George W. Bush

BufBloPoFo 09 DayTwo (March 15, 2009)

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If you had the power to put together the most perfect, end-of-the-universe, nothing-better-was-ever-made repast, using whatever ingredients you want, and with whomever you’d like as your co-diners, what would you want? Tell me about one little bit, or all fourteen courses. Tell me about venue, about background music, about which box of wine goes best with which flavor of ramen noodles.

I have invited two temporarily resurrected men, Tim Russert and Jesus, to my place for dinner. Joining the three of us will be one person who remains of this world, Madonna. I have offerred to prepare a zesty vegetable lasagna from scratch. I have chosen a veggie meal because Jesus and Madonna are both Jews, and I do not keep a kosher kitchen. I understood from Tim Russert’s waistline while alive that he is not a picky eater. I set three plates at the bar in my kitchen, and pour three glasses of red wine. Madonna only sips gingerly at hers, requesting a bottle of Kabbalah water alongside her plate. Tim Russert and Jesus start sucking it down. We all know Jesus was a pretty fun wedding guest. Tim Russert came from a blue collar Irish background. ‘Nough said. I keep a plate for myself on the side. I will eat (and drink later). I do not want to be distracted or compromised whatsoever as we begin our discussion.

Wine has reddened the cheeks of Tim Russert and so he introduces a lively debate on the current economic crisis. Russert heatedly lays the blame at the feet of George W. Bush, though he does admit that the U.S. had been a little too lax about a lot of things in the last twenty years. Jesus is of the opinion that he sort of likes Obama’s Robin Hood approach to his most recent budget plan. However, realizing he may have said too much, Jesus grows a little sheepish. The son of God ought not to appear to pick sides, he says, so can we all keep what he said under our hats? It’s not exactly a lie, and thus we wouldn’t really be breaking any commandments. I tell Jesus to relax and poor him another glass. Madonna, who charges $200 or more to see one of her shows, apparently doesn’t realize there is a recession at all. Nevetheless, Jesus is always one to find a silver lining, and though he encourages the Material Girl to get to know some of the “little people,” he nonetheless commends Madge on the adoption of the formerly impoverished David Banda.

As we move toward the dessert course, a homemade banana bread pudding (in this fantasy, I have miraculously learned how to cook. Perhaps the divine intervention of Jesus?), the discussion moves to the subject of children. Jesus, just like Michael Jackson a couple millenniums later, obviously loves them (However, He pointedly resents the Gloved One’s use of “Jesus Juice” to calm them down – J endorses no such product), but immediately lets us know not to believe everything we read. The Da Vinci Code is just a work of fiction and there were no Jesus Juniors. I can barely mask my disappointment. Tim Russert, by now a little intoxicated, grows misty eyed at the thought of his now adult son Luke. I show him a clip of Luke working on behalf of NBC news during the McCain/Obama debates and he is done for. Madonna has three children from three different fathers (fine, the last one was adopted). Jesus knows it’s 2009 and doesn’t want to come off as a prude, so he stays quiet during Madonna’s confessional.

Tim Russert can barely stand by the time we finish our meal. Jesus tells us the coolest thing about being the Son of God is his immunity to basically, well, everything. He hoists Tim up on his shoulder so they can begin the walk back to heaven. Surprisingly, it’s not that far. Madonna has a chopper on top of my roof and will fly off with her boy toy, 22 year-old Jesus Luz. She realizes the irony of sleeping with a pretty young thing that bears the name of the Chosen One, and accepts that as further proof that her bed hopping is indeed all part of God’s plan.

What Great Recession? Wall Street Remains Unoccupied By Ethics (May 23, 2015)

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Nearly seven years after the American economy foundered under the worst global recession since World War II, it seems nothing much has changed with regard to the behavior of those that brought us collectively to the brink. While the nation’s bankers and mortgage lenders were certainly assisted in their shenanigans by the middle and working class-looting policies of George W. Bush, which resulted in a 35 percent decline in median household wealth, Bush 43 has long since been shuffled into retirement. Meanwhile according to report this week fromThe New York Times writer Andrew Ross Sorkin, Wall Street malfeasance is alive and well.

