The hopelessness of hope with regard to change in the US.

[Jim Nickerson]

From time to time I've considered the part "hope" plays in regard to the political processes of the US with reference to the non-oligarchs. The non-oligarchs would be me and from what I can tell most of the readers here and all the others in the country who are not in the top 1% of wealthiness.

Something jtabeb put up today got me to thinking about "hope" again.

Quote of our time:
"you gotta give people hope"
Harvey Milk

I'd rather much forgotten about Milk, so I read a bit and found his "hope speech." Harvey was a gay man who got assassinated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_....2F27.2F78-107

What he said in 1978 in a gay-rights context was:

http://www.danaroc.com/guests_harveymilk_122208.html
And the young gay people in the Altoona, Pennsylvanias and the Richmond, Minnesotas who are coming out and hear Anita Bryant on television and her story. The only thing they have to look forward to is hope. And you have to give them hope. Hope for a better world, hope for a better tomorrow, hope for a better place to come to if the pressures at home are too great. Hope that all will be all right. Without hope, not only gays, but the blacks, the seniors, the handicapped, the us'es, the us'es will give up. And if you help elect to the central committee and other offices, more gay people, that gives a green light to all who feel disenfranchised, a green light to move forward. It means hope to a nation that has given up, because if a gay person makes it, the doors are open to everyone.

JN emphasis.

However, I believe one can take Milk's words and apply them to the general expectations of voters 30 years later, that is today. People who have any appreciation of the depth of this country's problems elect officials on the "hope" that the new electees will bring about a change. Do I recall "yes, we can" was aimed at changing things in this country, and it inspired a lot of people or at least enough to get Barach Obama elected. I didn't vote, but had I, it would have been to not elect McCain and Palin (for god's sake can anyone believe Palin was on any ticket?).

Here are a couple of articles I ran across today that suggest perhaps change is on the way in the US: Kaiser notes what may be change for the worse, and Johnson suggests that any "change" in the financial sector will be "no change."

• 
  
  Will Deep Pockets Always Win? It's In Roberts's Court., by Robert G. Kaiser, Commentary, Washington Post: ...This year or next the court could ... remake the American system by permitting a flood of corporate money into our electoral campaigns..., such a decision would create vast new opportunities for a particular class of Americans..., corporate elites. ...

"Until this summer, the barriers preventing the use of corporate and union funds in political campaigns -- the oldest dating to 1907 -- were "firmly embedded in our law"... Could the court really allow corporations and their agents -- the Chamber of Commerce, say, or coalitions of companies created for the purpose -- to campaign openly for or against individual candidates for federal office? Yes, it could. Campaign finance reformers are afraid that the two newest conservative members of the court, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, may be eager to overturn a long line of precedents. ...

"How would the political world be changed by legalized corporate campaigning? There would be a vast increase in the influence of corporations. ... Not surprisingly, corporate interests have always done well in Congress. More than a quarter-century ago, then-Sen. Bob Dole ... told the Wall Street Journal: "When these political action committees give money, they expect something in return other than good government."

""We may reach a point," Dole predicted, "where if everybody is buying something with PAC money, we can't get anything done." Dole was prophetic. Congress has failed to legislate on urgent issues for years -- think of health care, climate change, immigration, Social Security and Medicare. The organized interest groups that surround those issues rely on money to defend their positions and frustrate new initiatives. This is the wall our new president ran into this summer.

"What is now called "corporate" money in our politics is raised from the shareholders and executives of the companies that maintain PACs. Unions similarly collect PAC contributions from their members. Executives and their families can make personal donations. These are the only legal ways for corporate executives and companies to contribute to campaigns. The law sets limits on how much both PACs and individuals can raise and give...

"A decision to allow direct, unlimited corporate participation in campaigns would nullify the impact of those rules. American corporations ... would obviously have enough money to blow the roof off campaign spending standards.

"But the most dramatic effect of eliminating legal restrictions on corporations' spending could come not in campaigns but in the realm of lobbying. Fred Wertheimer of Democracy 21 ... explained: "Just imagine the impact on a member of Congress in the midst of deciding what to do on health care or climate control or banking legislation if the member knew that dozens of companies in affected industries each could spend millions of dollars . . . on full-scale campaigns to defeat or elect the member." ... [JN emphasis]


And Good Finance Gone Bad http://baselinescenario.com/2009/09/...ance-gone-bad/

• As the Lehman anniversary approaches, defenders of the financial sector struggle into position – partly in response to your comments (also here). They offer three main points:

  1. We need finance to make the economy work.
  2. Financial innovation delivers value, although it’s not perfect (but what is?)
  3. Don’t kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

  Point #1 is correct, but this does not necessarily mean we need finance as currently organized. The financial sector worked fine in the past, with regard to supporting innovation and sustaining growth. Show me the evidence that changes in our financial structure over the past 30 years have helped anyone outside the financial sector.

  
  
  
  
  
  
• On #2: Financial innovation has obviously benefited the people who run and operate large financial companies. Has it helped anyone else, including their own sharedholders? And if you can show broader social benefits (e.g., lower cost of capital, better ability to take nonfinancial risks that make sense, or anything else), do these outweigh the massive social/fiscal costs that are now apparent?

