By H. N. Burdett
Not too many moons ago I blew off political conspiracy theories as extensions of delusional tendencies fostered by all governments, even democracies. A bright young colleague from my newspaper days once gravely confided: "It's not paranoia if it's true."
When coincidences pile up, as they often enough do - for example, in the bizarre and well-publicized procession of sudden violent deaths of persons of interest, as they did following the assassination of John F. Kennedy - it has to give pause to those who would like to think of themselves as rational adults.
Forgive this perhaps overwrought introduction to a friend of a friend - a disarmingly charming and obviously intelligent woman known to me only as a telephone voice. To protect the guilty, she will be hereafter referred to as Penny Forthought. You'll have to accept as blind faith that Penny exists. She really does.
Penny was on the phone only minutes after a recent debate between the Seven Dwarfs (I keep forgetting to count the number of Republican presidential nominee hopefuls who line up on the stage during these intriguing forums). She insisted that this sad collection of unworthies for what is repeatedly called the highest office in the free world are all Democrats in disguise. Or else, she continued, how could they possibly be expected to be taken seriously as candidates for the presidency of the United States? Nope. Penny is confident that they are incognito Democrats pulling off an elaborate political dirty trick.
Here we must pause to remind faithful readers that, at this writing, it is nearly 14 months before the next quadrennial presidential election - a time when mischief, deliberate or not, and confusion, readily comprehensible, run rampant across the length and breadth of this great nation. And while the incumbent occupant of the White House sinks in the polls, vilified by the formidable GOP propaganda machine as lacking any semblance of leadership whatsoever, and dismaying hand-wringing liberal Democrats as the very pillar of appeasement, Republicans find themselves vacillating weekly if not hourly between the nonentities who have thus far offered themselves up as their most probable challenger in the 2012 presidential election.
A strong sign of the depth of Republican desperation is that former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney was the early favorite to be the party's last candidate standing. Viewed by hard-core conservatives as far too moderate for their taste, his viability seemed predicated on the premise that virtually anyone professing to be a Republican would be preferable to a second term for Barack Obama.
Then again, was not the laboratory for that GOP anathema, health insurance reform, the People's Republic of Massachusetts under the governorship of none other than Comrade Mitt?
Romney has begged to differ with that too-obvious-to-be-true assessment. In one debate with his fellow aspirants, he claimed to be just itching to cast Romneycare as nothing even close to Obamacare. The erstwhile governor suggested that the overriding difference is that the Bay State model would be best adopted state-by-state rather than imposed by the federal government. The plausibility of this contention is, in fact, secondary to the conventional wisdom that in politics the explanations seldom catch up with the allegations.
And even if Romney's conception of Romney-care were to be miraculously accepted by that portion of the electorate that gets the heebie-jeebies about "socialized medicine" and "the European model of socialism," the former New England governor would be squandering his advantages of telegenic countenance and articulate argumentation on fighting from a defensive posture. No less an authority than that master military theorist Karl von Clausewitz told us back in the early 19th century that the most ruinous losses are suffered by the retreating army.
No sooner would Romney make his case for Romneycare, than he would have to come up with acceptable explanations for his turnabout from a pro-choice governor of liberal Massachusetts to an anti-choice candidate for the GOP presidential nomination. With even more inconsistencies between his gubernatorial performance and issues he espouses on the presidential campaign trail, hapless Mitt would be destined to the fate of a counter-puncher throughout the campaign season. Political prizes are seldom awarded to those battling from a defensive stance. Of course, conventional wisdom does not always hold up, but backroom strategists would certainly roll eyes and shake heads at the prospect of running a horse weighed down by such a hefty handicap.
Not that political pinwheeling necessarily disqualifies Romney as GOP presidential material. George Herbert Walker Bush, the successful party nominee in 1988, and John McCain, the party's standard-bearer in 2008, were both believed to be too moderate to satisfy decidedly more conservative Republicans. To win their respective nominations, each eased away from his less than conservative legislative record.