In Many on Wall Street Say It Remains Untamed, Sorkin mines new data from a joint survey conducted by The University of Notre Dame and Labaton Sucharow LLP. The project, entitled The Street, The Bull and The Crisis: A Survey of the US & UK Financial Services Industry, engaged “1,200 traders, portfolio managers, investment bankers and hedge fund professionals both in the United States and Britain” in an effort to find out how the culture has changed in the wake of the Great Recession.

The results, for the overwhelming majority of us who would like to avoid such painful, debilitating economic calamities in the future, are not encouraging. Ross summarizes the Notre Dame/Labaton report as follows, “Rather than indicating that Wall Street has cleaned itself up, it suggests that many of the lessons of the crisis still haven’t been learned. And the mind-boggling settlement numbers, as well as stringent new rules, like the of Dodd-Frank regulatory overhaul in 2010, appear to have had little deterrent effect.”

Among the data highlights of the survey:

  • A third of Wall Street workers who earn more than $500,000 annually self-report that they “have witnessed or have firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace.”
  • “Nearly one in five respondents feel financial service professionals must sometimes engage in unethical or illegal activity to be successful in the current financial environment.”
  • Almost half of the over $500,000 crowd shared that law enforcement and regulatory bodies are ineffective “in detecting, investigating and prosecuting securities violations.”
  • A third of respondents “believe compensation structures or bonus plans in place at their company could incentivize employees to compromise ethics or violate the law.”

Though America has voted itself a much more competent and empathetic POTUS in Barack Obama versus the reckless mismanagement of “compassionate conservative” George W. Bush, the data from the study makes clear that the conditions are ripe for a crisis similar to the subprime mortgage scandal to occur. It’s only a matter of time. The unchastened criminals, having suffered nothing personally as a result of their misbehavior, are going about business as usual. As Sorkin writes, “Wall Street is…risk-taking and those who seemingly do it most successfully find that edge of the line and get as close to it as possible without crossing it.”

But as we know, the experts have crossed that line and in a culture where power, money and recklessness have a sexy image, in a regulatory climate where repercussions rarely go beyond a light wrist slap, there is little reason to reform.

But perhaps all hope is not lost. After all, thanks to Bernie Sanders, the 2016 Presidential campaign conversation includes ideas for balancing the “all gimme while the working man suffers” imbalance between Wall Street and the proletariat. Our own Jason Easley wrote Bernie Sanders Plans To Make College Free By Raising Taxes On Wall Street this week. She quotes Sanders as saying, “At a time when the wealthiest people in this country have made huge amounts of money from risky derivative transactions and the soaring value of the stock market, this legislation would impose a Wall Street speculation fee on Wall Street investment houses and hedge funds.”

Wall Street looted the country by operating in the shadows, conducting transactions so complex and murky that most lay people couldn’t understand them. Meanwhile, the Republican political establishment of the Bush II years was all too happy to look the other way. Discourse and study are not synonymous with action of course. But they offer an enormous advantage versus the willful ignorance of the early aughts.

Have Decades of GOP Deregulation & Safety Net Gutting Made Depression the New Normal? (November 18, 2013)

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Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is never afraid to ask the tough questions. Though his Times blog bears the name “The Conscience of Liberal,” the title is sort of an unfortunate misnomer. Krugman’s esteemed reputation was fostered by a decidedly nonpartisan, common sense approach to policy evaluation. It is more a sign of the times that his Keynesian monetary philosophy has earned him the liberal firebrand label. It’s not that Krugman has moved to the left over the course of his career. It’s more that politicians, the media and other economy wonks have veered so far rightward.

I also appreciate that Krugman is an agitator, failing to be complacent about the status quo while accepting situations as “the way things are.” Thank goodness because we live in an era of such whitewashed talking points, of corporate media ownership and blurred lines between church and state that feed each other symbiotically.  It’s a real challenge to stumble across any real, independent thinkers.

This week, Krugman is at it again, acting as the proverbial thorn in the side of the “deficit scolds” he sees it as his civic duty to expose. In an early Monday morning column entitled, “A Permanent Slump?,” he wonders, “what if the world we’ve been living in for the past five years is the new normal? What if depression-like conditions are on track to persist, not for another year or two, but for decades?”

If it is indeed the case that the anemic job and economic growth we’ve experienced in recent years (and, as Krugman rightly points out, well precedes the late-2008 housing and stock market collapses) is now standard operating procedure, we have to go further. We must ask ourselves what’s changed? Why does it seem the robust glory days of the American middle class are behind us, and why should we accept this as so?

