Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Morris O’Kelly is a producer for the Tavis Smiley radio show. Morris, you may recall, was my counterpoint on the NY Times Fifth Down Blog last year and again in October of this year, and through that connection I was invited to participate in a citizen roundtable discussion on the Tavis Smiley radio show.

Your thoughts and comments are certainly invited and appreciated.

You may be one of those who always seems to have enough money on hand to pay your bills. You may have a nice savings account, and a retirement account, and perhaps some other investments that you can convert to cash when needed.

Or, you may be a person who is always willing to work but can’t always find work, and when you do, it’s for minimum wage or not much more. You are always behind on all of your bills, and you take turns paying each one at the last possible moment to avoid losing a car or having the electricity turned off.

Or, you may reside somewhere between those two extremes.

In our lifetimes, most of us have never seen what’s happening now to our economy. Two years ago we were talking about how to overcome our reliance on fossil fuels; one year ago we were talking about shifting resources in the war on terror, from Iraq to Afghanistan. Today all we can talk about is the meltdown of capitalism itself.

There will be an election in this country in 8 days. The next president will either be an economic neophyte who clings to free market principles, or an economic neophyte who clings to economic welfare. Neither man can even comprehend the magnitude of what is coming, thus neither man has any hope of constructing a meaningful response. And even if there was enough wisdom and understanding by either candidate to act constructively, he would immediately run into ideologues to his left and his right, willing to use his ideas to make sure the other does not get their way. In other words, stalemate.

Do you know how you get rid of bad ideas? You let them die. Unfortunately, there is a price to pay for doing so. Good people lose their good jobs, and go from somebody with a solid life to somebody who is in a constant scramble to stay ahead of complete destruction. Sure, Americans are resilient (as, presumably, are citizens of other nations), but when you don’t provide opportunity, it doesn’t matter how hard a man is willing to work. When you tell him that his $50,000 a year job is not coming back, and he has to fight to win a $30,000 job to replace it, you are telling that man that his former life is over.

The truth is that this economic tsunami is coming, and there is nothing that either candidate can do about it. Neither man has any idea where it will end or what will be lost; the market will determine those things. There are some bad ideas floating around, particularly McCain’s to buy bad mortgages and keep people in their homes, bad because only the market can determine the true value of those homes, bad because everybody bought in to the same rules, and now the rules will be changed to protect the losers.

The hidden truth of capitalism is that it contracts as well as expands. Any bet that the economy will only expand is a bet on a pyramid scheme; a certain amount of that money is destined to be bad money.

The losers take jobs with them; they take consumer spending with them; they take massive asset value with them. Any government which interferes with the process of resetting prices, risks an even bigger tsumami when all confidence is lost in the system as it continues to fail despite those efforts, and of course such governments risk actual bankruptcy, where bills don’t get paid and services don’t get provided.

Whichever man wins the White House, he will preside over the most massive loss of jobs in this country’s history. He will preside over a massive reliance on social services, and he will preside over a watershed moment not only in American history but in world history, in the alliance of nations, capital and labor. Many new ideas will come from the ashes of this destruction, and many people will be in a position to understand that capitalism never did hold all the answers. Perhaps we need a new system; perhaps the gap between the top and the bottom grew too vast. Perhaps too many people, for too long, allowed themselves to believe that the tough questions could wait.

If the American worker must lose because of these bad bets, then so must the people who made those bets. And when the time comes to determine what replaces what was lost, and who owns the assets of that new system, American workers should remember that nobody was looking out for them when the bottom dropped out, and that perhaps their own interests are best served by being in control of that new system.

I’d like to give a shout out to The Mo’ Kelly Report for embedding the following video of Donna Brazile, speaking at The New Yorker Festival.
This monologue by Ms. Brazile, who is seen regularly on ABC television’s Sunday morning program “This Week with George Stephanopoulos, is really in two parts. In the first part she talks about how far the country has come, and then she gets to some of the politics of this election, which she perceives to contain racial undertones. I agree with that observation. In fact, I agree with all of what Ms. Brazile says here, and I’m grateful to Mo’ Kelly for leading me to this clip.

I’m famous. The New York Times said so.

What will I do with this fame? I told my co-workers this morning, “I can die and go to heaven now. I’ve got a byline in the New York Times.”

But I will admit that, as I enjoyed a hot shower this morning before going to work, after having seen the post that Toni Monkovic, bless her his soul, had been preparing for several weeks, I did have one over-riding thought:

Maybe I should start a blog. Maybe I can attract some eyeballs.

Then I remembered I had a goDaddy account, and that I had installed WordPress. In other words, I already had a blog.

So, now I suppose the point would be to keep it up. Toni told me that she he wished she he could pay me for my thoughts. Well, maybe she he can. Maybe her his generous exposure will lead people to this blog, and maybe those eyeballs will translate into income. Maybe then I could quit my day job and share opinions online as my full time occupation. 

The economics aren’t impossible, when you think about it. I would need a couple hundred dollars a day in advertising income, to make this a full time pursuit. There are a number of ways to get there, so the trick is to get the eyeballs, and then maximimze the return on them.

I say it can be done. And I say, I’m the man to do it.

I’m nothing if not opinionated. In many ways, I’ve been preparing my entire life for this moment. As far back as I can remember, I analyzed absolutely everything, and then did so again. And I would discuss those thoughts with anybody who would put up with me. I retired the “Most Talkative” trophy. I crushed the field.

But there was always something going on behind the words. The words were simply a mad attempt to keep up with the thoughts. I’ve mellowed over the years, and I am still the most analytical person I know, by far.

So, I belong here. You belong here. Let’s kick stuff around.

The race card. Ugh. I know that it’s naive of me to dare think that, if we only stop talking about it, there will be no more racism.

That’s not exactly what I say. What I say is, until we learn to change the subject, we will be forced to keep talking about race. In other words, we have to try to stay in the present, and accept what we see.

A friend of mine lives in a suburb of Detroit, and has a child in football. He told me today that he sees enormous segregation throughout his area; white schools and black schools. So, there is a real question of equal opportunity, in some areas. So, it’s complicated. It depends on your particular life experience, whether or not you have had equal opportunity.

I just feel very strongly that idiots such as Limbaugh (who is, after all, an entertainer, let’s please remember) get to set the tone and topic of discourse. As I was driving back to work from lunch today, it occurred to me what really bothered me most about Limbaugh’s buffoonery on ESPN: he ambushed them. This is a group of football junkies, sitting around a table talking football, and Limbaugh plays the race card? The others were clearly stunned and sputtered in their attempts to respond, but the damage was done. When he heard what had gone on, McNabb was incredulous. Limbaugh seemed to have gotten away with something he should not have. ESPN spent the week backpedaling, Limbaugh eventually resigned, and the Sunday NFL Countdown crew came back the next week, minus Limbaugh, hats in hands, trying to figure out what had happened to their show.

It was offensive. It made me feel dirty to be a white person. It truly did.

Now, if ESPN wanted to host a roundtable discussion on the subject of race in sports, and the panelists had an opportunity to prepare their thoughts, and had some idea what the topic of discussion would be…different story. 

What Limbaugh did was designed to accomplish one thing: make himself the story. There is no greater self-promoter in entertainment today than Limbaugh, and that’s saying something on a planet which also includes Howard Stern.

There is a rule in the blog world, called Godwin’s Law, that says the first person to invoke Hitler or the Nazis as a comparison to the views of another, loses the debate and kills the thread.

I suggest that we have a very similar rule for situations where somebody plays the race card, unless of course the topic is race.

Limbaugh played the race card. Let’s go back and get this right: that means he loses.