Decent church-going Republicans, who believe in the redemption of sinners, were not overly concerned about the discrepancies between the relatively moderate performances of Bush and McCain as legislators contrasted with the conservatism to which they gave lip service as presidential candidates. Had not some of the most powerful contemporary preachers confessed to having found their salvation after Perdition-bound lives devoted to draining whiskey bottles and scandalous wenching? Indeed a few televangelists have been shown in recent years to have more of a fixation on their respective collection plates than on the souls of their parishioners.
Hard-nosed Republican political observers were less certain that Bush 41 and McCain's changes of heart were indicative of actually seeing the errors of their old ways or merely transitions of convenience. In the end, of course, Bush 41 was ousted after only one term and McCain never got to take up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Valiant fighter that he was, McCain's presidential aspirations became an all but hopeless quest when he had the audacity as a U.S. senator to co-author campaign finance reform, a notion that still sends shivers down the Republican party's corporate spine. Unsurprisingly, during McCain's presidential campaign, he refused to support strengthening his own campaign finance reform bill lest he sew up his party's deepest pockets. Still, his presidential race seemed more like running in place on a treadmill against a spirited sprinter daring to dream that he could be the first African American president of the United States.
After one term, Bush 41's presidency went down the tubes for violating two tenets of contemporary Republicanism. He raised taxes after challenging America to read his lips as he solemnly pledged that he would never stoop to such a dastardly deed. And he was perceived to be no better than just another liberal jellyfish when he allowed Saddam Hussein to bounce off the ropes and live to fight another day by halting our troops at the gates of Baghdad with the plea that there was no exit strategy.
Then, of course, there was George W. Bush, who indeed defied all logic by getting elected to two terms. In retrospect, maybe Bush the Younger gets a Mulligan for his alleged theft of the 2000 presidential election against Al Gore. If historians choose to make that contest the exemplar of contemporary stolen presidential elections, for the sake of objectivity they cannot simply overlook those suspiciously tardy Cook County ballots in Illinois that gave John F. Kennedy his victory margin over Richard M. Nixon 40 years earlier.
Nonetheless, Bush 43 no sooner signed his White House lease than the nation was shocked and stunned by the heinous 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Bush the Younger famously responded by launching his vengeance tour - the good son finishing the job Poppy was too timid to carry through and never mind that his counter-attack was against a country never proven to have anything to do with the suicide air attacks that horrified the world.
The brilliantly crafted rationale for the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan was that the United States was declaring "war on terrorism" - a dazzling non sequitur that resonated seamlessly with angry Americans eager to barrage anyone or any country with lethal retribution for the unprecedented attacks on continental U.S. soil. Never mind that wars are hostilities between nations and cannot be waged against "isms," where there are no white flags to wave much less swords to surrender.
Thus with the 9/11 attacks, the Bush 43 administration had stumbled upon a possible formula for the continuity of GOP executive and legislative power, considering the unlikelihood that the electorate would be much up for changing presidents or shifting political party power in the middle of a war. The reasonable assumption was that perpetual war, as a war against an "ism" dictates, would translate into longevity of power for the incumbent Republican administration.
Riding the unbridled steed of patriotism - in which testosterone invariably trumps reason - the reckless Bush 43 had the solid backing of his wisest counsels, a preposterous pair of flag wavers, Vice President Dick "I had other priorities" Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who never made a mistake he couldn't pin on someone else.
Basking in all of this glory, Karl Rove, Bush 43's one-man braintrust whose audacity might cause the Florentine sage to turn emerald with envy, wagered that there was no way Americans would switch national administrations in the middle of a war. Rove felt that World War II rather than the infusion of New Deal socialism, in the guise of recovery programs from the Depression that followed the 1929 Wall Street crash, held the real key to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's three terms as president. The fantasy of perpetual war was a dream come true for Rove, whose stated life goal is a generation of GOP domination of both the White House and Capitol Hill.
But, alas, Rove, a proud American history buff, unforgivably forgot or chose to ignore Abe Lincoln's dictum that some of the people can be fooled all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. Thus, while at least part of Rove's high stakes wager held up, Bush 43 having been re-elected, blood continued to spill on the two selected battlefields of the purposefully misnamed war on terrorism, even as a novice Democratic party politician trounced a combat-tested, genuine Republican war hero in the 2008 election.
