Corporatism

Has our democracy descended into a nihilistic corporate state in which manipulation and sheer materialism, often defined by competitive personal greed, are not only fundamental for success but for mere existence as well? Chris Hedges thinks we have surpassed Eisenhower’s warning of a military-industrial complex and now have lost our way intellectually and morally as well:

In decaying societies, politics become theater. The elite, who have hollowed out the democratic system to serve the corporate state, rule through image and presentation. They express indignation at AIG bonuses and empathy with a working class they have spent the last few decades disenfranchising, and make promises to desperate families that they know will never be fulfilled. Once the spotlights go on they read their lines with appropriate emotion. Once the lights go off, they make sure Goldman Sachs and a host of other large corporations have the hundreds of billions of dollars in losses they incurred playing casino capitalism repaid with taxpayer money.

And in his analysis of our current dilemma, to put it mildly, Hedges reveals how he thinks this is all now being spawned and incubated in our educational institutions, where these corrupt values are instilled, or distilled, in our children.

You see symptoms all around us today, from inane reality TV shows to mainstream media faux news, celebrity gossip and chattering talk-show bobble heads to so-called self-help gurus, personal-behavior legislation and, yes, the pulpit. What you don’t see, of course, is the corporate coitus for all this, because that's done behind closed doors. It's an old story, perhaps, but the worm still turns.

Read Hedges's moral bailout blues here, and beware the establishment. In the end, they may collapse under their own obtuse obesity; but do the rest of us really want to go down with them?

Populist

You know we’re in trouble when Republican blowhards keep saying they want Obama to fail (at least according to redundant TV news babble). Here we are in deep doo doo, on the brink of economic free fall, and the party that put us there in the first place hopes we don’t get out of it.

More realistically, William Greider is worried Obama, along with the rest us, may be sucked into the voracious void of the burgeoning corporate state that threatens to overwhelm our democracy, even as he preaches reform:

The president is getting what he asked for, but perhaps not what he had in mind. During the campaign, Barack Obama beckoned Americans to put aside their cynicism about politics and re-engage as active citizens. They are now doing so with red-hot anger. They are outraged by events and forcing their way into congressional affairs and behind closed doors where policy wonks discuss issues with cerebral civility. The president is now trapped between these two realms -- the governing elites who decide things and the people who are governed. Which side is he on? If he does not choose wisely, the anger could devour his presidency.

Read the rest of Greider's analysis from last Sunday's Washington Post, and then you may want to get on this bus too, before it's too late.

"People are angry, but they want this president to succeed," Greider concludes. "Mobilized citizens can help him to prevail. If he goes with the other side, they will bring him down."

Plan?

While many intelligent people are plainly skeptical the money changers and politicians can be trusted at all, Andrew Sorkin wants to know "Where's the Plan, Wall Street?" in today's New York Times DealBook. Since he hasn't seen one yet, he presents his own five-point solution for the fine mess we're in right now. Reform is desperately needed, of course, and not just for investment banking and other Wall Street gambling but for political gaming in Washington as well. But asking the gamblers to come up with a plan sounds like asking the fox to guard the hen house. Would you even trust them to deliver pizza right now? Many of the readers' comments following Sorkin's article may be more to the point. What's really needed is some serious regulation and informed outside oversight. Does anyone have Paul Krugman's number handy, or Robert Reich's or Sheila Bair's?

Worried

Nobel Prize-winning eonomist Paul Krugman is worried Obama's team is barking up the wrong abacus for our banks. If it's really just a panic attack, he argues in yesterday's New York Times, then maybe the administration can get away with buying up toxic assets and "make the banks look solvent again." But if the banks really have made bad investments, "this won't work at all."

"To keep the banks operating," he argues, "you need to provide a real backstop — you need to guarantee their debts, and seize ownership of those banks that don’t have enough assets to cover their debts; that’s the Swedish solution, it’s what we eventually did with our own S&Ls."

