Latimer on Law

Policy or politics?

It's The Policy, Stupid!

"Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made."
-Otto von Bismarck

Policy or politics?  The forest or the trees?  What Bismarck said about laws and sausages has never been more true than today, with  the purportedly "principled" GOP obstructionism that seeks to have Obama's economic recovery plan fail because it is "socialist" and because it is full of "pork."

     This blatantly political obstructionism is based on two main themes. The primary, overall theme is that the plan is "socialist" because it involves close governmental regulation of, and some degree of direct intervention in the way businesses are conducted until the economy as a whole can be restored. The other theme is that elements of Obama's stimulus plan, are "earmarks".  

     Both of these approaches are purely political obstructionism, in an avowed attempt to see President Obama's balanced effort to restore the economy fail, because he and the Democratic majority in Congress are exercising their Consitutional powers of regulation and taxation, as they were elected to do.  The GOP's determined obstructionism, is informed by nothing more than it's extreme right wing ideology of "free market" capitalism.  It is purely a matter of politics, informed by nothing but the GOP's anti-constitutional ideology.

A.  GOP political obstructionists seek to have the Democrats' economic recovery plan fail solely to promote their own narrow ideological and political agenda.

     Obama's plan involves shoring up major banks and insurers through cash subsidies, i.e. "bailouts."  Some on the right, i.e. the corporate elite, only object to this if the government is given tight control over how the subsidies, funded by our taxes, are managed. They still cling to the now discredited "free market" nonsense that caused the crash in 2008, so they want our government to socialize the cost of the bailout, while privatizing both control and all direct benefit.

     Others on the right, more honest perhaps but equally wrongheaded, object to the bailouts per se because they realize that the only responsible way to bail out such capitalist enterprises is by giving government a major role in how the subsidized companies are run. 

     Still others would simply let these businesses fail, based on their absolutist "free market" ideology.  These are the exponents of social Darwinism. In their minds, ideological purity clearly outweighs any consideration of how that would bring even more economic ruin on America, not just on the corporate "best people" that caused the damage by practicing their "free market" capitalism but on the hundreds of thousands of employees, shareholders, account holders, retirement and annuity beneficiaries and other blameless individuals. 

     Whatever their specific ideological bent, "principled" or cynically self-interested, or their degree of ideological commitment, it is only on such admittedly ideological bases, that the GOP obstructionists, in unsion, object to the corporate corporate subsidies, as well as many of the local projects in Obama's economic stimulus plan, as being "socialism."  This is clearly a matter of politics only, and not of any Constitutional principle.

     The GOP's obstructionism is not based on any Constitutional limit on the powers of the federal government, but only on their purely ideological belief, as intoned by Ronald Reagan some thirty years ago, that "government is the problem."  The ideological policies that derived from that simplistic political attitude, the Bush administration's past eight years of deregulation of the financial markets in particular, is what caused the economic collapseof 2008, and the GOP political opposition to Obama's recovery plan is motivated by nothing more than their continued, desperately obstinate faith in such anti-constitutional "principles" as "free markets" and small government. 

     That is to say that the GOP's obstructionism is nothing more than politics in service of their ideology, and it is not in any way based on an informed, genuine concern for the integrity of our Constitutional government or even to promote the general welfare of all Americans.

B.  Every element of the Democrats' economic recovery plan is squarely within the express governmental powers granted to them in the Constitution of the United States, and the GOP's whining about "Socialism" is nothing more than politically motivated obstructionism.

     I support subsidies of large banks and insurance companies with significant impact on our national economy, but only if there is a major component of strict, governmental oversight, or regulation, to ensure that our tax dollars aren't just poured down the vortex of financial irresponsibility that spun out wider and wider over the past eight years, fueled by the Bush administration's irresponsible policy of deregulation, until it sucked our whole economy, our jobs, our homes, our retirement -everything, down the black hole of "free market" capitalism.

     This support, like Obama's economic recovery plan itself, is based on a clear understanding of both the breadth and the limitations of our government's Constitutional powers to regulate the economy, levy taxes or take private property for public use.  This support is based on a clear understanding that it is the government's duty to implement regulatory and tax policies which are calculated to promote the general welfare. 

     Everything Obama and the Democratic Congress are trying to do is well within the powers of regulation, taxation, fiscal policy and eminent domain that are specifically given to them by the Constitution of the United States for the express purpose of promoting the "general welfare."  The Constitution says nothing about "capitalism" or "free markets" as being necessary to promote the general welfare, and it says nothing to exclude socialization of assets, goods or services for that purpose.   Obama's Constitutional policy of regulation and taxation isn't even "socialism", as a systematic alternative to capitalism, but simply a corrective measure needed to readjust the economy after eight years of uncontrolled, money centered, capitalist excess.