Compounding the long-standing smoke-and-mirrors myth that the GOP is both the party of fiscal responsibility and far tougher than weak-kneed Democrats in dealing with enemies foreign and domestic, Bush the Younger left the White House destined to be remembered as easily the worst president ever to hold that office. Not only was the confessed perpetrator of 9/11 still at large, presumably hopping through the treacherous terrain of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border with the apparent agility of a mountain goat hooked up to a dialysis dispenser, the U.S. economy was left in shambles with global markets following closely behind.
That Bin Laden was finally shot, killed and dumped at sea on Obama's watch is an inconvenient truth Republicans would prefer to expunge from recent memory, if not the history books. To accomplish this seemingly improbable feat, they pile more and more garbage at the President's doorstep, all the while shouting through talk radio megaphones that the incumbent in the White House has, in less than four years, not wiped up the malodorous mess and all of its indelible stains that over eight years was created, packaged and distributed by Bush 43/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice et al.
Not Penny Forthought, nor anyone else can make much sense of this nightmare narrative. But Penny watches the contingent of prospective Republican presidential nominees straining and struggling to have the electorate believe utter nonsense: the lunacy that two wars can be fought for 10 years financed by maybe the Tooth Fairy, but not, by golly, by taxing upstanding, patriotic wealthy Americans; that, though the nation is suffering from near double-digit unemployment after 10 years of Bush the Younger's corporate welfare, that two-percent of the nation's wealthiest individuals deserve tax breaks because they somehow qualify as "job creators," knowing full well that more often than not they are job-killers and job-outsourcers.
So Penny watches the Republican debates and the only possible sense she can make of them is that they are behaving as caricatures of politicians that would be far too off-the-wall for any respectable editorial cartoonist to draw. In fact, the appeal of onetime front-runner Mitt Romney, on all sides of virtually every issue, was so flimsy that whispers that none of the candidates was cutting it rose to prayers that were not muttered but screamed.
All of which prompted yet another sheriff to saddle up and lift the hopes of the born-agains and flat-earthers, the lunatic fringe believed by more than a few Democrats to be the very heart and soul of the GOP.
Prior to Rick Perry's one-man stampede, imbecilically devout Republicans had only Rep. Michele Bachmann, who claims a Higher Authority as her personal political guru, as the only star who was worthy of hitching their wagons that remain filled with skepticism about science, evolution and anything else they are unable to find in the holy scriptures.
That Governor Perry more truly represents the wishes of the Supreme Province than Ms. Bachmann is a decision more likely to emanate from his home state's considerable oil and defense industry interests than by righteous bible thumpers, who can be trusted to fall into the beat of the all-too-familiar corporate cadence.
Anyone foolhardy enough to attempt to use this narrative as an outline for a a novel or even a slapstick movie comedy would not only be rejected by agents far and wide but declared candidates for rubber rooms in the nearest funny farm. So, as I was starting to say up front, I no longer shrug off the conspiracy theorists as pitiful creatures gone bonkers in a weird and crazy world they never made.
These days I tend to sympathize with those who find imagination, illusion and fantasy a preferable alternative to confronting today's realities in a forthright and serious manner. Then, too, it is absolutely true that during the last 10 years or so of my professional life in Washington, I toiled from an office that had previously been occupied by none other than JFK conspiracy weaver extraordinaire Mark Lane. When my telephone pal, Penny Forthought, learns of this, we'll have much more to discuss.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
A TIME FOR REFLECTION
By H. N. Burdett
With apologies to Woodrow Wilson's Vice President Thomas Riley Marshall, what this country needs is a hell of a lot more than a good five-cent cigar.
The emergence of a seriously progressive political party that would at least do for the Democrats what the much-maligned Tea Party is doing for the Republican party - that is to say, shake them up - would be a positive start toward getting where the country needs to be.
If there is one thing on which overwhelming consensus might be reached in this bitterly divisive political era, it is the proposition that the lawmaking apparatus of this still great nation is broken. Furthermore, Americans cling to the understandable conceit that their legendary know-how can fix damn near anything and everything that requires repair.