"Why am I so vehement about this?" he concludes. "Because I’m afraid that this will be the administration’s only shot — that if the first bank plan is an abject failure, it won’t have the political capital for a second."

Payola

"Conservatives have argued for decades that the sins most dangerous to our society were rooted in lust when in fact they were rooted in greed," E. J. Dionne observes in today's Washington Post.

He's right, of course, ever since Reagan, in our time, and until now as Bush screwed the pooch and trashed our economy. That's going to be his bush-league legacy, that witlessly he brought down his own house and left us the rubble to rebuild our so-called democracy, this time for the people perhaps instead of payola.

"The sound you are hearing in response to the AIG payoffs -- excuse me, bonuses -- is the rancorous noise of their arrogance crashing to earth," Dionne continues. "A study of compensation levels in 2007 found that average CEO pay at S&P 500 companies was 344 times higher than the average worker's wage, and that the top 50 investment fund managers took home 19,000 times -- yes, that's with three zeroes -- as much as typical workers earned."

Now, Dionne urges, Obama's "administration should be unafraid to use its proposals on health care, taxes, education, energy and financial regulation to argue that it is building a new economy on the ashes of the old -- an economy based on fair rewards to capital and labor alike, not on an ethic of greed and excess."

Festivus

As the current administration is sliding all over American Interntional Group's slippery slope, Robert Reich, Clinton's Secretary of Labor, gets right to the point in The Huffington Post about what all this means for the rest of us:

Apart from AIG's sophistry is a much larger point. This sordid story of government helplessness in the face of massive taxpayer commitments illustrates better than anything to date why the government should take over any institution that's "too big to fail" and which has cost taxpayers dearly. Such institutions are no longer within the capitalist system because they are no longer accountable to the market. So to whom should they be accountable? When taxpayers have put up, and essentially own, a large portion of their assets, AIG and other behemoths should be accountable to taxpayers. When our very own Secretary of the Treasury cannot make stick his decision that AIG's bonuses should not be paid, only one conclusion can be drawn: AIG is accountable to no one. Our democracy is seriously broken.

So now, maybe it's just Festivus for the rest of us.

Socialist

Who said Obama is a socialist? Certainly not Billy Wharton, the editor of the Socialist magazine. Even though suddenly he has become somewhat of a media celebrity himself because of this buzz, Wharton says Obama is not a socialist, and in fact he may not even be a liberal. “Socialists understand him more as a hedge-fund Democrat,” Wharton continues in today’s Washington Post, “one of a generation of neoliberal politicians firmly committed to free-market policies.”

So how did all this talk get started? “Oddly enough, Republican politicians such as Mike Huckabee and John McCain had become our most effective promoters,” says Wharton. “During his campaign, the ever-desperate McCain, his hard-charging running mate Sarah Palin and even a plumber named Joe lined up to call Barack Obama a socialist.”

In fact, what Wharton wants to know from Obama is: “Can you lend legitimacy to a society in which 5 percent of the population controls 85 percent of the wealth? Can you sell a health-care reform package that will only end up enriching a private health insurance industry? Will you continue to favor military spending over infrastructure development and social services?”

Unless Americans wake up from their nationalist nap of denial, Obama will have his hands full just trying to keep from collapsing under this impoverished balancing act.

Mapoff

Now you can pinpoint most of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi suckers on a map. Nebraska seems to be one of the few states he didn't reach, so far. The Madoffmap is the brainchild of Atlanta real estate lawyers Lynwood Bishop and Glenn Kirbo, and it uses colored dots to denote the concentration of victims in a particular area -- green for places with not so many and red for a lot of them. So, if you're wondering if anyone you know has been fleeced by this felon, just go to http://www.madoffmap.com/, and at least you'll find out where they were before Bernie was busted and they still thought they had all their moola.

Refund?

