I have even more issues with most of our other elected democrats supposedly representing us back in that other Washington.  The rate at which many of them are swilling lobbyist and other inflowing cash is appalling, even if not at the level of the repubes.

Frank Rich, under the caption "What Happened to Change We Can Believe In?," has some useful, if depressing, insights:

Obama, the Rodney Dangerfield of 2010, gets no respect for averting another Great Depression, for saving 3.3 million jobs with stimulus spending, or for salvaging GM and Chrysler from the junkyard. And none of these good deeds, no matter how substantial, will go unpunished if the projected Democratic bloodbath materializes on Election Day. Some are even going unremembered. For Obama, the ultimate indignity is the Times/CBS News poll in September showing that only 8 percent of Americans know that he gave 95 percent of American taxpayers a tax cut. 

The reasons for his failure to reap credit for any economic accomplishments are a catechism by now: the dark cloud cast by undiminished unemployment, the relentless disinformation campaign of his political opponents, and the White House’s surprising ineptitude at selling its own achievements. But the most relentless drag on a chief executive who promised change we can believe in is even more ominous. It’s the country’s fatalistic sense that the stacked economic order that gave us the Great Recession remains not just in place but more entrenched and powerful than ever. 

No matter how much Obama talks about his “tough” new financial regulatory reforms or offers rote condemnations of Wall Street greed, few believe there’s been real change. That’s not just because so many have lost their jobs, their savings and their homes. It’s also because so many know that the loftiest perpetrators of this national devastation got get-out-of-jail-free cards, that too-big-to-fail banks have grown bigger and that the rich are still the only Americans getting richer. 

This intractable status quo is being rubbed in our faces daily during the pre-election sprint by revelations of the latest banking industry outrage, its disregard for the rule of law as it cut every corner to process an avalanche of foreclosures. Clearly, these financial institutions have learned nothing in the few years since their contempt for fiscal and legal niceties led them to peddle these predatory mortgages (and the reckless financial “products” concocted from them) in the first place. And why should they have learned anything? They’ve often been rewarded, not punished, for bad behavior. 

The latest example is Angelo Mozilo, the former chief executive of Countrywide and the godfather of subprime mortgages. On the eve of his trial 10 days ago, he settled Securities and Exchange Commission charges for $67.5 million, $20 million of which will be footed by what remains of Countrywide in its present iteration at Bank of America. Even if he paid the whole sum himself, it would still be a small fraction of the $521 million he collected in compensation as he pursued his gambling spree from 2000 until 2008. 

A particularly egregious chunk of that take was the $140 million he pocketed by dumping Countrywide shares in 2006-7. It was a chapter right out of Kenneth Lay’s Enron playbook: Mozilo reassured shareholders that all was peachy even as his private e-mail was awash in panic over the “toxic” mortgages bringing Countrywide (and the country) to ruin. Lay, at least, was convicted by a jury and destined to decades in the slammer before his death. 

The much acclaimed new documentary about the global economic meltdown, “Inside Job,” has it right. As its narrator, Matt Damon, intones, our country has been robbed by insiders who “destroyed their own companies and plunged the world into crisis” — and then “walked away from the wreckage with their fortunes intact.” These insiders include Dick Fuld and four other executives at Lehman Brothers who “got to keep all the money” (more than $1 billion) after Lehman went bankrupt. And of course Robert Rubin, who encouraged Citigroup to step up its investment in high-risk bets like Countrywide’s mortgage-backed securities. Rubin, now back as a rainmaker on Wall Street, collected more than $115million in compensation$45 billion taxpayers’ bailout, recently secured its own slap-on-the-wrist S.E.C. settlement — at $75 million, less than Rubin’s earnings and less than its 2003 penalty ($101 million) for its role in hiding Enron profits.  during roughly the same period Mozilo “earned” his half a billion. Citi, which required a

It should pain the White House that its departing economic guru, the Rubin protégé Lawrence Summers, is an even bigger heavy in “Inside Job” than in the hit movie of election season, “The Social Network.” Summers — like the former Goldman Sachs chief executive and Bush Treasury secretary Hank Paulson — is portrayed as just the latest in a procession of policy makers who keep rotating in and out of government and the financial industry, almost always to that industry’s advantage. As the star economist Nouriel Roubini tells the filmmaker, Charles Ferguson, the financial sector on Wall Street has “step by step captured the political system” on “the Democratic and the Republican side” alike. But it would be wrong to single out Summers or any individual official for the Obama administration’s image of being lax in pursuing finance’s bad actors. This tone is set at the top. 

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Since Obama has neither aggressively pursued the crash’s con men nor compellingly explained how they gamed the system, he sometimes looks as if he’s fronting for the industry even if he’s not. Voters are not only failing to give the White House credit for its economic successes but finding it guilty of transgressions it didn’t commit. The opposition is more than happy to pump up that confusion. When Mitch McConnell appeared on ABC’s “This Week” last month, he typically railed against the “extreme” government of “the last year and a half,” citing its takeover of banks as his first example. That this was utter fiction — the takeover took place two years ago, before Obama was president, with McConnell voting for it — went unchallenged by his questioner, Christiane Amanpour, and probably by many viewers inured to this big lie. 