So why in the name of Jupiter can't we put together that great Humpty Dumpty that had a great fall: the United States Congress? It won't take all the king's horses and all the king's men to put old Humpty back together again; an army of squirrel shooters provided that service way back in 1776. Fourscore and seven years later, rivers of native blood drenched great battlefields to preserve the union.
In 1789 in Philadelphia, the Founding Fathers, spearheaded by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton with the infinitely wise Ben Franklin offering his singularly sage advice leavened with wit and humor, wrote and the 13 original colonies subsequently ratified a masterpiece blueprint for democratic governance conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal.
Don't look now but the country stands at the brink of a crisis unparalleled in its more than two centuries of existence.
Confidence in government has plunged to a level unrivaled since the Civil War. Back then an unlikely self-educated rail-splitter named Abe Lincoln was steering the ship of state. Some say it was an act of divine providence
That Lincoln was in the right place at the right time in American history, is indisputable. It is one case that might give pause to the most avowed atheist who ever walked the earth. There would be monumental difficulty in refuting the intervention of a Higher Authority to anoint a Lincoln when he was most needed. Consider that Lincoln's predecessor, James Buchanan, was among the more inept souls ever to reside in the White House - one who would certainly be included among the five to 10 worst disasters ever to serve in the office of the presidency. And the Great Emancipator's successor, Andrew Johnson, also qualifies for that less than distinguished roll call.
At this current juncture in United States annals, the so-called two-party system has become such a rigidly partisan mess that a resolution praising motherhood and apple pie might trigger a party call and generate a maelstrom of uncivility. A mere 12.3 percent of the populus attest to having faith in their own national lawmakers. Easily remedied, one might wrongly opine. At the next election, just toss the rascals out and bring in fresh faces to set things right.
The glaring fallacy of this premise stems from the fact that it is unlikely to happen. Obviously the majority of some 87 percent of the electorate convinced that Congress has lost its way believe their own representatives are just fine; it's all those other nut-jobs, dunderheads and incompetents who are fouling up the works. And there's nothing to be done about correcting the inferior judgment of voters in other states and other congressional districts. To say nothing of there being no guarantee that fresh faces will be anything other than just that and that alone.
Evidence of competence can only be measured after it is too late to undo the damage done behind voting booth curtains. Only after the office has been won, the new member of Congress settles in and begins to legislate do we know what we have. The crystal ball and astrological charts have yet to be designed that can accurately predict whether those we elect will be an improvement upon what we have turned out.
This calls to mind the response of former Maryland Governor Theodore R. McKeldin when he was once asked the eternal question of whether judges should be appointed or elected. McKeldin unhesitatingly posited that there is but one way to ensure the ascendance of the very best judges: immaculate conception.
For all the hooting and hollering about how the Tea Party is muddying political waters, which were rather thoroughly polluted before the teabaggers rode into town, the contribution of these brash interlopers has been to force Republicans to become more introspective about their own values.
Tea Party supporters may have various stands on any number of issues, but they are united in their insistence upon whittling down government to its bare bones, as well as either vastly reducing or, preferably, eliminating federal taxes. And, incidentally, this is a departure from the credo of the Boston Tea Party with whom the contemporary incarnation proudly identifies. The original Tea Party, those who donned native American garb to dump tea imported from Mother England into beantown's harbor, did not rail against taxation per se, but rather taxation without representation - a condition most worthy of taking up ball and musket to challenge.
So just as the Tea Party has provoked the Republican party into examining what it stands for - presumably, small government and drastic reduction if not complete elimination of taxes, and the like - is it not time for a progressive counterpart to stand up and test the frigid feet of the timid Democratic party against the flames of self-revelation?
It is high time for Democrats to determine whether they remain committed to their traditional roots: a fair shake for working people; allegiance to concepts like social justice and equal protection under the law that they are more likely than their more conservative brethren to regard as sacrosanct rather than flowery euphemisms for pie-in-the-sky claptrap; a dogged belief in the revolutionary notion that health, education and assistance to those struggling to put roofs over the heads of their families, food on the table and clothes on their backs and playing by the rules are at least as much a slice of the same American Dream as the lust for ever greater profits and making a few killings on the market.