     Therefore, the broader criticism of Obama's recovery plan, that it is "socialist," is based on nothing but political obstructionism.  It is based on nothing more than the same, ideological "free market" capitalism that created the crisis that Obama has to deal with.  The basic problem, in terms of policy, was that Bush and the former GOP Congressional majority, abdicated their Constitutional responsibility to regulate the economy, under the Commerce Clause, and to levy appropriate taxes to promote our general welfare, and now Obama and the other grownups in government, i.e. the Democrats, have to clean up the mess.

     The solution to that problem now being put into effect by Obama and the Democratic Congress, in terms of policy, is to restore governmental oversight of the economy, and to use the power of taxation to boost the economy, all well within their Constitutional authority and their Constitutional duty to promote the general welfare.  The GOP obstructionists and media hacks like Limbaugh can bleat about "socialism" all they want, but that does not alter the fact that the Democrats' recovery plan, using regulatory and tax policy, is entirely within the Constitutional powers given to the government while their ideological objections clearly are not based on anything in the Constitution,.

C.  The difference between Obama's attempt to restore the economy to benefit all Americans, and the disastrous Bush administration policy of deregulation that has destroyed the economy, is that Obama seeks to fulfill his Constitutional duty to use government to promote the general welfare, and Bush shirked that duty in service of the corporate elite's  ideological "free market capitalism.

     The GOP's ideological opposition to the recovery plan is clearly both politically obstructionist and wrongheaded, not only in terms their anti-constitutionalist belief in "free market" capitalism, but in practical terms as well, where their cherished limited-government policy of deregulation has failed so abjectly, and the only responsible means for the Democrats to effect a recovery is to use the Constitutional powers of regulation and taxation to correct the economy -and thereby give the lie to their cherished ideological faith in "free market" capitalism. That, and that only, is why a highly-paid henchman for the corporate oligarch, like Limbaugh, declares "shamelessly" that he wants Obama's plan to fail.  

     Now that the recovery plan has been put into place by a President and a Congress elected by a majority of Americans last November, the GOP political obstructionists are carping about the issue of "earmarks," calling the stimulus package just so much "pork", for the sole purpose of creating another divisive issue among the electorate, based on taxation.  That sort of divisive politics, as in the case of exploiting so-called "values" issues to get middle class voters to support the corporate elite's economic agenda, has been the only basis for the Republican majorities that have risen to ascendance over the past thirty years or so since Ronald Reagan intoned that "government is our problem."

     This is why the Republican obstructionists are trying to get Americans to look at the trees rather than the forest -tree stumps, really, after the corporate elite has logged off all the good timber with the help of the GOP's ideological "free market" policy of deregulation.  This is the same corporate elite that Bush "honored" with the title "pioneers," for raising the cash that helped buy him two elections.  How ironic that term was, too.

     As observed by Charles Marion Russell, the cowboy artist, quoted in John Hutchens' One Man's Montana:

I have been called a pioneer. In my book a pioneer is a man who comes to virgin country, traps off all the fur, kills off all the wild meat, cuts down all the trees, grazes off all the grass, plows the roots up and strings ten million miles of wire. A pioneer destroys things and calls it civilization.

From Desert Solitaire, by Edward Abbey.  And that, exactly, is what Bush's corporate "pioneers" have done to our economy over the past eight years, enabled by Bush's ideological, "free market" policy of deregulation.  And that is exactly the kind of ideologically based policy the GOP obstructions seek to implement again by doing everything they can, politically, to cause the Democrat's recovery plan to fail.

     The GOP obstructionists are therefore desperate to distract us average Americans now by focusing on all those little tree-stumps, the remnants of our local economies that  our tax dollars are allegedly being wasted on,  i.e. the "earmarks," wanting to inflame us about the trivial cost of this or that program so we won't do anything about actually fixing the problem through Obama's broad policy initiatives.  They want us to ignore the sap hemorrhaging from the exposed growth rings on every one of those stumps, as our savings, our retirement accounts, our annuities, our business accounts continue to spill onto the barren ground  -lest we actually look at the broader issue of how their ideologically determined policies of deregulation and limited taxation caused the forest itself to disappear by enabling Bush's "pioneers" to cut down all the trees,.   

D.  Now that Congress has passed the initial phases of Obama's economic recovery plan, conservative and Republican obstructionists are nickel-and-diming about so-called "earmarks," solely as a matter of politics because they are desperately afraid of what a successful recovery under Obama's policy initiatives will do to their ideological "free market" stranglehold on both our economy and society in general.

     The GOP obstructionists have now taken to carping about all those "earmarks" in Obama's stimulus spending package.  Picking out individual items from the package and calling them "pork," in an obvious attempt to inflame anti-tax sentiment among the electorate by using sound bites, slogans and now, "twittering" to each other -without providing any real analysis as to how those earmarks are just "pork" as they claim, and not related to the overall policy embodied in the stimulus plan. 

