The Law is an Ass

You know what the bitch is about writing a daily post? Figuring out the first sentence. This doesn't have a damned thing to do with what I'm about to write, but I figure the best way to solve a problem is to point it out. Try this tomorrow; wake up and wonder what the hell you're going to do with your life. Then do it the next day and the next day and the next....

But you didn't dial in here to see me whine and I've managed to brilliantly solve my own problem. My first sentence is dead. This concludes this episode of "Fighting Writer's Block." Yay on me. Onwards and upwards.

Moving right along, I'm a little lost on what to think about Roland Burris. This is a problem. Turns out, he's just a little bit of a dick. The general consensus is that Burris is a good man caught in a controversy bigger than himself. That controversy may be bigger than he is, but he's not a good man.

ProPublica.org:

Former Illinois attorney general Roland Burris, embattled Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s pick to replace Barack Obama in the Senate, is no stranger to controversy.

While state attorney general in 1992, Burris aggressively sought the death penalty for Rolando Cruz, who twice was convicted of raping and murdering a 10-year-old girl in the Chicago suburb of Naperville. The crime took place in 1983.

Cruz was clearly innocent. Another man confessed to the crime. Burris pushed to legally murder -- there is no other word for it -- Cruz for political gain. My opinion of this man is that he's the scummiest of scum. Much, much worse than the corrupt governor who appointed him. Blagojevich never tried to kill anyone.





Most people probably don't know about this and still believe Burris shouldn't be seated. A recent Gallup poll finds that a slim majority -- 51% -- think that Burris should not be seated. Only 27% thinks he should get the seat.

And here's where I earn my blogger pittance -- Burris should get the seat. Screw you majority.

It's not about Barack Obama or Blagojevich. it's about the law. And, as Mark Twain put it, the law is an ass. A big freakin' brainless donkey who'll plant his ass anywhere, anytime, and refuse to budge. As much as we'd like the law to always make sense, that's not the way it is.

Blagojevich is the governor. Scandal or no scandal, Illinois still has an executive. He's signing or vetoing law and, if there were some sort of disaster -- an icestorm, say -- he's the guy who'll deal with it. He has every right and, dare I say, obligation to make this appointment.

We need to look at nations where the law serves the rulers, rather than the other way around. China shouldn't be our model. If law is subservient to leadership, we lose in the long run. Blagojevich is a dick, Burris is a dick, but the law should be absolute.

Don't get the idea that I take this stance casually. I really, really don't like Burris. Where ambition trumps justice, we all suffer. And Burris has proved he puts ambition above justice. Screw him,

As I write, news comes in that Burris will be seated.

San Jose Mercury News:

In a reversal, Senate Democrats now appear ready to let Roland Burris fill President-elect Barack Obama's vacant seat.

After being rejected Tuesday when he tried to join the class of incoming freshmen senators, Burris is finding new support on Capitol Hill among Democratic leaders, the Associated Press reported.

Burris, who would become the Senate's only black member, was blocked from taking the seat by Democrats who objected to an appointment by embattled Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

I wish I could celebrate.

-Wisco

So Long, Mr. Awesome

Thanks go to Frank Rich's column in the New York Times for the PDF. Whatever you think of Rich, he's a good writer. In a piece titled A President Forgotten but Not Gone, Rich tears into George W. Bush as an ineffective failure, whose only worth to history is the amount of time it takes to say, "sucked." Note the lack of an exclamation point. In Rich's view, the Bush administration isn't even worth getting excited about.

Rereading that paragraph, I'm probably doing Rich a disservice. He's not really saying that Bush should be a forgotten man, just that -- at this point in history -- Bush is a forgotten man. And our amnesia is self-inflicted; we're so tired of the man that we're all willing to pretend he never existed. There was no Bush, there is only Obama.

I can't help it, I've got to give you a bit of Rich's column:

The joke was on us. Iraq burned, New Orleans flooded, and Bush remained oblivious to each and every pratfall on his watch. Americans essentially stopped listening to him after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, but he still doesn’t grasp the finality of their defection. Lately he’s promised not to steal the spotlight from Barack Obama once he’s in retirement -- as if he could do so by any act short of running naked through downtown Dallas. The latest CNN poll finds that only one-third of his fellow citizens want him to play a post-presidency role in public life.

