Comments on 9/26 Debate

Disclaimer: I was drinking during the debate. It was just some cheap red wine, but it made the debate easier to take.

John McCain touts that his cost cutting would shave 18 billion off the budget, or some such “puny” number. But with the recent bandying about of 700 billion that essentially his (Republican, led by Phil Gramm, his advisor) deregulation has cost the tax payer, what he saves is piddling.

It’s smooth for Barack to laugh at McCain’s jokes. He seems to actually laugh when McCain wants people to laugh. Whereas McCain smirks when Obama attacks, as if to say, “Jeez, this guy is an idiot.”

I’ve got to credit that Naval Academy graduate who finished in the bottom 1% of his class—he has overachieved.

The mother of the dead soldier says “Don’t let my son’s death be in vain.” Why don’t we ask the mothers of those living if they want their sons and daughters to die, so that the first man to die won’t have died in vain? Good thing that Obama had a bracelet from another mother, who didn’t want any more to die. The media needs to analyze what sacrifice John McCain is making to support the war.

Does traveling to Iraq do any good for the leader of the troops? Perhaps to buck up the troops’ morale, but not to learn anything new. What McCain is talking about is field research. I’ve done field research, and in a place that wasn’t a war zone. The truth is hard to see on the ground, much less when you're wearing a flack jacket. More important than going yourself, is to find trustworthy people on the ground. Bush has not done that.

“A League of Democracies!” AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Spain is a democracy. Venezuela is a democracy. Actually all of the states in Latin America except Cuba are democracies. Will they be in McCain’s league? Will they get to wear superhero costumes? Capes are out.

In the discussion on Russia, Senator Obama classified Venezuela as a rogue state. I would like to hear the facts on how Venezuela is a rogue state. Seems to me that he can’t be open-minded about Hugo Chavez, because to do so would lose those independents who have swallowed the Edward Bernays spin on Venezuela.

Gotta stop now. My typing is gettting slurrred.

Bailout? No! Nationalization!

The recent failure of two great business icons of Wall Street, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, are highlighting again the role of the government in regulating business. But I wonder if we are using the right language to describe what we are doing.

All of the news media, even the progressive ones like Democracy Now!, are describing what the US has done for AIG, the giant insurance company, as a bailout. A quick check of the definition indicates that a bailout is only helping that company, albeit with huge infusions of cash and credit.

But the process of bailing out AIG ended up with it being owned by the US government, to the tune of 80 percent of the stock. You and I, the citizens of the US, now own AIG. That’s more than bailing out, where we loan money and they pay it back. We bought it.

And that’s nationalization. That’s a word that we use when we talk about countries like Mexico taking over foreign oil companies doing business within its borders. Why don’t we call it what it is?

Because it's socialism. People think that socialism is some sort of infringement on the rights of the individual, but at its most basic, it is the state owning the means of production. What’s happening then, is we are using a basic tool of socialism to save capitalism.

And it is always thus. Mixed-market economies balance allowing markets free reign (laissez-faire) and some sort of regulation. The ultimate regulation is ownership by the state. The fact that we've resorted to nationalization indicates how badly the markets have worked.

Markets are not gods, never mind what neo-liberal economists and politicians would have you believe. They are instruments of human society, designed to serve society. When they don’t work, you opt for the other option: planning. Even before the demise of AIG—which happens to be my life insurance company—the pendulum was swinging back to planning, more commonly known as regulation. AIG, and Fannie and Freddie before it, nationalizations all, will speed up the process. Socialists always have to save the capitalists from themselves, and they never say "Thank you."

Update:  We haven't actually bought AIG yet.  The BBC points out that we have the option to purchase up to 80 percent of the company.  Check out TomDispatch f you want a good history of finance regulation in the US.

Whither the Republicans

The first day I teach a class, any class, in politics, I have to define paradigm for my students. The concept paradigm first hit the big time in a book by Thomas Kuhn in 1962, The Structure of Scientfiic Revolutions. Boiled down it means your world view. It’s the cognitive filter that you use to make sense of the world. Kuhn talks about it in terms of scientific models. Since I teach politics, I talk about the paradigms that let us make sense of the social world around us.

Paradigms are sticky. Once one is good and adhered in your head, changing your paradigm is like scraping barnacles. You can’t do it in one cocktail conversation, which is why talking about politics over martinis usually just resembles crows arguing about who gets the prairie dog road kill. Just to dislodge one, not even thinking about establishing a new one, takes at least one semester of college. Either that or parachuting into a war zone or refugee camp.

They are so sticky that most people never change theirs. It’s also why in a class of about thirty students at least two will liken me to the anti-Christ in their course evaluations. (Note to those students: I know who you are.) So how is it that they change? What might dislodge the Zeitgeist?

When asked the above, at first students offer up Reason. Sure, reason gets the ball rolling, but the reasonable often get tossed into the hoosegow. See Galileo and Socrates for pertinent examples. People just don’t give up their world-views that easily.

Death. Death is what does it. Birth helps too. The younger generation seems to recognize new truths first. Kuhn observed that great scientific observations tended to be made by younger minds. Einstein is only one of his examples. Then they get tenure and try to keep the younger minds from figuring more things out. (Movie reference: Happy Feet)

This is what is most striking about the race between McCain and Obama: older folks tend to support McCain and younger ones tend to support Obama. The actuary tables don’t only suggest that being 72 years old, McCain has a relatively high probability of passing the baton to Sarah (pitbull-not-a-pig) Palin, but that many of the people who support him will also pass on. (Of course there are exceptions: neither of my parents support McCain. Just felt I had to mention that here in case they were to read this.)

And if you were to extrapolate this tendency for the next twenty to thirty years, my prediction would be that the Republican Party will either change dramatically, just to survive, or it will whither away. Who knows, it might disappear because we pass a law that makes it illegal to lie during campaigns.

Along with age, ethnic demographics predict a Republican withering. Did you notice all those white folks at the Republican Convention? Sure there are some anomalies (to wit the “Log Cabin Republicans”—by the way, I really believe that mainstream Republicans think that they are referring to Lincoln), but trends show that white Americans will be in the minority by 2042. Combine that with the generation gap, and I’ll go on the record here saying that Republicans will be out of the game by 2030. I’ll be only 70 then so if I’m wrong, you can email me an “I told you so.”

If it does disappear, then the Democratic party would split, with economic policy being the constant, and the social issues dividing the two new parties. It also might split on green issues--one side being light green and the other dark. It could resemble the 90s under Bill Clinton, except instead of staunchly believing in free trade and the overwhelming power of the market, both parties would believe that government can do good. That makes sense. Why would anyone vote for a president if they believe a federal government is inherently inept? (See Bush.)

Sarah Watching Russia

There’s got to be some comedy writer for Saturday Night Live that can pick up on Sarah Palin’s international expertise: “They’re our next-door neighbors. And you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska. From an island in Alaska.”

Call her bluff!! Ask her, “When have you gone to that island, to look at Russia?” Then you have a skit where Sarah takes a trip to go sit on an icy rock and look over at more icy rocks. Kind of a Waiting for Godot meets Gidget moment. We can hear her internal monologue about what Putin might be doing while she throws snowballs at the seagulls and tells the sea lions to shut up or she’s gonna shoot them.

And then a whale swallows her. Wait, that was Pinocchio. Was it my imagination, or has Sarah’s nose grown recently?

Postscript: I posted this before Kos did his at the DailyKos.