Mr. Will,

As an avowed social liberal, I consider you to be an important voice, not because we see things the same way but because we don’t. I am a keen admirer of your intellect, as I possess a sharp intellect as well. I am nowhere near as educated nor as well read as you, and I am constantly being educated and enlightened by following your train of thought.

Having said that, I have become disturbed with your recent inability to complete a thought. Your columns will start off on a sharp tack, then veer this way and that, then sort of slow to a stop. No coherent development, no walloping final point.

I’ve noticed a tendency amongst social conservatives such as yourself to assume the burden of defending capitalism. Although I understand that social conservatives fancy themselves fiscal conservatives, what I see is an unbridled defense of free enterprise. In other words, Convervative seems to equate to Capitalist. Thus, you collectively have demonstrated that you feel a duty to represent free enterprise in its best possible light in this, perhaps the worst of times.

What I see is that you have undertaken an impossible task, and will likely be undone by it.

Your Sunday column in the Washington Post today clearly calls for government to get out of the way and allow business and industry to cast aside workers, and to greatly reduce the income for those they keep, in order to regain efficiency.

If you are as analytical and skeptical as I believe you are, then you will at some point question whether or not free enterprise capitalism is the best we as humans can do. You will ask if the pain and misery which batters untold millions during economic slowdowns is an acceptable price for economic renewal.

You will ask yourself if our labor and material resources are really being used as wisely as possible. And while you are wondering that, you will ask yourself why this economic system has no use for 9 percent of its potential labor force which is ready and willing to show up for work, if asked. You will, if honest, acknowledge that you consider it acceptable to allow this number to grow.

You will ask yourself why the essential elements of human life: food, fuel, shelter, health care, medicine, are also the most expensive, and thus out of reach to some extent for more than a quarter of the population of this country.

You will ask yourself why more than two thirds of all workers are one or two paychecks away from poverty.

I will ask you this: Would you consider it elitist to defend policies which inflict pain that you will never have to endure? Would that not be a perfect definition of the term?

Imagine this: ABC fires you. WashPost/Newsweek fires you. Your syndicate drops you. Nobody will pay you a penny to publish a word you say.

Your savings lose all of their value. Your home plummets in price and you can’t profit from selling it, but you can’t afford to keep it.

You have to walk away.

Far-fetched, of course. There is a certain momentum to your life that only a sex scandal could derail. But what I want you to do is imagine it. The question is: what would you do next?

Now, imagine a 50-something factory worker, making perhaps $50,000 a year, with perhaps 25 years toward a nice pension. Then his company goes broke and he is out of a job. The pension fund is also broke and therefore worthless. He can’t find anything like the work he used to do. He finds himself in late working life, with no education which has any value in the job market, and no chance whatsoever to make even half of what he once earned.

My question for you is: What did he do wrong?

The New York Times

As far back as I can remember I have been a music lover. I grew up in suburban New Jersey to the sounds of WABC-AM and WCBS-FM (Golden 101!). ABC played contemporary pop and CBS played oldies, mainly songs from the late 1950s and early 1960s. My mother seemed to know all the words to all the songs, and had perfect recall for song titles and the artists who performed them.

I remember I went to New York City with a friend once and we wound up at something called The New York Experience, sort of a museum of modern New York. There was a jukebox there with the Del Vikings’ “Come Go With Me” on one side of a record, and their lesser hit “Whispering Bells” on the flip side. When I got home I quizzed my mother: what was on the flip side of “Come Go With Me”? I was so proud to tell her, once she gave up. She responded with a quizzical “Oh”, because those songs had been released at different times.

I hadn’t yet learned about reissues…

I discovered FM when I was 16. A student in my high school home room brought in a single of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”, a truly remarkable song for 1976. I asked why I hadn’t heard the song before and she sneered “because you listen to AM”, the “AM” curling out of her mouth like an epithet.

My radio only got AM! Oh…..

I bought a cheap combo player from a friend that had AM/FM/turntable, and found some pop stations with better clarity than AM. It took a couple more years to find progressive FM, and then I was home.

WNEW-FM was THE progressive, album rock FM station of the 1970s. OK, WMMR out of Cleveland was also famous, but FM signals do not travel as far as AM signals; I had no chance of picking up a Cleveland station in New Jersey.

Dan Neer, Dennis Elsis, Allison “the night bird” Steele, and the king of them all, Scott Muni. They didn’t have slick, huckster voices. What they had was a passion for the music. WNEW also played live concerts from up and coming performers such as Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel and Meatloaf. I would lay in my bed at night and listen to these concerts, transported, transfixed. The most joyous days of my childhood were those nights.
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And so the last several days have seen spectacular images coming from the Indian port city of Mumbai, a key commercial center of this vast nation. It will be some time before the smoke clears, literally as well as figuratively. It will be a while before we know who did this and why.

We can make the early assumption that a commercial center was attacked on purpose. Surely if the attackers wanted to target religious and other cultural centers, they could have done so. They chose hotels popular with foreigners. They chose a commercial hub.

They were attacking commerce.

Was the point to disrupt capital flow into and out of India? Was the point to blame commerce and capital for social ills? All issues to be unraveled during the investigation.

The tendency at a time like this will be to blame individuals or small groups who profess a “hatred” for freedom loving ways of life. It is clear that attackers such as these do not care that they are killing human beings with families and loved ones and productive lives. The attackers care much more about the statement they are making.

The phrase “we do not negotiate with terrorists”, made popular by the U.S. and Israel (even though both nations do exactly that, routinely) is another way of saying “We deplore their tactics; therefore we will not address their issues.”

Which is an easy way of sticking your head in the sand and hoping they don’t shoot your ass off.

Certainly there will always be a need for effective intelligence and law enforcement. Certainly there can be no excuse for killing innocent individuals in order to make a political point. No movement which behaves this way can be given a seat at a negotiating table.

However, how much longer can we go on demonizing those with whom we disagree? This attack may have nothing to do with al-Quaeda, nothing to do with the Taliban. It may be some other expression of extremism. But whoever did this, represents an ideology that is not going away.

Think about that.

In the eight years of the George W. Bush presidency, the United States pursued a policy which represented the belief that extremism can be eradicated.

No, it can’t.
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Read this article from today’s New York Times:

Nationalism of Putin’s Era Veils Sins of Stalin’s

then read my comment:

This article manages to utterly mangle any potential it had to teach.

First, the phrase “sins of communism” is far too vague and, in the context of anti-communist tendencies in the United States, presumably pejorative.

Surely the average well educated New York Times reader can differentiate between Marxism-Leninism and the brutality of Stalin and his successors.

So, the first point was missed entirely: revealing the many ways in which Stalin actually rejected his predecessor’s political philosophy runs an unavoidable risk of resuscitating Lenin’s legend. The man is already revered in Russia; peeling back the layers of the atrocities which were committed after his sudden, early death would expose how the revolution was abandoned. It is not a far leap from there to consider whether the true revolution should be resumed.

So, Putin wants nothing to do with potentially bringing the country back to that period.

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…or a ham or whatever you stuff into your face on Thanksgiving. Go be with your family.