Holier-than-thou investors and venture capitalists succeed in pawning themselves off as courageous saviors of the American way, the risk-takers, whose kissing cousins at blackjack, craps and roulette tables from Vegas to Atlantic City engage in the same basic activity only under somewhat less respectable guises. In the end, both are are doing what they do: gambling, a pastime to which all too many are addicted and for which psychologists and psychiatrists have licenses to treat. The difference is that at least in the casinos there are rules and if you don't abide by them you get thrown out with an invitation not to return.
On Wall Street and in corporate board rooms, the consensus preference is for no rules, keep government off our backs, the market can only seek its own level unimpeded by nuisance regulations and the sky's the limit because, as any fool can plainly see, they are above and beyond the law. After all, they are the 'job creators,' the crowd whose high-stake wagers fuel the entire economy.
The truth is that there are decent folks at both ends of the economic spectrum, but there will always be another element: those ever seeking ways to tilt the playing field in their own favor, to game the system for their own advantage and at the expense of others.
The bad apples in the three-piece suits at one end will always try to dream up new variations on the Ponzi scheme, as will, operating from the lower end, welfare queens, grifters, three-card monty dealers and other street-smart sharpies out to pocket the fast buck from those of whom it is said are born every minute.
If and when they are caught, the difference is that the suits always seem to have sufficient emergency funds and a valid passport stashed away for a quick flight to the tropics or to hire the services of clever mouthpieces who make their living assisting and advising clients in the fine art of avoiding and evading taxes and which often enough allow them to swagger off into the sunset with, at most, out-of-court settlements. At the other end of the scale, the penalty is more likely to be stiff fines or jail time.
With all the nonsense spoken and suggested by the fear-mongers who wring their hands and express concern about the United States going the way of dreaded "European socialism," the simple truth is that the last best hope of capitalism does indeed rest with its ability to swallow hard and accept sensible regulations.
The challenge of government is to seriously enforce these regulations, to revisit the Glass-Steagall Act, which worked well from the Great Depression to prevent banks from engaging in multiple mischiefs that are morally untenable and unacceptable.
When Glass-Steagall was overturned in 1999 by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley cabal, the drawbridge was lowered, the gates of economic peril opened wide; it was the game-changer that led inevitably to the malaise that the experts now tell us we'll be digging out for another five to 10 years at minimum. The Dodd-Frank bill, at very best Glass-Steagall lite, is tantamount to tending to a hangnail when open-heart surgery is required to save the patient.
For the Democrats another kind of surgery is required. They urgently need a spine transplant. If they could only find a way to acquire the DNA of arguably the two toughest presidents this nation or any nation has ever known, and they were both Democrats: Andrew Jackson and Harry Truman. Old Hickory and the Man from Missouri must be pinwheeling in their graves at the shocking transformations that have evolved in the party they revered. The backbones of these men would be just the ticket to resuscitate this flailing and floundering shipwreck of a political party.
As for that fellow Lincoln, does anyone honestly believe that were he alive today he would even consider registering as a Republican? The party that fights any real effort at health care reform tooth and nail? The party that would eliminate the Department of Health, Education and Welfare as the exemplar of government profligacy? The party that covets and fawns over those at the upper 2 percent of the economic scale with the ferocity of a lioness protecting her cubs?
From the vantage point of his memorial at one end of the National Mall, Lincoln peers toward the Capitol to the east. His heart is heavy. Were his hands not sculpted from marble, were they flesh, blood and bone, he would raise them to hide his eyes, his long, thin frame trembling with grief. The words carved into the stone on the wall to his right begin: "With malice toward none, with charity for all. . ."
###
With apologies to Woodrow Wilson's Vice President Thomas Riley Marshall, what this country needs is a hell of a lot more than a good five-cent cigar.
The emergence of a seriously progressive political party that would at least do for the Democrats what the much-maligned Tea Party is doing for the Republican party - that is to say, shake them up - would be a positive start toward getting where the country needs to be.