The biggest beneficiary of Bernie Madoff's bulimic billions so far seems to be the Internal Revenue Service. Congress has been holding hearings into the egregious lapses of the Securities and Exchange Commission in regulating Madoff's phantom firm and the enormous fraud he perpetrated. But what about the billions of dollars the victims have forked over to Uncle Sam in capital gains taxes, for gains that were invisible at best and in the end annihilating all their principal as well?

"The government cannot ignore the fact that, but for the failure of the S.E.C. to detect this fraud, it would have been deprived of this revenue stream," says Andrew N. Lerman, a CPA in White Plains, N.Y., in yesterday's New York Times DealBook. "Federal regulators had the opportunity to stop this scheme and for whatever the reason, did not or were not able to."

"Should the government be the beneficiary of that?" he asks.

"It may not be reasonable to think that the government should restore the victims’ investment," Lerman concludes. "Rather, the immediate priority should be to establish procedures and clarity so that victims may deduct the appropriate losses and the taxes that they paid can be refunded without delay."

At least, you would think.

Retired

The ultimate irony of the Madoff mess is that prison probably will be the most comfortable place for Bernie to spend the rest of his life. As a pathological "'anal-retentive' neatness freak" with "a major case of obsessive-compulsive disorder" (Vanity Fair, April 2009, p. 135), he should feel right at home in his little cell now, with only his bunk and concrete floor to keep neat and clean. And since he has been revealed to be clinically antisocial, he should feel right at home there with his fellow inmates. After all, with all the money and luxury he has amassed, he has been working diligently his entire life for this solitary retirement. No fuss, no muss, at least for him.

Odyssey

Warren Buffett says the economy has fallen off a cliff, but in five years we should be back to normal, if not inflated. Robert J. Samuelson is worried Obama's vision is blurred and "still runs the risk that his overworked rhetoric loses its power and boomerangs on him." Paul Krugman is afraid the new administration's economic policies are "falling behind the curve, and there’s a real, growing danger that it will never catch up." E. J. Dionne points out that no president since FDR has inherited such an "unbholy mess," and that Obama must be bold: "If there is one thing he should fear, it is fear itself." Meanwhile, FDIC Chairwoman Sheila C. Bair wonders if we should have allowed some banks to get so big in the first place. What about insurance companies, like AIG, or HMOs or credit card companies or car companies or Big Macs and McMansions and SUVs?

Wall Street junkies predictably want to blame Obama for their overdose and withering withdrawal. In the end, we're all in this together now, unfortunately, and we better sober up and fly right this time or the whole world spins out of orbit, with Rush Limbaugh on board and all his other cracked heads. Stanley Kubrick did that space odyssey 40 years ago (or at least something like it), didn't he? During the 70s, there was a glimmer of green with organic food co-ops, home-grown vegetables (with some good ganja), fuel-efficient air-cooled Beetles and wood-burning stoves. Then the yuppies invaded. Well, now the hippies may be back, with some rejuvenated flower power.

Plumbers

The current debate in the media seems to be centered on Obama’s burgeoning national debt. But wouldn’t you say that debt is largely inherited from brain-drained Reaganomic reactionaries? Where was the media when Bush and Cheney were exploding our debt into the stratosphere with a fake war and specious tax cuts and then hiding the weenie so we wouldn’t see it going into their pockets, and the tax-relieved oligarchy that supported them, instead of into our nation’s infrastructure and basic human services such as health care and higher education?

It seems as long as the rich and powerful are making out like bandits, the debutantes in the mainstream news media just don’t get it as long as they’ve got their dance cards filled out for the next D.C. uberball. Warren Buffett himself has said, as you may recall, that the superrich have been on a spaceship for the past 25 years while the middle class has been on a treadmill.

Well, as Madoff has made off with a lot of their moola and Wall Street has crashed under the weight of their hair-brained speculation in mortgage-backed securities and other shell games, they have turned the tables on themselves. Now they’re crying like little babies because their bottles are empty and mommy has run off with Joe the plumber, who also got the family jewels. These worms have turned once again; and now it’s time to drain the rest of their bulimic brains and restore the national trust.