Take a break from the worries of the world…

…they’ll still be here tomorrow.

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…lame intro, the rest is classic Mitch…

President-elect Obama made it clear early on: “The country has only one president at a time.”

The public mood could not be more clear: “Can we change that?”

Yesterday, Obama announced the formation of an economic advisory group for the express purpose of having an economic recovery plan ready to go “on day 1.”

One can only wonder if Obama grasps the folly of any such plan.

One of the key contradictions of capitalism in its imperialist form is this: companies and the broader economy are squarely multi-national and indeed, in many ways borderless. And yet, populations are still governed within national borders. President-elect Obama is making plans to defeat an international economic crisis by making changes within the borders of one country, the United States. And the solutions he is proposing amount to “stimulus”: flooding the existing markets with dollars in the hope that the money will find its way into the hands of “consumers.”

In other words, he is attempting to re-float the sinking ship.

He has no intention of letting it sink. As I mentioned recently, the bailout of Citibank sent a clear signal: we will not let major institutions fail, because the risk of a complete system failure is too great.

Nevermind that nobody has the slightest idea how to prevent such a thing, other than to buy the bad debt, flood these financial institutions with cash and hope that they don’t make the same mistakes again.

Two immediate problems with that theory (and the long term is even scarier): 1: the bottom has not been found yet, and cannot be found until the government gets out of the way and allows the market to establish prices; 2: the economic growth which provides value to investments has been shown to have been not a bubble but a balloon. An even more apt description, one which I’ve used more than once, is of a pyramid scheme.

In other words, the value was only there as long as new investors could be found to pump up the prices. Once the well dried up, the air came rushing out of the balloon and the pyramid came crashing to the ground. Except, the pyramid is not done collapsing. Not by a long, long shot.

Over two million workers lost their jobs and filed for unemployment benefits in the last four weeks. As predicted here, Obama’s plan to create or salvage 2.5 million jobs will soon seem paltry, and indeed will equate to perhaps one third of the jobs lost in the time between his announcement and his inauguration. Nobody wants to float real numbers because there is no historical precedent for this growth in the number of unemployed at such a rapid pace. Analysts keep trying to compare this situation to past slowdowns, but the comparisons fail because the comparisons are being made to recessions which were near their bottom. This one has only just begun.

And so President Bush has essentially stepped aside and is not interfering with Obama’s shadow government. Obama’s economic advisers are working directly with Congress to fashion the shape and depth of the policies which Obama considers most urgent, particularly his $500 billion job rejuvenation plan.

It is a very good idea to invest in infrastructure, especially when private sector jobs are scarce. Obama has no choice but to ignore the budget deficit, and he will do exactly that. But what does he plan to do about the other 15 million or more who will still be unemployed after his job package ramps up?

His intention is to wait.

If the economy rebounds, the private sector will create more jobs. Obama will wait and hope that the government stimulus is enough to breathe life into that engine, and he will attempt to manage the interim pain.

As I said on Tavis Smiley back before the election, Obama is destined to be an agent of change he cannot even fathom. The issues he must tackle, right away, will bear little resemblance to the priorities he staked out during the campaign. If he is deft, he will attempt to fold the former into the latter.

But this is no time for idealism.

The Washington Redskins football team holds an annual giveaway of turkeys, food and gifts at their stadium. Yesterday, people were lined up as far as the eye could see to receive this meager assortment.

It was better than they could do for themselves.

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It’s a breathtaking array of headlines in this morning’s New York Times:

U.S. Unveils $800 Billion Credit Program

President-Elect Starts Taking On Burdens of the Job

Home Prices Hit 2004 Levels in Quarter

When you also consider the $500 billion stimulus package being considered by Congress, and the eventual jobs program which president Obama will be forced to put into place, this bailout is approaching two trillion dollars.

That’s $6,000 for every man, woman and child in this country.

And the meltdown, remember, is global: this rescue will take many times over that amount, when spread among all of the countries in crisis.

And - we’ve only just begun. The arc of this meltdown is in, perhaps, it’s first ten percent. Perhaps less.

Where did all the value go? The better question is: was it ever there in the first place? The actual value of goods and services may not be the same as what a customer is willing to pay at times of high confidence in future returns. In other words, “expensive” money may seem like “cheap” money, if you expect to profit from that investment despite the cost. During an economic boom, this is exactly the psychology: get in while you can! Get out before the bust.
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U.S. Approves Plan to Help Citigroup Cope With Losses

So proclaimed the New York Times this bright and beautiful Monday morning (you sure look fine…).

Too big to fail? Oh, yeah. Hell, yeah.

No question about it.

Why is Citibank too big too fail? As one analyst put it recently, the credit market is capitalism’s oxygen. Without the relatively free flow of credit, the system grinds to a halt, seized up for lack of lubrication.

Citibank is a key contributor to that lubrication.

The U.S. government has agreed to commit 306 billion dollars - do these numbers even have the capacity to shock, anymore? - to underwrite shaky obligations held by Citibank (if Citibank can’t pay the obligations, the government will) and will inject 20 billion dollars directly into Citibank’s available capital.

The details:
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Yesterday, president-elect Obama announced that he will put America back to work on his watch. He promised 2.5 million new or salvaged jobs during the course of his plan to rebuild the national infrastructure and develop new, clean sources of energy.

On the surface, putting American workers back to work is clearly something we can all support. After all, so much money has gone into bailing out those who made the huge bets that crashed the world economy; how about a little something for the workers beyond extending their unemployment benefits?

At the same time, the national infrastructure clearly needs attention which it has, for too long, failed to receive.

In a recent column, Pat Buchanan struggled to make sense of the death of American Auto, blaming its demise on unfair competition from abroad, where work, wage and living standards are not as high as in the United States. In other words, the decked is stacked against American Auto. He made the point that for the first time in U.S. history, the government employs more workers than does manufacturing.

President-elect Obama intends to double down on that scenario, or so it would seem.

How will this money be spent? Will the government directly run these projects? Will they be doled out to the companies which promise to do the jobs most cheaply; i.e., beat down workers on wages and benefits? Will start-ups, minorities and other entrepreneurs be encouraged to compete for these projects?

There is still a lot of support for “big business” in the halls of government. The fact that the Senate is dragging its feet in bailing out American Auto should not fool you into thinking that Congress is alright with American Auto failing.

No: they are alright with American Auto declaring bankruptcy, which will allow them to basically dismantle the agreements they have with workers. As others have pointed out, the hourly labor cost paid by the Big 3 is much larger than their competition. There are some specific reasons for this, among them the high cost of health care and pensions. These were generous deals for their time but were deemed affordable based on the industry’s profit level.

They aren’t sustainable in times like these. As a result, Congress looks at the situation and says “Your cost structure is too high. You can’t make money. Why should we throw good money after bad?”

Take it out on the workers.
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Ladies, remember when you went gaga over the latest teen hearth-throb? Think back to when you were 12 or 13, just beginning that transition from tomboy to little lady. And then you first saw Jordan Knight or Justin Timberlake, and something strange happened inside your chest and you felt weird but in a good way?