The real tragedy here, though, is not whatever happens in midterm elections. It’s the long-term prognosis for America. The obscene income inequality bequeathed by the three-decade rise of the financial industry has societal consequences graver than even the fundamental economic unfairness. When we reward financial engineers infinitely more than actual engineers, we “lure our most talented graduates to the largely unproductive chase” for Wall Street riches, as the economist Robert H. Frank wrote in The Times last weekend. Worse, Frank added, the continued squeeze on the middle class leads to a wholesale decline in the quality of American life — from more bankruptcy filings and divorces to a collapse in public services, whether road repair or education, that taxpayers will no longer support. 

Even as the G.O.P. benefits from unlimited corporate campaign money, it’s pulling off the remarkable feat of persuading a large swath of anxious voters that it will lead a populist charge against the rulers of our economic pyramid — the banks, energy companies, insurance giants and other special interests underwriting its own candidates. Should those forces prevail, an America that still hasn’t remotely recovered from the worst hard times in 70 years will end up handing over even more power to those who greased the skids. 

We can blame much of this turn of events on the deep pockets of oil billionaires like the Koch brothers and on the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which freed corporations to try to buy any election they choose. But the Obama White House is hardly innocent. Its failure to hold the bust’s malefactors accountable has helped turn what should have been a clear-cut choice on Nov. 2 into a blurry contest between the party of big corporations and the party of business as usual.

You Have to Be Carefully Taught

It seems to me there are any number of intrinsic merits to a vacation, e.g., putting a pause to life as usual, getting away from the slog, seeing new things, etc.  One benefit I sometimes forget was quite conspicuous this year for me, namely coming upon intriguing book leads in local bookstores.  I'd guess I have read at least 5 or 6 books with some sort of vacation locale influence since our July trip that were directly inspired by a few brief stints in bookstores in places like Thermopolis and West Yellowstone.

One of those books was my original intended subject here, but before we get to that I have a side issue.  And that book may have to await a future blog, depending.  Much as that vacation awaits further blogs, unfortunately.  I have intentions and designs, believe me, but the execution is another matter.  I spent numerous hours doing some limited cleanup on the vacation pics, as I may have noted before, and even got so far as to print out 150 or so of the suckers for some sort of hands-on keepsake.  A selection of those images also now grace Facebook, though pics there as yet stop well short of Yellowstone.

I have a generally likable and entertaining co-worker who was raised in a town of population 1,500 or thereabouts in northeast Kansas.  We have a lot of common enthusiasms in the way of things like preparing and consuming food (preferably with spice, smoke, and tang), gardening, and critters, both domestic and wild, but politics is not one of them.  He only recently took down his office photo of McCain and Palin.  (My treasured mockup, courtesy of Ma-in-Law, of Ford, Bush I, Reagan, and Nixon, thanking me personally for my dutiful support of the R party remains on display.)  He is judicious around me, but prone to bait those of the liberal persuasion with any signs of weakness or lack of redeeming qualities of the sort I guess I feature and otherwise brag of his narrow-minded, right-wing, I've got mine, screw them mindset.

He was 18 years old or so before he encountered rice in a form other than Rice Krispies.  His wife, who grew up in somewhat similar surroundings, to this day cannot eat rice.  My friend had not encountered an avocado before they moved to Seattle back in the early '90's.  He now considers avocados a food of the gods.

My dear friend Michael lives less than 50 miles from where my co-worker grew up.  He recently expressed despair at living in the only slightly-blue enclave in a horrific state of red.  He grew up, at least in my impression, in the environs of the biggest metropolis in the area, i.e., Kansas City (or its' burbs).

My guess is that when I was about the same age as my co-worker when he first came upon the miracle of rice as we know it as a component of a dinner meal I was reveling in the idea of alternatives to Cantonese Chinese foods in my neighborhood.  Szechuan and Hunan were still a little down the pike, but a Mandarin restaurant blossomed I think while I was in highschool, only a couple miles from our home.  And was promptly adopted and enjoyed by us.  A restaurant meal was a celebration in our family, not something done spontaneously or lightly.  But that intriguing source of new spicy/tangy, even hot, food was added to the pedestrian (Shakey's!) pizza parlor, more wide-ranging spaghetti house, and a more distant mexican restaurant as part of our family repertoire.

Otherwise, while a few African-Americans and Asians attended my highschool, it was a pretty solidly waspy area.

"You have to be carefully taught."  I think that is from The King and I, and whether I have it right or not, I have that stored in a category that might be labeled "Teaching Bigotry."  The insight for me here, though, is that if you grow up in an environment that does not even include anyone significantly different from you, no "ethnicity" even in the vicinity, there is a significant chance you will fail to mature to be a well-rounded global citizen with the ability to empathize with or even cope well with cultural and ethnic differences (not to mention diet!).  Especially if your parents are incurious and make little or no effort to expand your horizons.  Or serve you rice, for gosh sake.  We can be carefully taught in so many ways.

I'm not saying I have achieved that, either.  But I feel blessed that, while I did not have the advantage of a particularly multicultural neighborhood or educational system, at the very least I had the benefit of a far more varied and curious encounter with the trappings of other cultures than my coworker.

Growing up in a vibrant port city, fueled by international trade and populated by a mix of folks including escapees from the Mississippi Delta as well as Asians of multiple affiliations, is quite different from growing up in a small waspy Kansas plains town.

Mind you, I am not defending my co-worker, merely trying to better understand where he is coming from.  And hoping that might help me in some unknown way to better deal with the obvious collective insanity on the right that we are seeing these days. Abetted, of course, by the Corporate Media, increasingly intolerant of any real reporting a la Izzy Stone.