     That policy is to put money out on Main Street, not just Wall Street, to rebuild the economy from the groundup by creating local employment opportunities, providing credit to enable new local businesses to start up and providing governmental assistance to help existing, productive businesses survive the crisis.   That is the policy, as opposed to the obstructionist sound-bite  politics we're getting from the GOP minority in Congress, from "Rush"  and on Fox TV. 

(1)   GOP opposition to specific "earmarks", like the honeybee insurance program, only serve to illustrate how fundamentally shallow and ignorant their "principled" sound-bite politics really is.

     So GOP political hacks, like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, are whining about nickel-and-dime things, such as the $150 million program for honeybee insurance and research.  The "free market" ideologues on Fox TV call this "Porculus", proving only their own ignorance as to how a productive capitalist economy actually works, with the interdependence of many disparate elements nationwide, and the fundamental truth that when it comes to providing for our general welfare, at the most basic level,  "the farmer is the man."

     None of the GOP hacks who object to the honeybee funding can tell us exactly how, without a viable honeybee industry, all those crops like apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, broccoli, celery, squash and cucumbers, citrus fruit, peaches, kiwi, cherries, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe and other melons will be pollinated?  Even the beef industry depends on the honeybees that pollinate the alfalfa crop.  Nor can they tell us why it would be in the interest of our general welfare for the government to just stand by and let all those crops fail. 

     The actual real world fact, ideology aside, is that the farmer depends on the beekeeper to pollinate his crops. The beekeepers have been losing whole hives due to an as yet unidentified disease or parasite and they need insurance and publicly supported research in order to stay in business -if they lose a hive they will have to replace it before the next growing season or the farmer's crop won't get pollinated.  If the crops aren't pollinated, there's no harvest and no fruits and vegetables are delivered to market, which cuts jobs in the trucking industry and in the retail food industry, as well as the processed food industry.  Ronald Reagan once told us "ketchup is a vegetable," when he was trying to cheat poor kids out of federal funding for school lunch programs, but even tomatoes are pollinated by honeybees.

     About one-third of food crops worldwide depend on honeybee pollination.  Therefore, the GOP minority's "principled" opposition to this part of the stimulus plan as "pork," is either based on ignorant ideological obstructionism or informed by a cynical,  politically corrupt obstructionism. Those are the only options for any reasoned understanding of why they are opposing this element of the stimulus package.  And the same is true for their objection as to "earmarks" across the board.

     But, of course, Any such detailed, informed analysis would require way too much reason and effort  than they can muster with the sound-bite rhetoric that dominates Fox TV or gets twittered to prominent GOP pols as they use those same sound bites while speaking before the Senate against earmarks as "pork", in their desperate attempt to find something, anything really, on which they can attack Obama politically and thereby derail not only his plan but the recovery of our American economy as well.

(2)  The GOP's political obstructionism is pure demagoguery, floating divisive and inflammatory accusations over the public airwaves, based on no real, substantive analysis as to why they say the  specific items they focus on are not related to the overall policy of Obama's economic recovery plan.

     The GOP obstructionist bloc is now criticizing Obama for not going through the stimulus plan with a microscope, as they are so desperately doing, to pull out all that "pork" like the honeybee insurance program.   Their simple-minded attack on these "earmarks" typically recites just the object of the program and the amount of money it will cost accompanied by some sarcastic comment -like the neocon moron who said we can't afford to see all those honeybees out of work, ha, ha -without even having a clue as to the important work that honeybees actually do for our economy, both locally and nationally.

     A couple of their favorite targets now are a $1.7 million project for pig odor research in Iowa and $200,000 for a program to help former gang members in L.A. get their gang tattoos removed.  Oh, that's a real laugh, isn't it.  But try explaining the joke to someone living next to a piggery, a productive business that supplies the country with real pork -the nutritious kind we like to put on our table,  or the long-term pig farmer who's being sued for nuisance by NIMBY newbies because his former neighbors sold their once productive farmland to a developer and cashed out. 

     Try explaining the joke to a former gang member, Asian, Hispanic or black, who has straightened himself out, wants to start a family and needs a good job.  He's finished community college, has some skills and is looking hard -but who will employ him for any decent job in an office or a retail setting with those tattoos all over his face and neck?  And forget about decent factory work, because all those jobs have gone overseas thanks to the neoconservatives' ideological faith in "free market" capitalism.

     If you look closely at any one of those so-called "earmarks" with an open mind, instead of the ideologically driven sound-bite obstructionism we're getting from the GOP and wingnut media hacks like Limbaugh, you will see a purpose behind them directly related to the overall goals of the stimulus plan, to put money into the hands of consumers by creating employment opportunities in localities all across America, so ordinary people can afford to purchase consumer goods, and to make credit available to start up businesses and keeping existing productive businesses afloat. 