Welcome to our world, ladies. Except, we men, well many of us, we worship at the alter of sports.

We tend to be huge fans of the game itself, whatever game it may be. Many of us do like more than one sport, but we typically have a favorite sport.

And within that sport, we typically have a favorite team. And we typically made that connection when we were very young, perhaps 8 or 9.

Maybe it was Dad’s favorite team. Maybe we liked the uniforms. Maybe a player we worshipped played for that team.

My father was a Johnnie Mize fan. When Mize played for the Giants, my father was a Giants fan. When the Giants traded Mize to the Yankees, my father, still young, switched his allegiance to the Yankees, where it remained until he died, only last year. He took his allegiance to the grave.

As will most of us. Once a fan, always a fan.

I have several strong allegiances, to which I will admit now: Basketball: the New York Knicks. Baseball: the New York Mets. Football: the New York (OK, Hackensack, NJ) Jets.

When I was younger, had more discretionary income (before discovering the joys of being a parent 5 times over, that is), I was like any other Jets fan, attending as many games as I could, booing when they sucked, cheering like a maniac when they did well. Over the years the Jets have had, it seems, far more losing seasons than winning ones, far more years when they were among the worst than when they were among the best.

Still a fan. Just an irritated fan. (OK fellow Jets fans, fill in the blank: Rich _______ Kotite.)

This year may be different. Even if you know next to nothing about sports, even many of you ladies who only tolerate sports because your boyfriend is basically a sports lunatic, have heard that Brett Favre retired from the Packers after 800,000 years as the most exciting quarterback in the solar system, then changed his mind, decided that the Packers didn’t really want him back, and accepted a trade to the Jets.

Hallelujah! And so forth. The Jets finally did something to make their fans proud. They finally said to the pack, we ain’t following, we’re leading. You react to us for a change.

We appreciate it.
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(…the one who didn’t lose a bag of tools…)

This is the second in a series of articles focusing on the term of President Barack Obama.

The word is out now, that Hillary Clinton will be the next Secretary of State. What makes this most interesting is the issue which became an early, central theme in the Democratic Primary Race: talking to our enemies “without preconditions.”

When Barack Obama uttered those words in a debate, Clinton pounced. Her immediate response was to label such comments “naive” and “dangerous”. She insisted that handing this sort of prestige to an enemy of the United States, or even the mere suggestion of it, revealed Obama’s lack of fitness for office. It became a strong early wedge issue, the first time Obama was really on his heels a little bit.

He responded by asserting that he had meant what he said, but that this did not mean he would meet without low level talks to set the agenda and so forth. In other words, he wasn’t hopping on a plane to Damascus any time soon.

What makes this so interesting is the message coming from al Quaeda this week, in the wake of Obama’s election from Ayman al-Zawahiri, as reported by Fox News:

The second of these messages is to the new president of the United States. I tell him: you have reached the position of president, and a heavy legacy of failure and crimes awaits you. A failure in Iraq to which you have admitted, and a failure in Afghanistan to which the commanders of your army have admitted.

The other thing to which I want to bring your attention is that what you’ve announced about how you’re going to reach an understanding with Iran and pull your troops out of Iraq to send them to Afghanistan is a policy which was destined for failure before it was born.

It appears that you don’t know anything about the Muslim Ummah and its history, and the fate of the traitors who cooperated with the invaders against it, and don’t know anything about the history of Afghanistan and its free and defiant Muslim people. And if you still want to be stubborn about America’s failure in Afghanistan, then remember the fate of Bush and Pervez Musharraf, and the fate of the Soviets and British before them.

And be aware that the dogs of Afghanistan have found the flesh of your soldiers to be delicious, so send thousands after thousands to them.

As for the crimes of America which await you, it appears that you continue to be captive to the same criminal American mentality towards the world and towards the Muslims. The Muslim Ummah received with extreme bitterness your hypocritical statements to and stances towards Israel, which confirmed to the Ummah that you have chosen a stance of hostility to Islam and Muslims.

There was much more, including some distinctly personal and racial attacks. al-Zawahiri is not a fool, nor strictly a jihadist. He is a cleric and an intellectual, and he represents a clear line of thinking in the Muslim world.

Will Obama meet with him? Will Obama negotiate with him? Will Obama seek peace through diplomatic means with him?

Will he be sending Secretary of State Clinton to the middle east to meet with al-Zawahiri and other “enemies”?

Just exactly how will this New Diplomacy work?
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All the pain inside amplified by the
Fact that I can’t get by with my nine to five
And I can’t provide the right type of life for my family
Cuz, man, these goddamn food stamps don’t buy diapers

The above lyrics are, from the brilliant title track to Eminem’s semi-autobiographical 2002 movie “8 Mile”. Several things have combined to place that and other lyrics in my head today.

The other lyric running through my brain today is from Stevie Wonder’s incredible “Innervisions” album from 1973. The song I’m referring to is one of the most gripping, powerful songs any man ever wrote, “Living For The City”:

A boy is born in hard time mississippi
Surrounded by four walls that aint so pretty
His parents give him love and affection
To keep him strong moving in the right direction
Living just enough, just enough for the city…

His father works some days for fourteen hours
And you can bet he barely makes a dollar
His mother goes to scrub the floors for many
And youd best believe she hardly gets a penny
Living just enough, just enough for the city…

Hard Time, Mississippi.

Welcome to Hard Time, America.

Another half million workers applied for jobless benefits this past week, well over a million in the last two weeks. What this means for the country (and the world) cannot be predicted, other than that it will be immensely painful.

What can be predicted for the cities, however, is much simpler.

Violence.

The poor and underprivileged always suffer first and worst in a downturn. Well, folks, we are way past downturn. We are deep into a meltdown. This economy is in a race to throw off as many jobs as it can, as soon as it can.

My prediction of 5 million new jobless within a year, made only a month ago, seems timid.

I was afraid of that.
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Barney Frank, United States representative from Massechusett and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, was on the radio this morning, calling not only for a $25 billion bailout of the Dettoit “Big 3″ automakers, but for more after that, if needed. He insists that this will be a loan only, and that Congress must insist on reforms which will right the industry, in order for them to receive the money.

In today’s New York Times, former Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate Mitt Romney called for the industry to declare itself bankrupt, shed current management, and rebuild itself from the ground up.

The automakers and many analysts worry that, once they enter into bankruptcy, they will not have access to the lines of credit they will need to operate, and thus would be forced into liquidation.

If the Big 3 liquidate, the estimate is that 3 million jobs may be lost within the auto manufacturing industry as well as in the ancillary industries which supply parts and which deliver and sell the finished products.

If you’re scoring at home, what this means is that nobody has any idea what to do.

What seems certain is that there will be some contraction in “Detroit”, a moniker which represents the northern auto industry controlled by GM, Ford and Chrysler. This contraction may end up being complete. If so, the north as an industrial center will most likely cease to exist as we know it today. The vast majority of industries in the north are tied to heavy manufacturing, and are built on enormous scales of size. Without an underlying robust manufacturing industry, these ancillary industries will topple in rapid succession.

What seems utterly unknowable is: What to do about it?