Krugman begins with a rather empirical observation about the undistinguished trap of modern economics. He notes, “the evidence suggests that we have become an economy whose normal state is one of mild depression, whose brief episodes of prosperity occur only thanks to bubbles and unsustainable borrowing.”  Thus he ties the latter Bush II “boom years” not to genuine expansion, but rather the disingenuous fraud perpetrated by record household debt and criminally destructive mortgage lending.

Slower post-Boomer population growth, which has led to reduced demand for infrastructure, products and services is offered as an unavoidable accessory to the economy’s stagnation, as well as “persistent trade deficits, which emerged in the 1980s and since then have fluctuated but never gone away.”

All common sense as pertains to the “why?” and I’m sure that even most right-wing economists would find little with which to quibble thus far. But then Krugman transcends the talking point laziness afflicting most GOP think tanks and dares to ask “what?” we can do to upend this trap.

“Central bankers [including the Fed] need to stop talking about ‘exit strategies.’ Easy money should, and probably will, be with us for a very long time. This, in turn, means we can forget all those scare stories about government debt…if our economy has a persistent tendency toward depression, we’re going to be living under the looking-glass rules of depression economics — in which virtue is vice and prudence is folly, in which attempts to save more (including attempts to reduce budget deficits) make everyone worse off — for a long time.”

And this is where he goes in for the kill vis a vis Republican policymakers and the cowardly, election cycle-focused Democrats afraid to contradict them:

“I know that many people just hate this kind of talk. It offends their sense of rightness, indeed their sense of morality. Economics is supposed to be about making hard choices (at other people’s expense, naturally). It’s not supposed to be about persuading people to spend more.”

Ironically, the “spend more” doctrine was championed by George W. Bush after the atrocities of 9/11, rightfully so, in order to stave off a panic-induced economic contraction.  The then-President offered up tax rebates and broadly encouraged Americans to use the funds to stimulate the economy, rather than save or pay down household debt. I offer this example not to champion the overall deficit-busting proclivities of Bush, but rather to hearken back to a time, just a little over a decade ago, when Republican economic policy went further than robbing the lower and middle classes to give gifts to the rich, all while performing Jedi mind tricks in an effort to convince the struggling that these actions were in their best interest.

For years now, the modern GOP has tried to leverage the Federal deficit, combined with “these are unusual times” rhetoric to try to wrench the social safety net out from under us, and delay job-creation spending to provide relief to the long-term unemployed. Only, as Paul Krugman demonstrates, these are not unusual times and current policy, if left unchecked, will only worsen the decline of hardworking American prospects.

That’s exactly what the one percent is hoping.  If we let these tactics continue to succeed as they have, shame on all of us.

Sane GOPers Tell the Crazy Republicans to Stop Talking to Themselves (January 31, 2013)

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Although I respect the intellect of New York Times columnist David Brooks, particularly his application of humanistic psychological and sociological research to the formation of public policy views, there are many times when I throw my hands up in frustration. While professing a moderate approach to the role of government in American society, he often ends up sounding much like a Republican mouthpiece. I am thinking of his implausible regard for Paul Ryan’s endless circumstantial flip-flopping on budget and deficit responsibility (pro-spending under George W. Bush, austerity principles during the Obama regime) as just one example.

At the risk of welcoming angry comments and hate mail, I do believe that a sound and rational two-party system is essential to the health of our cherished democracy. No one is served by a insulated majority free of checks and balances, closed to new ideas, no matter which end of the political spectrum that party should occupy.

I would assert that underlying much liberal anger is a genuine wish that those of the right wing persuasion would embrace modern reality and take part in a honest conversation about the direction in which the country needs to move if it is to face current challenges, including but not limited to: immigration and health care reform, globalization, fiscal balance, entitlement spending, the tax code and a whole host of other issues. Unfortunately, an increasingly radicalized GOP has brought little to the table in recent years beside anger, corporate kowtowing, backward social thinking and obstructionism.

With this in mind, there are elements to admire vis a vis Brooks’ column for the Times this week, entitled “A Second G.O.P.” In it, Brooks writes “On the surface, Republicans are already doing a good job of beginning to change their party. Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana gave a speech to the Republican National Committee calling on Republicans to stop being the stupid party, to stop insulting the intelligence of the American people….But, so far, there have been more calls for change than actual evidence of change.”