If there is one thing on which overwhelming consensus might be reached in this bitterly divisive political era, it is the proposition that the lawmaking apparatus of this still great nation is broken. Furthermore, Americans cling to the understandable conceit that their legendary know-how can fix damn near anything and everything that requires repair.
So why in the name of Jupiter can't we put together that great Humpty Dumpty that had a great fall: the United States Congress? It won't take all the king's horses and all the king's men to put old Humpty back together again; an army of squirrel shooters provided that service way back in 1776. Fourscore and seven years later, rivers of native blood drenched great battlefields to preserve the union.
In 1789 in Philadelphia, the Founding Fathers, spearheaded by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton with the infinitely wise Ben Franklin offering his singularly sage advice leavened with wit and humor, wrote and the 13 original colonies subsequently ratified a masterpiece blueprint for democratic governance conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal.
Don't look now but the country stands at the brink of a crisis unparalleled in its more than two centuries of existence.
Confidence in government has plunged to a level unrivaled since the Civil War. Back then an unlikely self-educated rail-splitter named Abe Lincoln was steering the ship of state. Some say it was an act of divine providence
That Lincoln was in the right place at the right time in American history, is indisputable. It is one case that might give pause to the most avowed atheist who ever walked the earth. There would be monumental difficulty in refuting the intervention of a Higher Authority to anoint a Lincoln when he was most needed. Consider that Lincoln's predecessor, James Buchanan, was among the more inept souls ever to reside in the White House - one who would certainly be included among the five to 10 worst disasters ever to serve in the office of the presidency. And the Great Emancipator's successor, Andrew Johnson, also qualifies for that less than distinguished roll call.
At this current juncture in United States annals, the so-called two-party system has become such a rigidly partisan mess that a resolution praising motherhood and apple pie might trigger a party call and generate a maelstrom of uncivility. A mere 12.3 percent of the populus attest to having faith in their own national lawmakers. Easily remedied, one might wrongly opine. At the next election, just toss the rascals out and bring in fresh faces to set things right.
The glaring fallacy of this premise stems from the fact that it is unlikely to happen. Obviously the majority of some 87 percent of the electorate convinced that Congress has lost its way believe their own representatives are just fine; it's all those other nut-jobs, dunderheads and incompetents who are fouling up the works. And there's nothing to be done about correcting the inferior judgment of voters in other states and other congressional districts. To say nothing of there being no guarantee that fresh faces will be anything other than just that and that alone.
Evidence of competence can only be measured after it is too late to undo the damage done behind voting booth curtains. Only after the office has been won, the new member of Congress settles in and begins to legislate do we know what we have. The crystal ball and astrological charts have yet to be designed that can accurately predict whether those we elect will be an improvement upon what we have turned out.
This calls to mind the response of former Maryland Governor Theodore R. McKeldin when he was once asked the eternal question of whether judges should be appointed or elected. McKeldin unhesitatingly posited that there is but one way to ensure the ascendance of the very best judges: immaculate conception.
For all the hooting and hollering about how the Tea Party is muddying political waters, which were rather thoroughly polluted before the teabaggers rode into town, the contribution of these brash interlopers has been to force Republicans to become more introspective about their own values.
Tea Party supporters may have various stands on any number of issues, but they are united in their insistence upon whittling down government to its bare bones, as well as either vastly reducing or, preferably, eliminating federal taxes. And, incidentally, this is a departure from the credo of the Boston Tea Party with whom the contemporary incarnation proudly identifies. The original Tea Party, those who donned native American garb to dump tea imported from Mother England into beantown's harbor, did not rail against taxation per se, but rather taxation without representation - a condition most worthy of taking up ball and musket to challenge.
So just as the Tea Party has provoked the Republican party into examining what it stands for - presumably, small government and drastic reduction if not complete elimination of taxes, and the like - is it not time for a progressive counterpart to stand up and test the frigid feet of the timid Democratic party against the flames of self-revelation?