The public was not even able to stomach the idea of bailing out Wall Street; Congress essentially had to ignore public will in order to pass the legislation. Those same congressmen will have to run on their record in two years (in the House, that’s everybody; in the Senate, one third), and the relative success or failure of the economy will be perceived by the voting public as a referendum on the plans their congressmen and women did or did not support.

If the government bails out Big Auto, then who’s next? “The Public Dole” is taking on a whole new meaning.
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Paul Simon’s beautiful, stunningly original 1986 album “Graceland” rightly took home the Grammy award. It contains a haunting, nearly wordless song called “Homeless”, which contains the line above.

Today’s New York Times reports that veterans returning from the Gulf War are, for a variety of reasons, losing their homes. They may be unable to work, or waiting for benefits to kick in, or facing debt which accumulated while they were away.

Returning home to find themselves homeless.

Some have families, some just themselves. They come back with scars both physical and emotional, with no clear way forward, and often with not near enough support.

President-elect Obama, as well as Senator McCain, both promised to attend to the needs of veterans. Both insisted that veterans deserve the best possible care and support after having served their country.

The article quotes officials of various agencies: unemployment among returning veterans is 18%. A quarter of those who do find work, fail to earn a living wage.

What does this mean? Frighteningly, it means that these men and women believed that a hitch in the army was their ticket to the middle class. Many of these men and women had no viable job or educational prospects in the first place, which was why they enlisted.

They emerge from their service time with new skills, for sure; it’s just that those skills have no application in the civilian world. Combine that with stress and other factors, and you have a volatile cocktail.
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You may not shed a tear over the fact that the financial sector is shedding jobs.

I’d understand.

Question: The town you live in: do more or fewer than 53,000 people live there?

Probably a good chunk of you said “fewer.”

Well, Citibank just announced plans to lay off your town.

Or, the equivalent number of its own employees. Combined with previously announced reductions, that’s a 20 percent shrinkage of its work force.

Twenty percent of the American work force is roughly 30 million workers. The resulting unemployment percent would be 26% or so, roughly what it was at the depths of the depression.

That was only 75 years ago. It could happen again.
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In today’s column, “Socialism? It’s Already Here” George Will writes

Sugar import quotas cost the American people approximately $2 billion a year, but that sum is siphoned from 300 million consumers in small, hidden increments that are not noticed. The few thousand sugar producers on whom billions are thereby conferred do notice and are grateful to the government that bilks the many for the enrichment of the few.

You should read the entire column, and when you do you will understand that Will is not advocating socialism, and the sort of practices which he refers to as socialism are usually ill conceived and poorly executed. True socialism would involve a true realignment of the ownership of the means of production.

Which brings me to this quote:

Conservatives rightly think, or once did, that much, indeed most, government spreading of wealth is economically destructive and morally dubious — destructive because, by directing capital to suboptimum uses, it slows wealth creation; morally dubious because the wealth being spread belongs to those who created it, not government.

We’ll assume that Will meant “rightly” as a pun, not as a definition of correctness. What I want to address are two points Will makes above: 1) redistribution of wealth, based on need, slows wealth creation; 2) the wealth belongs to those who created it.

It’s hard not to consider these positions to be intellectually dishonest, or else they don’t make sense alone or together. Will asserts flatly that optimum wealth creation can only occur when markets are completely free. This is every bit as utopian as the most pie in the sky collectivist dream. Will ignores the social decay which sets in when capital only flows where it “grows best”, meaning quickest, meaning it flows toward the best “opportunities.”

In this consumer-crazy system in which we live today and which is in the process of melting down, “opportunities” are represented by potential profits, which is determined by the popularity of something versus its cost. So, the free flow of capital would lead it to prefer catchy gadgets which can be made cheaply.

We convince ourselves that these gadgets in some way improve our lot in life, and never ask some basic questions, such as: what were the labor conditions under which this product was made? And, could the productive capacity and raw materials which went into making this gadget have served a better purpose?

These are important questions when we are concerned with the health of a civilization, yet they are questions that capitalism never asks. Only government has, and only occasionally, managed to ask questions of capitalism that it would never ask of itself. Will would have us believe that the market settles all things for the best. He cannot possibly, actually believe that.

Second, he states that the wealth belongs to those who created it. He will never be more right, and in this case I do mean “correct.” Wealth belongs to those who create it: the workers. Those who manage the broader aspects of the business are also workers and deserve fair wages, but no human’s work is worth 100,000 times more than the work of another human. And if it were somehow so, it would reveal deeply disturbing truths about the relative capabilities of humans as a species.

Or, to put it another way: if the current system is the best we can do, we aren’t very bright.
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The same 16 year old daughter who learned last week of the perils of shoplifting, recently asked permission to get a tattoo. She will be 17 soon, and 18 is the legal age of consent for such things, and she wanted it somewhere on the back of her neck, and her 18 year old sister was going to get a similar one, so I agreed.

Two nights ago my daughter informed me that she now wanted the tattoo on her wrist. She had even checked to make sure that this would not disqualify her from being a nurse, something we had discussed.

I said “No way.” No visible tattoos. Uh uh.

She sort of didn’t handle it well. I’m sticking to my guns anyway.

From this side of the fence, my attitude is that she can do what she wants in a year. She’ll live another 70 or so years after that. Small percentage of time to have to wait.

From her side of the fence she wants it NOW! She may as well KILL HERSELF! How can I be so COLD? I already said YES! What’s the big DEAL?

One day she will be a parent and have to make these decisions. Then, she will understand.

She and I have had a very rough year, mainly because she has had a very rough year. No doubt, in her mind this is just one more crappy thing that happened this year.

As a parent, of course we want our children to be happy. On the other hand, I spent a lot of my childhood unhappy, and it didn’t kill me. I learned early in life to live with disappointment. I see no harm in not getting what we want sometimes. It teaches us that life is like that: sometimes wanting something is not enough.

Hey, I want her to be successful. Do I have any control over that? No. I can set her up to be successful, give her the opportunities to acquire the tools to be successful, but she still has to want it, seek it and make it happen. She has given me many reasons this year to wonder where her head is at.

As I like to point out to her, she is five minutes away from being out the door. She has to pull it together while she still has the chance.

She brought home three Fs on her report card last week. I had to take away her cell phone because she refuses to put it in her locker at school and instead uses it during class. She’s been grounded for weeks over this, and that grounding will continue until her grades rebound.

Would I love to make her happy on the tattoo? Sure. Is it any big deal whether she gets a tattoo on her wrist today or a year from now? Not really. The difference is, it will be her decision to legally make.

Until then, I represent the simple fact that it’s not her choice. She can’t have everything she wants when she wants it. Some things she wants, she shouldn’t want at all.

My dear daughter learns everything the hard way.

Sheryl Crow sings, quite beautifully, “No one said it would be easy…but no one said it’d be this hard.”

Indeed.

A group of world leaders known as the G-20 will meet this weekend in Washington, D.C. The meeting was called by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and President Bush agreed to play host.

This meeting has the potential to be quite historic.