• 
  
  Which leads to point #3: what kind of egg did the finance goose lay? Obviously we now need to go back and recalculate economic growth – if much of what was done by finance was issue loans that were not likely to be repaid (while not recognizing the probable losses).

• But the unfortunate side effects of finance lie much more in the future than in the past. It’s not lowering recent growth by some fraction of a percentage point that should bother us, it’s the likely behavior of large-scale finance, now more powerful and with greater concentration of power.

• Private sector capture of the state is bad enough, wherever it happens in the world. But when the capturers have an unparalleled ability and willingness to “tax” the rest of us, we should really be afraid.

• The business model of big finance is not to consolidate their position and live on comfortable annuities. It’s to take as much as they can (”otherwise the competition will hire our best people”) while stuffing the risk (”which ordinary people don’t understand”) onto the taxpayer. The technical details of this arrangement are loosely refered to as “financial innovation”.

• Modern finance is more than quack medicine. This is state capture, an old tradition for bankers – and in the modern American version their hands are in the deepest set of pockets ever. Why would they ever let go? [JN emphasis]
  
  
  By Simon Johnson

I would like it ever so much if a requirement for signing up here was to post one's age; it would allow me some better assessment of the stupidity of various posters at least relative to their age and thus allow me to reflect back on whether I was equally, or probably more stupid than whoever at such and such an age makes posts here.

As I can recall from many of the threads here there are endless notations of what is wrong with this country and its leaders and perhaps even with us citizens, but seldom if ever does anyone come up with substantive suggestions as what can be done to actually bring about change in this country for its (this includes everyone who legally lives here) betterment as a nation and as a member of the world.

I'm certainly not picking on metalman, but here, as just an example, is a bit of a post he made today referencing Peterson and things I took to be suggestions that he believes would solve some of the problems facing this country.

here's the solution that pete will never suggest

- end gov't subsidies of the housing market
- let res real estate fall 50%
- write off 50% of the mortgage debt & interest payments

- shrink all financial debt by 50% & interest

I use that an an example of what must be hundreds, thousands of things here people think should be done, and maybe I'm misinterpreting what I have read here and there.

I want to ask the question: what is actually going to bring about serious changes in how this country has operated and is operating until today, and what is to bring it back, if it is possible to do so, from its current downward course toward being something on the order of a great nation again?

I believe the younger one is, the less the seriousness of the individual about the politics (and the commensurate power of elected office). Younger people are interested in hopefully getting some sort of education, getting a job, keeping a job, advancing, getting married, staying married, raising kids, educating them, etc. oh, and maintaining health care coverage and avoiding bankruptcy, buying a house, keeping it up, and all the lesser things young people do that are of little to no long term importance, e.g. getting drunk, getting layed, gaming, texting, iPods and such bullshit. So when these 'enlightened" youngsters vote, their primary focus is on the candidate who offers the most HOPE, trusting that such candidates will deliver in their elected jobs, just as the youngsters should be trying to deliver in the works and aspirations of their own lives.

You get a little older and hopefully a little wiser and I think most voters still are mostly hoping, despite perhaps realization of failed past hope for whomever they voted, that this time around the latest new guy running will deliver what they are hoping for. And so it goes until in my case I reached all the freaking way to 64 before I said fuck the system, it isn't ever going to change during my lifetime, and I rather doubt that if you are half my age now, you will ever see it change, because nobody am I reading or hearing is actually coming up with anything that will produce a serious change in how this country operates politically.

My suggestion, which is the only one that probably would work, is for all the political bastards to be killed, but most here would argue my appoach is a bit radical; perhaps they are correct, but perhaps not.

Seriously, a suggestion would be a national grass-roots program to RENO--Re-Elect No One--at any level of government. Even if a newly elected guy/girl seemingly does a better job than its predecessor, give another new guy a chance and perhaps even a third one a new chance before possibly re-electing anyone. Doing that would take 12 years to happen in the senate.

I think it would be great if everytime anyone here bitches about what needs to be changed with this or that part of the operation of the US government that he follow on with exactly how such a change could realistically be effected, or otherwise shut TF up and don't take up server space with useless complaints with no suggestion for remedy.

Oh, one last jab. The numbers are too large for me to grasp and certainly so frequently changing as for me to keep up with them, but consider the probable cost per citizen to all that has been directed to bailing out the too-big-to-fail financial institutions vs. the cost of providing healthcare to all citizens of the US, even it it includes a lot of f#cking waste. How much ruckus was recorded during the townhall discussions about whether or not to bail out Wall Street vs. how much ruckus on the issue of health care? My memory is no doubt failing, was there any ruckus with regard to the financial bailouts?

The monied interests in the US have the tax payer by the balls both with regard to keeping the taxpayers minds on the things of minor importance (to the FIRE interests) i.e. health care, and continuing to pull off the things that are most important to the FIRE interests, i.e. on going bailouts by the taxpayer of dastardly acts on Wall Street. Keep tuned for the next bailout and pay particular interest to the coverage of the townhall meetings.

For you holiday reading enjoyment: Salaries and Benefits of US Congress Members http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/uscong...ongresspay.htm