Well said. If the results of the 2012 Presidential election taught us anything, it’s that the Republican Party platform increasingly falls outside of mainstream views. Continuous disregard and disrespect for the middle and working classes, the social safety net, female reproductive rights and immigrants cost Mitt Romney the popular vote in a big way. Almost every GOP leader woke up the need for more inclusive messaging, but to Brooks’s point, how does that translate into real policy reform? Thus far, it hasn’t. In order for the right to begin taking steps toward relevancy, it must do more than talk to itself about change. It must actually make that change palpable.

Brooks goes on to observe, “In this reinvention process, Republicans seem to have spent no time talking to people who didn’t already vote for them.”

In other words, as the GOP seeks to rejoin productive policy dialogue, it must move away from navel gazing and the equivalent of empty locker room pep talks to doing the actual work required to attract new members. President Obama has made it clear over the last four years that he would love to count upon constructive Republican input when it comes to solving the nation’s problems – with disappointingly few results. As the title of Brooks’ column implies, the GOP needs to reverse course in the form of a total break with a failed platform.

It has been an interesting feature of 2013 that the direction of the Republican Party has been the subject of much internal criticism. Will that criticism be co-opted into sincere course correction? Stay tuned…

The Right Claims Obama Has More War on Terror Hubris Than Flight Suit Wearing Bush (May 2, 2012)

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Creating a new entry under the “Well don’t that beat all?” file, the former head of the CIA’s Clandestine Service, Jose Rodriguez, took to the airwaves this past Sunday night. In an interview with Lesley Stahl, Rodriguez put forth the idea that President Obama is taking on radical Islam in ways that would make predecessor President George W. Bush blush. It may surprise exactly no one to learn that Rodriguez plays for Team GOP.

Folks, I don’t know what to say anymore. The mouthpieces of this party are so used to trying to have it both ways, I sincerely believe its members are in the throes of a full-on dissociative fugue. How can Obama suffer routine hounding from birthers and other whack jobs who claim that he is a covert practitioner of the Muslim faith, yet at the same time confront lambast from critics who wish to depict him as ruthless killer of Islamic innocents?

How on Earth could Obama out-display the pitiless hubris of a flight-suit wearing Dubya standing aboard an aircraft carrier declaring a “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq? This smarmy soundbite is characterized in an apolitical Wikipedia entry as such: “While this statement did coincide with an end to the conventional phase of the war, Bush’s assertion—and the sign itself—became controversial after guerrilla warfare in Iraq increased during the Iraqi insurgency. The vast majority of casualties, both military and civilian, have occurred since the speech.”

Obama’s measured, targeted approach to the War on Terror is more ruthless than Bush’s Cowboy Diplomacy, more tasteless than a man who later admitted that his bellicose “bring ‘em on” taunt to Iraqi insurgents was an error in judgment? Yes, because nothing says “I care about humanity” quite like baiting the country you’ve invaded in order to co-opt its oil reserves.

But I do not wish to misframe the debate. Rodriguez’s claims are yet another political red herring designed to obscure the abundant, wasteful ineptitude of the Bush years – you know, the ones where Osama bin Laden was hiding in plain sight. And the former CIA employee has a book to sell – Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives.

In this wondrous tome, Rodriguez argues that enhanced interrogation techniques embaced by the Bush administration after 9/11 “saved lives.” There’s just one problem: Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats are on the verge of concluding a three-year investigation of enhanced interrogation and will report that it had little to no success in eliciting vital intelligence. The Atlantic Wire noted that “With the lack of specifics in his 60 Minutes interview, supporters of torture had probably better hope there’s more in his book to make the case.”

And what does any ex-CIA official worth his salt do when posed tough questions about previous policy for which he has no good answers? Deflect. After all it’s an election year, and every opportunity must be availed to portray the man once decried as a foreign-policy newbie who’d go soft on terror as a veritable Genghis Khan.

“We don’t capture anybody any more,” Rodriguez told Stahl. “Their default option of this Administration has been to … take no prisoners … How could it be more ethical to kill people rather than capture them? I never understood that one.”

Obama the Mercenary set in relief against Dubya the Lamb. There are just no words.