World leaders are, understandably, attempting to portray the current economic situation as a “crisis”, which is true enough. However, they are also attempting to portray it as solvable within the basic structure of capitalism. In his Wall Street speech yesterday in anticipation of the “summit”, President Bush said this:

This is a decisive moment for the global economy. In the wake of the financial crisis, voices from the left and right are equating the free enterprise system with greed, exploitation, and failure. It is true that this crisis included failures - by lenders and borrowers, by financial firms, by governments and independent regulators. But the crisis was not a failure of the free market system. And the answer is not to try to reinvent that system. It is to fix the problems we face, make the reforms we need, and move forward with the free market principles that have delivered prosperity and hope to people around the world.

Among the pillars defining the agenda for the meeting, number 5 out of 5 is this:

Reaffirming our conviction that free market principles offer the surest path to lasting prosperity.

“Lasting prosperity” for who?

The billions who live on this planet with no access to basic services? The billions who toil in labor every day and still don’t have economic security? The many millions who want work but can’t find work? The many millions who, today, have work, but are in severe danger of losing those jobs - through no fault of their own?

“Consumerism” was a neat trick. They’ll write about it in history books some day. How to get as filthy rich as possible? Sell as many gadgets and trinkets to people as you can. Use extremely cheap labor, so you can sell the stuff at a price which is still affordable to many, and allows you to make a tidy profit.

Fuel the whole thing with debt. Keep creating more consumers, so your markets keep expanding and you can service that debt.

Except…when the whole thing implodes. When that happens …Whoops! Capitalism has no plan!

Darn the luck. We picked a plan that has no backup plan.
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Yogi Berra is supposed to have once said “When you get to a fork in the road, take it.” Berra has been famous for 60 years for his malaprops, the gist of which is that on some level they make sense. (The truth behind the fork in the road Yogi-ism is rather bland: he lived at the time on a circle at the end of a road. Whichever way you went, you would get to his house.)

The metaphor makes me think about the world economic situation. It seems to me that the capitalist world is also at a fork in the road. The illusion that the balloon would ever expand and never pop has been shattered. No, it didn’t pop. It just sprouted a million leaks, and you can’t plug them all. The air is quickly leaving the balloon, and no nation is capable of stopping it.

Other than Shanghai, which applauds the Chinese plan to inject almost $600 billion into public works projects, Asian stocks were pounded today. Hong Kong and Japan both lost over 5% of their already eroded value. U.S. stocks have been taking a similar pounding. The financial sectors in cities such as New York and London are on their way to becoming vertiable ghost towns. The earth is shifting beneath the entire system.

We are at a fork in the road.

On the one road we have some sort of limp, failed, collapsed economic system that never was all that fair and equitable in the first place. Pure capitalism is the pursuit of the accumulation of as much wealth as possible by as few people as possible. It always sounded like a recipe for a train wreck, and now the train wreck has come. so, road 1 might be called Irrationality, or Refusal To Accept Reality. Road 1 is the road of people muttering, “If we just tweak it here and there, we can save it.”

Road 2 is Robert Frost’s Road Not Taken. The Road Less Travelled By. In other words, Road 2 is the unknown. The rules for choosing Road 2 are that there are no rules. Down road 2 we encounter ideas such as confiscating that accumulated wealth and putting it to work tapping the enormous productive potential which capitalism, even at its hottest, has always ignored. Now, in its coolest phase, capitalism has no capability to make use of untapped productive potential.

Quite the opposite: capitalisms’s solution to its crisis is to create even more untapped productive capability. The geniuses who defend this insanity will tell you that we need cheap, available labor in order to be ready for the next great idea, such as technology. What technology? Don’t worry, we’ll think of something, and when we do, we’ll put all those people back to work.

Whoops, we slipped back onto Irrational Road.

Back on Unknown Road, we ask: is that the best we can do? Throw millions of people out of work and tell them to wait? Economists refer to “labor.” I like to think of them as “humans.”

I know, I’m such a softy.
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I remember the term so well.

Pussy.

It sounded just like what it meant to a 10 year old boy: “You can’t fight, you can’t defend yourself, you might as well be a girl.”

The way it worked was that everybody was somebody’s pussy. There was always a tougher kid. If you failed to catch a fly ball, “Pussy!” If you ran away when a bully came by, “Pussy!” If you wouldn’t climb over the fence to the water tower to get the football back, “Pussy!”

And then, sometimes, to avoid being proved to be a pussy, you would go ahead and climb the fence, and tear up your pants on the barbed wire, and when you got home you’d get your ass whipped.

It was definitely worth it.

Last night my wife and I were discussing the order of things, and I mused that in an uncivilized world, I’d be somebody’s pussy or I’d be dead. She let out a rollicking laugh over that comment, but she also understood the point.

On a small scale, we use whatever tools and weapons we have, to avoid being thought of as weak. I always had books and music and throwing a ball against a stoop and imagining I was Don Drysdale. I always had my mind. And I was pretty fast. I could run. I stood my ground when necessary, but too many times I was outnumbered. It was an up and down journey. It most certainly, as we intellects like to say, “informed my world-view.”

Here in civilzation, bullies don’t rule. All the men get to procreate, not just the alpha male. (Some would say that’s not such a good thing.) Here in civilization, the pen is indeed mightier than the sword.

But when you get down to it, aren’t most of us still somebody’s pussy? Even the richest man in the world might have a wife who controls him. The most pampered woman could have her life snatched away at any moment. We are all dependent on someone or something that we cannot control, that does in fact control us.

And isn’t our world view informed by that reality?
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Greetings from Absurdistan!

Thank you for joining us. I’m Walt Bennett, your tour guide. We hope you enjoy your journey through a land where the bizarre seems normal and there is always a logical explanation for the illogical.

I’m sure you will agree, that sounds like a fun place! So, let’s gets started on our tour. We’re going to explore some of the more interesting places in Inner Absurdistan.

One of the most funs places to visit in Inner Absurdistan is a little place we like to call Wall Street. There’s actually no wall here, physically speaking. There used to be, to keep the barbarians out. But then we killed all the barbarians and we didn’t need the wall anymore.

Some of you might think that there is a figurative wall here now, which keeps all the barbarians in. If so, congratulations! You are already thinking like an Absurdistani. Soon, such thinking will even begin to seem natural.

Now, here is a special place, a place where very absurd things happen. This place we call “Goldman, Sachs”. Sounds so huffy and important, doesn’t it? Even has the word “Gold”, as in “Gold Standard”, in there.

Question in the back? What’s a “Gold Standard”? Here in Absurdistan we call that a joke. Back in that boring old place our ancestors used to live in, Payasugovia, the Gold Standard was the basis for valuing currency. The more your gold was worth, the more currency you could issue. Now you can see the problem with that, right? What if you want to issue more currency and pay yourselves massive bonuses? And what if the price of gold doesn’t cooperate and keep going up to allow you to print that currency? We can’t have that, so we ditched that anachronistic device many years ago. And as you can see, we have been so much better off without it.

Thanks for the question, now back to our tour. There’s so much to see and so little time.
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This item appeared  Sunday in the Associated Press:

Obama to use executive orders for immediate impact

Among the measures under consideration:

• Reversing Bush administration policies on stem cell research
• Reversing Bush administation approval for oil exploration on public lands

Thus we can see the beginnings of a two-pronged strategy to solidify Obama’s political standing. In other words, he is already running for re-election.