Bush was supposed to be the Second Coming of Reagan. And he was. Only without all the leadership. Bush was never a man, but a committee -- he was Reagan's team without the captain. Dick Cheney and the rest of the neocons put together their Dream Team and that team didn't actually have a coach. The Bush administration was an experiment to determine whether the Executive branch could operate without an Executive.

Turns out it can't.





But back to the PDF. "[An] elaborate example of legacy spin can be downloaded from the White House Web site: a booklet recounting “highlights” of the administration’s “accomplishments and results,” Rich writes.

He also points out that these "highlights" read like Highlights for Children. Rich's column is much, much broader, but I want to write about this PDF file -- Frank Rich wrote his column and there's no reason for me to rewrite it. I'm all about the downloadable PDF. Bush's file is a great example of really, really lousy propaganda. It assumes you're a freakin' idiot.

We get -- in Great Big Caps -- talking points worth the virtual paper they're printed on. Point one, KEPT AMERICA SAFE AND PROMOTED LIBERTY ABROAD. This is otherwise known as THE GREATEST EXAMPLE OF PRESIDENTIAL INCOMPETENCE EVER -- WITHOUT A DOUBT.

Protecting the American people is the President's most solemn obligation. Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the President has carried with him a symbol of sacrifice and courage; a police shield given to him by the mother of an officer who died at the World Trade Center. As the President noted after the attack, "This is my reminder of lives that ended, and a task that does not end... I will not yield; I will not rest; I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people.

The absolute worst intelligence failure ever happened on your watch, George. 9/11 was an astonishing example of incompetence. It's hard for me to believe that Bush is still trying to milk it. After he'd exploited 9/11 to invade Iraq, you'd think he'd want everyone to forget about it. Iraq is, after all, the defining failure of the Bush administration -- as much as it should be 9/11 -- and it's a measure of Bush administration incompetence that this disaster is the first example of Tremendous Accomplishments in his propaganda file.

It gets worse. The file is littered with diner menu factoids, in big "Did You Know?" boxes. For example, Did You Know President Bush implemented the largest reorganization of the Federal national security apparatus since 1947?

Wow, all that illegal wiretapping and torture was just so awesome! Reading through it, you get the feeling that the loyal Bushies aren't all that loyal anymore -- it doesn't seem like they're trying very hard. Bush LOWERED TAXES & INSTITUTED PRO-GROWTH POLICIES -- which, of course, explains the fiscal and economic mess we're in right now. Those "pro-growth policies" didn't actually result in growth. A competent propagandist wouldn't even have included economic policy."For only the third time in history, " we're told, "Americans received across-the-board tax relief." Turns out there's a reason why that's so rare -- it was stupid. He even takes credit for dumb ideas he didn't actually accomplish; for example, we're told the inheritance tax is "on the road to extinction." Really?

All in all, the PDF is amazingly awful BS. We all know about Bush's legacy project to rewrite history in his favor, but it's hard to believe that someone looked over this thing and thought, "Yeah, that'll do it." It's the same old tired crap we've gotten again and again. It hasn't worked so far, why think anything's going to change any time soon?

In fact, this sort of propaganda has failed as spectacularly as anything else Bush has done. Last month, a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll found that only 23% of respondents said they'd miss Bush. He really does suck that bad. In a weekend appearance on Meet the Press, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Bush was "the worst president we’ve ever had." Don't look for that to be blown up into a minor scandal. Reid's not really going out on a limb here, this is the majority opinion.

In the end, Frank Rich finds Bush "a narcissist with no self-awareness whatsoever." I think that's giving the man too much credit. He's a stupid little man with no idea just how stupid he actually is. Beware the man with no idea what his limitations are. I doubt Bush believes he's brilliant, but rather that the neocon ideology is. Bush is an example of what can happen when the president has a cultist's mindset, where faith supersedes reason and theory trumps results. When everything goes all to hell, you keep doing exactly what your political theory tells you will work and trust it'll work eventually.

Bush may be a narcissist. I have no reason to believe he's not and plenty of reasons to believe he is. But that's probably true of any president. That's not the problem. The problem with Bush is that he's simply jaw-droppingly incompetent.

Luckily, that incompetence extends to this final propaganda push. We'll remember Bush exactly as he is, not as he'd like us to.