It is high time for Democrats to determine whether they remain committed to their traditional roots: a fair shake for working people; allegiance to concepts like social justice and equal protection under the law that they are more likely than their more conservative brethren to regard as sacrosanct rather than flowery euphemisms for pie-in-the-sky claptrap; a dogged belief in the revolutionary notion that health, education and assistance to those struggling to put roofs over the heads of their families, food on the table and clothes on their backs and playing by the rules are at least as much a slice of the same American Dream as the lust for ever greater profits and making a few killings on the market.
Holier-than-thou investors and venture capitalists succeed in pawning themselves off as courageous saviors of the American way, the risk-takers, whose kissing cousins at blackjack, craps and roulette tables from Vegas to Atlantic City engage in the same basic activity only under somewhat less respectable guises. In the end, both are are doing what they do: gambling, a pastime to which all too many are addicted and for which psychologists and psychiatrists have licenses to treat. The difference is that at least in the casinos there are rules and if you don't abide by them you get thrown out with an invitation not to return.
On Wall Street and in corporate board rooms, the consensus preference is for no rules, keep government off our backs, the market can only seek its own level unimpeded by nuisance regulations and the sky's the limit because, as any fool can plainly see, they are above and beyond the law. After all, they are the 'job creators,' the crowd whose high-stake wagers fuel the entire economy.
The truth is that there are decent folks at both ends of the economic spectrum, but there will always be another element: those ever seeking ways to tilt the playing field in their own favor, to game the system for their own advantage and at the expense of others.
The bad apples in the three-piece suits at one end will always try to dream up new variations on the Ponzi scheme, as will, operating from the lower end, welfare queens, grifters, three-card monty dealers and other street-smart sharpies out to pocket the fast buck from those of whom it is said are born every minute.
If and when they are caught, the difference is that the suits always seem to have sufficient emergency funds and a valid passport stashed away for a quick flight to the tropics or to hire the services of clever mouthpieces who make their living assisting and advising clients in the fine art of avoiding and evading taxes and which often enough allow them to swagger off into the sunset with, at most, out-of-court settlements. At the other end of the scale, the penalty is more likely to be stiff fines or jail time.
With all the nonsense spoken and suggested by the fear-mongers who wring their hands and express concern about the United States going the way of dreaded "European socialism," the simple truth is that the last best hope of capitalism does indeed rest with its ability to swallow hard and accept sensible regulations.
The challenge of government is to seriously enforce these regulations, to revisit the Glass-Steagall Act, which worked well from the Great Depression to prevent banks from engaging in multiple mischiefs that are morally untenable and unacceptable.
When Glass-Steagall was overturned in 1999 by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley cabal, the drawbridge was lowered, the gates of economic peril opened wide; it was the game-changer that led inevitably to the malaise that the experts now tell us we'll be digging out for another five to 10 years at minimum. The Dodd-Frank bill, at very best Glass-Steagall lite, is tantamount to tending to a hangnail when open-heart surgery is required to save the patient.
For the Democrats another kind of surgery is required. They urgently need a spine transplant. If they could only find a way to acquire the DNA of arguably the two toughest presidents this nation or any nation has ever known, and they were both Democrats: Andrew Jackson and Harry Truman. Old Hickory and the Man from Missouri must be pinwheeling in their graves at the shocking transformations that have evolved in the party they revered. The backbones of these men would be just the ticket to resuscitate this flailing and floundering shipwreck of a political party.
As for that fellow Lincoln, does anyone honestly believe that were he alive today he would even consider registering as a Republican? The party that fights any real effort at health care reform tooth and nail? The party that would eliminate the Department of Health, Education and Welfare as the exemplar of government profligacy? The party that covets and fawns over those at the upper 2 percent of the economic scale with the ferocity of a lioness protecting her cubs?
From the vantage point of his memorial at one end of the National Mall, Lincoln peers toward the Capitol to the east. His heart is heavy. Were his hands not sculpted from marble, were they flesh, blood and bone, he would raise them to hide his eyes, his long, thin frame trembling with grief. The words carved into the stone on the wall to his right begin: "With malice toward none, with charity for all. . ."
###
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