On the one hand we have seen, in only a few short days since this ‘historic”, “transformational” election, the administration-in-waiting clearly warning its base not to expect immediate change, while promising to “reach across the aisle” to Republicans when crafting policy, and to “govern from the middle.”

The evident hope of such actions is to defuse the right wing by incorporating its issues into presidential policy. Obama fears a fate similar to that of Bill Clinton, who came to power in 1993 with majorities in both houses of Congress and lost both majorities less than two years later, in the first mid-term election of his two term presidency. The failed effort to implement universal health care was sold to the public as a beurocratic nightmare, which it might have been had it been enacted, because it relied heavily on cooperation from employers, health care providers, state and local governments, and the insured themselves.

No such coalition ever emerged, and the plan fell apart bit by bit as more intitial supporters either offered watered-down alternatives or walked away entirely.

Upon losing his Congressional majority, Clinton quickly realized that had to “move to the center” if he was going to have any effect on meaningful legislation; in other words, if he was going to have a record to run on, he had no choice but to cooperate with Republicans.

Well in hand of that message, Obama, the first Democratic president since Clinton, plans to start in the middle. Congressional Democrats are no doubt heaving sighs of relief. There is certain to be a Republican backlash in the near future. The last thing the majority wants to do is to add fuel to the fire by recommending radical solutions to the social and economic problems which are crippling the country, crippling the people who voted them into office. They know that radical solutions are easy targets for political caricature, and that the public is always eager for somebody to mock and to blame. They know how easily the mood of the electorate can shift.

One only need to look back 14 years for a crystal example. Memories in Washington are a lot longer than that.
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We’ll make a regular Saturday habit of taking a break from the issues of the day, and reflect on some things that go on in our everyday lives.

About a month ago, as I was sitting at a friend’s house with my wife on a Friday evening, relaxing before going out, I got a call from Claire’s in the local mall. They had my daughter.

I have five children; my second oldest is 16, and she’s the one they had. Claire’s, in case you don’t know, is a teenage girl’s dream store. They sell all sorts of jewelery, most of it plastic, all of it relatively cheap. Girls on a school-age budget need to shop too, right?

On this parrticular day my 16 year old daughter decided that she was attracted to a $6 pair of earrings that she also didn’t really want to pay for. In other words, she wanted them but could not justify the price.

She was an easy mark. The store manager easily observed my daughter slipping the earrings into her pocket, stopped her at the door and brought her into the back room.

That’s where I found my daughter when I arrived at the store, surrounded by store management and mall security. They were waiting for the police to arrive.

Claire’s has a zero tolerance policy against shoplifting. My daughter was about to be charged. 

The policeman came and took his report. When he found out that my daughter was over 16, he informed us that this meant she was being arrested. “Cuffs?” I asked. “Yes,” he nodded. “Walked out in front of her friends?” I asked. “Yes,” he affirmed.

“Do you need me for any of this?” I asked. “No,” he replied.

“In that case, I’ll meet you at the police station,” I said, and left. I had no interest in watching my daughter being perp walked through the mall. This was her humiliation, not mine.

She was inside the police station for at least a half hour, and when the officer escorted her back to the car, he advised me that he was recommending my daughter for a shoplifting class, which takes place once a month and is an alternative to conviction for first time offenders.

When she went to court, my daughter was told by the judge that most of his cases involve teenage girls, and many of them were from Claire’s. He approved her for the class, and this morning she went.

I should say, we went. Parents of minors are required to participate. (I think that’s a great idea…)
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Today should have been known as Bloody Friday.

As the sun sets over the United States today, it does so over a current unemployment rate of 10.1 million people, up from 7.3 million people just a year ago.

On this same day, both Ford and General Motors announced that they were losing money rapidly and would soon be broke.

On this same day, the Dow Jones industrial average rose 248 points. Most of that rise occurred late in the day.

Does this make any sense? While it is true that the market lost ten percent of its value over the previous two days, which typically represents some buying opportunities, what sort of “bargains” were available in an economy that is so clearly tanking?

The financial sector has long since melted down. Now comes the manufacturing sector and the service sector, soon to be followed by the consumer sector.

What bargains?

Here’s the psychology of capitalism at work: companies are shedding jobs. That is good for the economy. Why? Because businesses are paring down, becoming more lean, which is what they need to do in a declining economy.

In other words, the stock market saw this tremendous reduction in jobs (240,000 in October, and another 179,000 jobs which were lost in August and September and previously not reported) as good news.

In other words, 419,000 jobs were reported lost today which had not previously been reported lost.

Good news? Only in the minds of “investors.”

Or perhaps they took as good news that these new job losses are actually less than the revised September numbers, which went from 159,000 to 284,000.

So, then, the rational thought would be: wait for the revised October numbers.

In any case, it is difficult to find a rationale for this move. Lost jobs mean lost consumers, and moreover, the psychology of a bad job market makes consumers more cautious: “Sure I have a job today, but I may not have a job next month. Better conserve.”

Will a stimulus package bail out the economy? Did the previous one?

It will help retailers survive Christmas, some of them anyway. The pain of this contraction has only just begun, and small measures along the way may buy a little time, but only a little.

Serious solutions are needed in the very near future, and all options must be on the table.

When economics begin to turn downward, things are always worse than they at first appear.

You would think that those who invest in the stock market would know that.

The world’s tenth largest economy has failed.

Gone bankrupt. Belly up.

The State Of California is broke. They cannot meet their obligations. They have proposed significant tax increases and an equal amount in service cuts, in order to have expenditures come close to matching income.

They will soon be begging the Federal government for a bailout.

California’s current budget deficit is $11.2 BILLION. That’s out of a gross state product of $1.8 Trillion. The deficit is expect to swell to $16 billion in 2009. California’s economy is roughly the same size as that of Russia.

It is a very large failure, monumental. Staggering. Historic.

And of course, California is “too big to fail.” Based on that logic, the Federal government will see no option other than to bail out the state. The size of the bailout will no doubt be above $10 billion.

That’s a lot of roads and bridges we could be repairing. A lot of schools we could be building.

Instead, it will go to fund the waste and mismanagement which led to this deficit in the first place.

Californians already pay among the highest taxes in the nation. The national economy is shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs per month. A large percent of those job losses will be in California.

This will further depress the budget. The state will need to raise taxes still further, and cut services even further.

California is not meeting its minimum service commitments today. That will only worsen.

This is a government in default. It is a failed state.

What will be the perspective of the working people of California as these measures are forced into passage? Will they accept the additional burden, the “pay more, get less” solution?

Or will a wave start in the west, and begin to spread?

If not now, when? When the pain is even greater?

George Will is a political opinion columnist for the Washington Post and a commentator on ABC’s Sunday talk show, This Week With George Stephanopoulos. His political stance is that of a social and fiscal conservative, and he is not above criticizing the Republican Party when the mood strikes. His tone is intellectual, and he expects his audience to keep up.