-Wisco

Zero Sum BS

If you follow politics, you've probably seen the argument. You're reading a blog post or a comment thread or a discussion on an online forum and you see words that go something like "capitalism isn't a zero sum game." What this means is that, when we're talking about wealth, there isn't a limited amount and it isn't possible for one person or one group of people to collect it all. Wealth is created all the time -- if it weren't, a growing population would've ruined capitalism with Malthusian cannibalism long before the system of capitalism even had a name. The "zero sum game" argument is generally used defensively when someone's complaining that such-and-such a gazillionaire is making way too much money. Since wealth creation isn't a "zero sum game," we're told, it's ridiculous to say that this gazillionaire is living high on the hog at the expense of all of the non-gazillionaires among us.

But this "zero sum game" argument is only partially true. At this moment in time, there's only X dollars worth of wealth in the world. It's not an unlimited amount. It is, therefore, most definitely a zero sum game. It won't be eventually, but we live in the now. If you buy something, you're generally not going to get that money back -- eat lunch at a restaurant and someone is cash richer because you've become slightly cash poorer. At any given moment, the contents of your wallet is a fixed sum. It's possible for someone else to take it all.

This reality works both ways and a post by Dean Baker at his American Prospect blog demonstrates that. Baker is a media critic who follows economic reporting (we need a lot more of this, by the way) and his response to a Washington Post article about the market and the economy is much more interesting than the article itself.





The WaPo article freaked out about the loss of $6.9 trillion in value in U.S. stock market last year. But, as we need to be reminded more often, Wall St. isn't the economy -- as much as financial reporting makes it seem that way. "While those who own large amounts of stock have reason to shed tears, this may end being good news for the rest of us," Baker tells us.

The loss of stock wealth means that stockholders have less claim to value of the country's output. The U.S. economy can produce just as much in 2009 as it did in 2008 (in fact somewhat more, because of labor force and productivity growth). If stockholders can demand less because of the reduced value of their stock, then this leaves more for the rest of us.

The most visible evidence of how the loss of stockholder wealth can benefit the rest of us was the sharp decline in consumer prices over the last three months. As a result, real wages rose at almost a 15 percent annual rate in the three months from September through November.

Grab an ad insert from your local paper to see this demonstrated. Demand has dropped prices to the consumer's favor. What you have buys more. When Baker says, "The loss of stock wealth means that stockholders have less claim to value of the country's output," he means that the immediate sum total of wealth has shifted in your favor.

But, of course, people are losing jobs. As a result, we aren't taking advantage of this de facto raise in wages. The working are afraid of joining the unemployed, so they're pinching pennies until Lincoln squeals. And it's the working -- i.e., labor -- that creates wealth, not Wall St. All the financial sector does, at its most basic, is trade money. Products and services are supplied by labor and demanded by consumers -- that's the real market and that's the real basis of the economy. It's all about consumption.

But the focus on Wall St. has served us poorly for years. As the market did better and better (even though it was a house of cards), real wages fell. The gap between rich and poor became greater and greater. If the economy wasn't a zero sum game, it was sure looking like one, with people gaining at the expense of others.

"To focus on the performance of the market... is to zero in on an economic indicator that can do well even as the country does poorly," wrote Ezra Klein in September. "In 2006, for instance, the Dow Jones industrial average hit highs. According to the just released census data, however, median earnings fell 1 percent, and millions more Americans entered the ranks of the uninsured. Indeed, from 2000 to 2007, the S&P 500 gained more than 500 points; meanwhile, the median household's income, at least as of 2006, fell by more than $900." While the media and the Bush administration were focused on the stock market, the actual economy was showing cracks. As is now being said so often as to become cliched, the focus was on Wall St., not Main St. And, as isn't being said often enough, the real economy is on Main St.

Therefore, the job isn't to fix Wall St. While important, it's not the be-all and end-all of the economy. And, if we pretend it is, we aren't going to get anywhere but in the same fix we were in -- right before it all went to hell. We need to increase demand and we need to do it where demand is strongest -- through workers.

"[I]f the loss of demand [for labor] from stockholders is effectively replaced by demand from the government or foreign sector, then the vast majority of the country will be made better off by this plunge in stock prices," Baker writes. In other words, if the demand for workers shifts and is made up, then we're going to have money that's worth more -- as we do now -- but that we also feel can be spent safely.

It's often said that the best social program in the world is a job, but it's also true that it's the best economic program. If government can create jobs through investments in our infrastructure, then there really isn't a better and more logical time to do it than now. If we can put the brakes on the constantly increasing unemployment, then people will feel easier about spending money that, as it is, has more value right now.

It's a no-brainer.

-Wisco