Fiscal Theater


Jeb Hensarling, a Republican from the 5th District of Texas, is speaking in a strained, almost panicked voice, about how Democrats talking about fiscal responsibility is an Alice in Wonderland experience. And one after the other, the Republicans rise to speak in voices that would scare a blind man, what with his dependence on deriving emotional resonance from sound to detect muscle tension signaling possible danger.

What astounds me when I listen to floor debate on CSPAN is the absence of context for anything most of the Republicans address. Details are picked out to support or defend some amendment or party position, or there are general attacks with selective evidence, but there is a hysterical avoidance of the elephant in the living room, which is where the money has gone. It has vanished in the most profound display of profligate waste since Woody Allen sneezed into the cocaine.

We are in a Republican war, supported by those Democrats who are consistently obedient to their worst enemies, their political strategists. Because they fear bringing down the wrath of the electorate, which is being deceived, divided, and whipped up by iconography and saber rattling, the Democrats tend to "fall in line" with the most recent device for moving money from the public coffers into private portfolios, through corporate laundries. The current popular euphemism is "privatizing." What that means is you take something which belongs to the public and you give it to somebody to run for profit.

One of the biggest problems we have in Iraq is that instead of going in to liberate them and then leave, we went in with a privatization program that was designed to turn over all their public wealth to western corporations. This was not well received, and we are now getting the reviews. They didn't want all their public services privatized. All they wanted was some capitalization on the ground, for local contractors. It would have been cheap and effective to do that. But that was not the object. The object was to create the chaos under which massive amounts of capital could be transferred from a publicly held service sector to an oligarchy. Career professionals won't do this. Party hacks have to be installed, whose fortunes depend not on what they know, but who they know.

We are getting a look, now, at what we get when we run the health care system for profit, the prison system for profit, and the military for profit. We are getting a good look at what happens to our food supply when the inspection is defunded and the cheapest shit available is passed off to us, some of it laced with formaldehyde. We have had a good look at what FEMA looks like defunded and turned over as political booty to hacks, and what Justice looks like run by a shyster lawyer who shares with Bush and Cheney a fey smirk.

The attempt of Vice President Cheney's office to simply abolish the agency it was supposed to report to regarding handling of classified information is a glimpse of the future, because we now have a Supreme Court that is aligned with this agenda; that of the imperial Presidency. They like to call it the Unitary Executive, but it means the same thing. Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito are proponents of investing most power in the executive.

The agenda of the Supreme Court as presently constituted is called a conservative agenda for the same reason loosening pollution rules is called a blue skies initiative. It conserves nothing. It is activist and radical if looked at in terms of preserving precedent and existing protections.

If you plan to do something which is illegal and immoral, you don't wait to be attacked on it and then try to defend it. You start out with a pre-emptive strike on the enforcement arm which is obligated to challenge your behavior. This is why the loading of the Supreme Court with activist judges was accompanied by attacks on mainstream sitting judges as activists.

For years the representatives of the very richest families have attacked the government as the enemy of the people. This is the government that educates the children, provides old age benefits, medical care, support for the poor and indigent, mental health hospitals, that sort of thing. This is the government which administered the publicly held national forests, military, school system, prisons, hospitals, etc. It also won its wars.

The party line was that because public sector services didn't compete, they had no motivation to improve. And that might have made sense if they wanted to turn them into profit centers where the money was reinvested in the services to better serve the public. But that wasn't the plan. The plan was to turn health care and prisons and everything else into profit centers for the oligarchy. Obviously you can't serve two masters. The institutions set up to serve the public were shifted into the service of the very rich, and the public became the unlanded riff raff.

The defenders of this shift sound crazy to me, but I guess they must sound okay to each other, the way men do trapped together in an unprovisioned life raft. "Why, it would be wrong to eat another human being. But as Scurvy's leg has to come off anyway, it would not ... technically ... be wrong, eh?"

"That's good enough for me. Have we got salt?"

I don't know Jeb Hensarling and he might be a great guy to shoot pool with or something, but I do know by the sound of the voices, in most instances, which representatives belong to the same tribe. It's the Dia Tribe most of the time, and it isn't helpful. To stand on the floor of the House and argue that the problem is the Democrats, after inheriting a surplus and instantly wasting it, is a show directed toward the mentally impaired, or as they like to call it, the base.

What the Republicans did with their majority was to borrow a trick from the games shows, the one where you get a shopping cart and you can keep as much as you can cram into it before your time expires. The occupation of Iraq was just something to throw in the cart as a favor to big oil. The upside was that they didn't have a Navy or Air Force, so it was expected to be a cake walk. All they had to do was not fuck it up.

The oil industry needed Iraq because they need to stabilize the oil supply to avoid any challenges from new, clean technology. That this protectionism might end up killing life on earth isn't relevant. What is relevant is the profit forecast for the oligarchs, like the Bush and Cheney families, as solidly based in oil as are the remains of the other dinosaurs. All they needed was a boogyman, and Hussein, who was too stupid to remember who put him in power, supplied that when he threatened to switch from dollars to euros.

The Supreme Court is not any help in curbing executive use of the military to do business. It hasn't even got a consistent internal logic anymore. It just destroyed legislation that addressed some of the worst abuses in election fraud, opining that you have to protect the right to free speech no matter what, and that this trumps any effort to block it for the public good. Then they ruled just the opposite on some high school students holding a banner, "Bong Hits for Jesus." They said that the right of the institution to be anti-marijuana trumped the right to free speech, even if it wasn't on school property.

I think Jesus is gonna need the bong hits to digest these decisions.

Meanwhile, in the House, the Republicans complain about Democratic spending to try and save what infrastructure we have left after the biggest privatizing orgy in history.

What may eventually be a two trillion dollar war, run by incompetent party hacks and lost by ignoring those in the mainstream of government, is not mentioned as the problem by the Republicans now pretending to be fiscally responsible by not funding the rapidly deteriorating public service sector of the government, including public infrastructure. Two trillion dollars needs some context. We're spending this to protect oil company dominance in the energy market. With that money we could have developed clean alternative fuels, and installed the distribution system. But it is gone like a fart in a windstorm.

We have to spend money to put back together our own infrastructure and society, after six years of gross mismanagement and massive transfers of wealth out of the public sector.

Republicans should look at this philosophically. Spending on education and health care will give a return on investment, and build up some more public wealth. Then ... well, you know the drill ...


Posted: Wed - June 27, 2007 at 12:09 PM