He is the man who famously asked presidential candidate Jesse Jackson in 1988, “What is your position on the policies of the G-7 and of the Louvre Accord?” Will was referring to the Group Of 7 Industrialized Nations, and a recent agreement they had struck to stabilize currency markets. What Will was really doing was to play “Gotcha!” with Jackson, to demonstrate that perhaps the most visible black presidential candidate in the nation’s history was not exactly up to the task, not as “qualified” as Jackson impassionedly assured voters he was.

In today’s column Will writes this:

Still, the Republican Party retains a remarkably strong pulse, considering that McCain’s often chaotic campaign earned 46 percent of the popular vote while tacking into terrible winds. Conservatives can take some solace from the fact that four years after Goldwater won just 38.5 percent of the popular vote, a Republican president was elected.

The conservative ascendancy that was achieved in 1980 reflected a broad consensus favoring government more robust abroad and less ambitious at home — roughly the reverse of Tuesday’s consensus. But conservatives should note what their current condition demonstrates: Opinion is shiftable sand. It can be shifted, as Goldwater understood, by ideas, and by the other party overreaching, which the heavily Democratic Congress elected in 1964 promptly did.

Will is fully aware that the unified Democratic government has stated its clear intentions to seek compromise, and not “over-reach.” He has also been known in the past to say that Americans “prefer divided government.” He seems to be staking an early claim that conservatism is in nothing more than a short time-out, and will no doubt rebound within 4 years. I expect that he will soon write a column reminding us of the 1994 bloodbath in president Clinton’s first mid-term election.

As the Obama presidency unfolds. we will keep an eye on the opinions of this influential conservative bellwether. Without question, the talk-radio wing of the conservative movement will spend the next four years in some state of hysteria; Will represents the calmer, more thoughtful tone of a man who has seen the comings and goings in national politics from the inside, for decades. It will be opinions such as his which will carry the most weight with the “other side.”

At this moment in time, I don’t see two sides. I see the “transformational presidency” already planning to avoid making Will’s hypothesis come true, by playing as nice with the conservative wing as possible.

A profoundly troubling sign, to say the least.

Well I don’t know why I came here tonight,
I got the feeling that something ain’t right,
I’m so scared in case I fall off my chair,
And I’m wondering how I’ll get down the stairs,
Clowns to the left of me,
Jokers to the right, here I am,
Stuck in the middle with you.

The above lyric snippet is from a 1972 song by Gerry Rafferty and Stealer’s Wheel, “Stuck In The Middle With You.” Thanks to the Quentin Tarantino blood-fest “Reservoir Dogs”, it is also associated with slicing off an ear.

Ladies and gentlemen, presenting the woman who will fight to the finish for our right to stay stuck in the middle:

Madam Speaker, Nancy Pelosi.

Quoted in today’s New York Times assuring us:

“The country must be governed from the middle.”

In other words, “Don’t worry, corporate America, nothing significant is going to change.”

We’ll keep right on bailing out the fat cats.

We’ll keep building up the war machine.

We’ll keep wages low and costs high. We’ll keep workers and poor people in their place.

Two days after winning a “transformative” election, we are promised that there will be no transformation.

What did they think we expected of them?

We will find out who’s right and who’s wrong, within the next two months. President Obama will certainly be the first president in history who will need to be as specific about his plans as he will need to be. He will almost certainly be directing Congress’ priorities between now and then.

We need to be directing him. He’s made that clear. He has no intention of leading a charge to the left. He’s made that clear.

Time to push back.

There is no time to waste.

The tom-tom rhythm of far-off danger; can you hear it? Listen closely. Is it getting louder?

The top half of todays New York Times web site offered these headlines:

A Towering Economic To-Do List for Obama

European Banks Cut Rates Sharply

Toyota Slashes Annual Profit Forecast

Bleak Night at Christie’s, in Both Sales and Prices

Mayor Cancels Rebates for Homeowners

I’ve been talking about the tip of the iceberg for weeks. That’s still where we’re at, on the “before” side of how bad things will get. I don’t say this to win the “Bummer Of The Week” award, although I’m sure a lot of you are saying “Come on, Walt, we’ve been through downturns before. We know capitalism is cyclical. We know we have to purge less productive jobs so they can be replaced with more modern, more productive jobs.”

All true, except this is nothing like anything that has come before. This time, the capitalists went broke; their entire structure collapsed. Without a mass infusion of wealth, wrenched from the workers of the world in a ruthless display of power, that system would have already keeled over, a scant several months after the most severe problems arose.

Capitalism, we now know, can fail in a huge hurry.

There would be contraction at this time anyway, as businesses retrench after losing so much value. But combined with the massive pullback in consumer spending, there is no precedent for this meltdown. There is no sector to turn to for good news, other than crude oil - and that is more of an ominous sign of slowdown than any other current sign. It is broadly perceived that there will be much slower economic activity in the months ahead, requiring less oil. Watch for OPEC to continue to slash output, to prop that price back up.

The October jobless numbers come out tomorrow. They will be brutal.

This is the question you have to ask yourself, as you listen to those tom-toms in the distance: will the same tools your ancestors used to deal with that scary threat work this time, or will you need new tools?

This question might also be pertinent: if the capitalists insist that massive unemployment is necessary in a time of retrenchment, why should we hand over what little wealth we have left to these people?

What exactly did the workers of the world do to cause this failure? Oh, that’s right: nothing.

So, one possible option must be considered: attack the threat.

More on how this might be done in future posts.

This is the first in a series of articles focusing on the term of President Barack Obama.

It is widely understood that there has been an enormous economic contraction in the last year, much of which has occurred in recent months. It has become clear that investor overconfidence has turned to paralytic fear. Investment firms, banks, traders, manufacturers, even entire governments, all teeter on the brink of bankruptcy.

The wave of closings has only just begun, and will in the next several years mount into a tsunami of job loss. This will be a world-wide recession, perhaps an actual depression, perhaps lasting a decade or longer. The world of 2008 is significantly different than the world of 1929, when the stock market crashed, and than the world of 1933, when unemployment reached 25%. The world of today is more integrated, more interconnected than that world. Jobs flow much more easily around the globe than they did then.

And in capitalism, capital will always flow in the direction of the cheapest labor.

American workers will soon be pitted against workers living in other, cheaper economies, and therefore against each other. American workers will soon be faced with a choice between a job with far less pay and fewer, if any, benefits than the job they lost to the meltdown, or no job at all.

Here are some numbers, which will be updated by the end of the week when the October figures are published:

2,399,000 workers have lost jobs in the first three quarters of 2008. Annualized, that number is 3,200,000. That’s not the total number of unemployed; that’s the number of additional unemployed in the first nine months of 2008; a number which is larger than the population of 21 U.S. states. Looked at another way, the number of jobs lost this year are equivalent to the combined populations of North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Wyoming and Vermont. More than the entire population of states such as Iowa, Mississippi, Arkansas, Kansas.

The current number of unemployed is 9,477,000. Looked at yet another way, The State of Unemployment is currently the tenth largest state.

