Jesse Bloggs

I haven’t had the chance to write anything about politics lately, but I did have a few brief thoughts I wanted to share.

First, Jon Stewart had an especially interesting discussion with Gwen Ifill on The Daily Show last night.  To be fair, Stewart didn’t bring up the conflict of interest created by Ifill’s moderation of the Vice Presidential Debate back in October; she had a clear interest in an Obama / Biden victory given that she had written a book entitled, The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama, which was released on the day of Obama’s inauguration.  I’ve also never been particularly impressed with Ifill; from the debates she’s moderated and the various spots from her PBS show Washington Week that I’ve seen, she always seemed dull and establishmentarian.  With Stewart, however, she was very lively and quick-witted.

But it was Stewart who raised the point I want to share.  He said:

You know, I have a[n economic stimulus] plan. [. . . T]hey’re bailing out these gigantic corporations, these banks.  Two trillion dollars, they think it’s going to cost.  [. . .G]ive us the money, but only for consumer debt and mortgages.  It’s a trickle-up theory of economics.  I don’t know why they keep talking about giving [. . . money] to banks.  Give it to us, specifically for our consumer debt[, we’ll put the money in the banks] and then they’ll have money, we’ll have no debt and the world will be made of unicorns and rainbows.

I’m no economist, but Stewart’s plan makes sense to me (maybe he can get Nobel-Prize winner and one-time guest Paul Krugman to crunch the numbers).  But even without a PhD from MIT I can certainly argue that we average Americans deserve a bailout more than some of these giant corporations.  Take, for instance, the American auto industry, which has been fighting tighter fuel standards generally (and in California specifically) for the last decade.  They won that fight, and so Americans got the SUV while Japan got the lead in technological innovation, with Toyota releasing the Prius and Honda the Civic Hybrid.  For this stellar behavior the Big Three Auto companies want 34 billion dollars, and they’re still fighting tighter fuel economy standards!  On the other hand, while some of the average American’s consumer debt problems surely stem from poor decisions, an equal amount probably stems from just trying to get by (I know this is true in my case).  I can already imagine someone arguing against Jon Stewart’s economic stimulus plan by saying that if the average American was bailed out once, they’ll just expect to be bailed out again the next time they’re in trouble.  To that I would point out that Chrysler, one of the Big Three, received a bailout once before in 1980.

My next political thought comes via Glenn Greenwald.  There is a bumper sticker that reads, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”  That slogan could just as easily be changed to, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not reading Glenn Greenwald.”  Today Greenwald links to a story from DigitalJournal.com that tells the story of a homeless man, Roy Brown, 54, who robbed a Capital One bank in Louisiana by pretending to have a gun in his pocket.  The teller put out three stacks of bills for Brown but instead he took only one hundred-dollar bill from the top.  He was hungry and needed the money to stay in a detox center, but the next day he felt guilty and voluntarily surrendered himself to the police, saying that his mother didn’t raise him that way.  He was sentenced to 15 years in prison.  Greenwald compares this well-intentioned, fortunately-harmless crime to the crimes of the Bush administration and the various elite pundits who argue that the Bush administration should not receive any criminal charges because it had good reasons to break the law.  I have written about Bush administration lawbreaking in the past (here and here), but I would like to remind everyone once again that the crimes of the Bush Administration against the law and humanity include failing to take seriously the warnings about the attacks of September 11^th, suspending habeas corpus, outing an undercover CIA operative, politicizing the Justice Department, starting a war under false pretenses, failing to properly prepare for that war, torture, violating the constitution in a myriad of ways and more.

My final political thought is about “free-market” Capitalism versus Socialism.  Let’s take a moment to examine the two ideas.  Free-Market Capitalism is based on the theory of “the invisible hand,” where “the greatest benefit to a society is brought about by individuals acting freely in a competitive marketplace in the pursuit of their own self-interest” (Answers.com).  The fact that people still believe this crap 200 years later never ceases to amaze:  there are countless examples of people pursuing their self-interest that has NOT brought great benefits to society, at least not to society as a whole (Slavery is a good example).  We also have the more recent theory of behavioral economics, which shows that people pursuing their self-interest often unknowingly make irrational decisions that actually hurt their self-interests and the interests of their society.  The invisible hand of economics is as invisible as the hand of Santa or the Easter Bunny, meaning that it doesn’t exist.  But when we pretend that it does we create a void of decision-making that gets filled by geniuses like the people who brought you the Great Depression, outsized CEO pay and Golden Parachutes, the California Energy crisis, Enron, the collapse of the housing market, credit derivatives and other disasters and injustices.

Socialism, on the other hand, has as many meanings as it has adherents and detractors, but in practice in the United States and most other Western Democracies it tends to mean regulation of markets (such as antitrust laws), nationalization of certain industries (such as energy) and tax-based welfare programs (such as Social Security).  At its essence, it means that the government fills the void that Capitalism would leave empty and makes decisions about what is fair and what things are worth.  In its more extreme forms, of course, Socialism and Communism have had dire consequences, such as in the USSR.  But the important distinction between good Socialism versus bad Socialism lies in the type of government implementing Socialist practices.  In the USSR, that was Despotism, which is always bad.  In the United States, it’s Democracy (or, more accurately, a Republic), which means the government is you.  By participating in the democratic process, you choose leaders who, ostensibly, pursue your interests in government.  It’s not a perfect system, but it’s certainly better than letting un-elected titans of industry decide what minimum wage should be, or whether or not there should be universal health care.  Don’t forget that you’re free.  Don’t let the Kenneth Lays of the world take away your power.  As Henry David Thoreau said in “Civil Disobedience” (emphasis added), “I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.”