That number could be over 10 million workers by the end of the year. It might reach 12 million, 13 million or more by the end of 2009. The fifth largest state in the union would be the State Of Unemployment.

Keep another number in mind: there are nearly 5 million more who say they want a job but have become too discouraged to look for a job. Based on that number the current unemployment rate is not 6.1% but 9%. The combined number could reach 18 million by the end of 2009, and might overtake Florida as the fourth largest state.

In his recent stump speeches, president-elect Obama promised to create 7 million new jobs in public works and technology projects. In the last year, the labor force grew by 100,000, but the number of people of working age who are not in the labor force grew by 800,000. How quickly the promised jobs become available will go a long way toward defining the length and depth of this meltdown, and will go a long way toward determining whether or not the Obama presidency will be transformative.

In order to fund the many projects which need doing in this country, which will also put many people to work in good paying jobs, two things need to happen: 1) President Obama must, through the tax code, confiscate significant amounts of wealth from those who have the most to give, and use these seizures to fund the projects. He can use emergency powers if necessary. 2) He must make sure that these projects do not enrich the very same power brokers. The money must flow primarily to workers, entrepreneurs and small businesses.

If President-elect Obama is serious about job creation, he has to remove the real barriers to job creation: the hoarding of cash by the richest few. The old economic theory that this cash would somehow trickle back down to the working class has been shown to be a complete lie. Quite the opposite, in fact. The recent Wall Street bailout is a prime example of trickle-up economics. When the power brokers made bad bets, we paid them off, so the fat cats could stay fat.

Senator Obama voted for that bailout, and so it is clear that his philosophy is to preserve the free enterprise system. In his acceptance speech tonight, he reminded his audience that this is not his victory, but theirs, ours.

There are large problems affecting all people of the world. Many of these problems will afflict this country in the near future. Many millions of people will be cast into unemployment, poverty and dereliction. A true economic revival can only happen when the 10 million people who want work can get work; when those who want training can get training; when those who want education can get education.

As the term of President Obama unfolds, one measure of his success or failure will be how soon these workers can reclaim their place in the workforce, in meaningful, good paying jobs.

We’ll be watching.

Today I will physically cast a vote for Barack Obama.

I will, substantively, be casting a vote for change.

To my mind, what it comes down to is this: will the wealthiest one percent give up that wealth peacefully, or will we have to take it from them via any means necessary?

For over a century the oligarchs have been collecting the wealth which was earned for them from the backs of the workers of this world. Now, in the early years of the next century, we see the bankruptcy of that philosophy. We see the physical devastation of the planet. We see the horrifying political conditions under which much of the world lives. We see the abject poverty that too many people, even in the richest nations, suffer. We see the way workers are treated like basic commodities, to be accumulated and discarded as needed.

For over a century they told us that this was the best economic system possible. If that’s true, what does it say about mankind, that this is the best we can do?

I don’t believe that, and I never have.

Now more than ever, the lie has been revealed. Now more than ever, the failure is apparent.

Don’t let them fool you. Don’t let them tell you that we can trim the hedges and all will be fine. Don’t let them tell you that any alternative to capitalism is “even worse.”

Don’t let them scare you into denying control over your own destiny.

We don’t, today, know what the correct answers will be to create an economic system which is truly fair to all. I know that some socialization is inevitable. Energy and Health care should not be for-profit enterprises. A person without access to energy is a primitive being. A person without access to healthcare is one illness away from devastation.

Not only can we do better, we must do better. In two months we will have a unified Democratic government, at a time when the old ideas of defending free enterprise and the rights of the few to control so much of the wealth, have all failed. Many millions in this nation and across the world are, at this moment, being snatched from the middle class and thrown into poverty, as industries and businesses contract as rapidly as possible amidst this enormous economic meltdown.

Who will represent them? Who will make sure that their future is assured? Who will see to it that those who have worked hard and, through no fault of their own, been cast aside, will not be left there to wilt?

Can we count on the unified government to propose and develop these new solutions? If you are under the age of 30, you might believe that “yes” is an acceptable answer.

It is not. By now we know that when we elect people who promise to change Washington, what happens instead is that it changes them. Candidate Obama has promised that it will not happen to President Obama. It will be up to us to hold him to that.

If we fail to insist on real, permanent change, we have only ourselves to blame when things get even worse. And in the end, the revolutionaries will then have been proved right: only all-out war could ever wrest control of the world economy from the hands of the oligarchs.

I don’t believe that, because my hopes and dreams work better when they aren’t so apocalyptic. My hopes and dreams work better when I choose to invest in a future where we vote our way there, where we create a mass movement that rolls over the current alignment and creates a new alignment.

We start tomorrow.

A man I’ve known since high school, a man of integrity, a man with deep principles, took me to task for failing to go far enough in my interview with Tavis Smiley.

His lack of respect for the way I approached the matter was the final rift in a difficult friendship. He would consider himself more honest than I am. I consider myself more honest than he is.

He has studied Marxism and spent his adult life advocating the complete overthrow of capitalism, replacing it with a pure workers state. He belongs to a socialist party, and has for decades.

I believe that mankind will eventually organize itself in some manner which resembles that structure, but I do not believe it can be rushed. I believe that humans evolve behaviorally, and when they are ready for the next phase, they accept it.

Sometimes we forget how long we’ve been on the planet, and how far we’ve come.

He believes that I should have declared Obama a traitor and the two party system a sham. He believes I should have advocated the immediate abolition of capitalism. He was unsatisfied that I specifically mentioned “workers” instead of Obama’s mantra “the middle class”; he was unimpressed that I included all peace-seeking people of the world in my area of concern. He seemed not to care that I had declared all of the ideas of the current era of capitalists to have “melted down.”

I felt that I had delivered strong words, that I had attempted to begin a dialog regarding what should be possible in these next four years. I intended to have a lot more to say about that, and in future posts I will do exactly that.

My friend was utterly disdainful of my intention to seek to influence others by approaching them on their terms, and having a conversation about what is possible and what is necessary.

By the way, my former friend the revolutionary lives a quite comfortable bourgeois life, as do his revolutionary comrades.

Today in Ohio soon-to-be-President Barack Obama said this:

“Washington will have to tighten its belt and put off spending on things we don’t need. As President, I will go through the federal budget, line-by-line, ending programs that we don’t need and making the ones we do need work better and cost less.”

We are going to have to repeat this a lot over the next four years, and it looks as though we had better start now:

President Obama, you do not get to cry poverty to us, not this time, not after a $750 billion transfer of wealth from the workers of this country to the fat-cat bankers and professional investors. Not this time, when we have a unified progressive Executive and Legislative branch for the first time in over a generation. Not this time, when the world economy is melting down, entire nations are going broke, and many millions of people will be thrust into unemployment through no fault of their own. Not this time, when we need real solutions to the problems of everyday people in this country and in so much of the world. Not this time, Mr. President. Don’t cry poverty to us.

Consider it a manifesto: Don’t Cry Poverty, Mr. President.

Not this time. No, sir.

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The Sumter Item has this video clip of raw footage taken at the scene where a 12 year old boy was shot while trick-or-treating by 22 year old Quentin Patrick.

At this time there is no known motive.