     For a Congressman from East L.A., there is a real concern about the level of unemployment in the inner city neighborhoods that the gang members come from.  One obvious way to address that problem is to enhance the employability of former gang members who want to straighten out, become wage earners and bring honest income, earned outside the neighborhood,  back  home to support local tradesmen.  And a good starting point for that, obviously,  is to help them get rid of their gang tattoos -or maybe you think some high end men's clothier on Rodeo Drive is going to hire someone whose face, neck and arms are covered with garish gang tattoos to greet his wealthy, white clientele and give them tips on men's fashion.

      For a Senator from Iowa, there is a real concern to preserve the viability of farming and livestock businesses in his state, which are major employers throughout rural America. Livestock businesses in general are being attacked by the real "moonbat" left that believes in the absurdity of "animal rights" -not just humane laws based on our own sense of decency, but rights equal to ours that belong to cows, sheep and pigs. They are being attacked, too, by the NIMBYs who don't like the smell of  chickens, cows or pigs next to their newly built country "estates."  

     Now the pig farmers are getting it from the right, too, from ideological GOP wingnuts who make fun of their Senator's attempt to help them address the NIMBY problem in order to stay in business, to keep their workers employed as well as provide grocery stores and restaurants all across America with a commercially important agricultural product like pork.  Sausage, anyone?

(4)  The specific spending items in Obama's stimulus spending plan were all conferenced in Congressional committees, in an open and transparent process, to determine whether they were consistent with the overall purposes and policy of the plan.

     Every one of the so-called "earmarks" was negotiated and conferenced into the stimulus plan after being proposed by a Congressman or Senator who is concerned that the federal  money allocated to his district or state be directed into programs that are important to his local economy first, which are calculated to create jobs, promote start up businesses and/or protect the few existing productive businesses that remain -and that, in turn, is the focus of Obama's stimulus package, to re-establish local, Main Street economies as well as helping to correct the excesses of Wall Street.  As for shoring up your local economy, who is better qualified to determine what's needed, your local Congressman or a bureaucrat in Washington?

     This is why Obama felt it was important to get as many in Congress, on both sides of the aisle,  behind the stimulus package.  Those GOP hacks who object, on "principle," to the specifics of the plan as "pork", and don't seek to get funding optimally directed into their districts and thereby spread the wealth to promote the overall policy objective of the stimulus plan, are doing a disservice to their own constituents and the nation as a whole.  And their obstructionism, based on the objection that this, somehow, is just "pork", would be funny if it weren't so harmful politically to the President's attempt to restore our national economy.

     How many Americans today understand what the political epithet "pork" actually refers to?  It goes way back to the early twentieth century as a metaphor based on the pork barrels that were used, before the days of refrigeration, to keep pork parts preserved in brine.  It was used metaphorically to describe the practice of Congressmen to put specific items in the federal budget to benefit local interests, having no real connection to the overall purposes or goals of the budget itself.  But there was nothing inherently derogatory about the butchers'  use of pork barrels, as an economically necessary practice designed to make a valuable agricultural commodity available to a wide consumer market year ‘round.

     Nor is "pork" valid, metaphorically, as an objection to the specific elements of Obama's stimulus package today.  It is rather, a positive analogy insofar as the policy of that package itself is intended, as the original pork barrels were,  to bring real benefits to a wider consumer market all across America on a sustained basis.  The stimulus package, containing some 9,000 different local spending projects can therefore be analogized with a pork barrel for containing a variety of disparate local projects all of which are calculated to advance Obama's economically necessary policy of increasing consumer purchase power, by creating jobs and making credit available, to assist Main Street businesses all across America.

(5)  The budgetary process itself, like legislation in general, is never pretty, and it always involves a measure of give-and-take among bi-partisan Congressional committees, where compromises must be made and the local spending concerns of individual members are discussed and resolved, based on whether such specific items are consistent with the administration's economic policy,  before Congress as a whole votes on the budget.

     The cost of the individual earmarks that these GOP demagogues complain of, in  Fox TV sound-bites or by "twittering" to each other in the halls of Congress, amounts to just so much chump change, two hundred thousand here, a mil-and-a-half there, compared to the "pork" that they have always supported in GOP budgets from Reagan on down to Bush.  And so what?  It's just the way that budgets have always gotten done in Washington and, sure, it's not pretty.  As Bismarck said, the legislative process is like making sausage, and with negotiating budgets through the committee process, there's always some "pork" thrown in. 

     That is not, per se, a bad thing, as today's GOP obstructionists would have us believe, provided there is some consistency between the earmarks and the overall objectives of the budget.  And you can cut their hypocrisy with a knife today, where the GOP minority itself has managed, through that same bi-partisan committee process, to load forty percent of the stimulus plan with their own pet projects.

     For example,  Rep. Ralph Hall, R-Texas, slipped $142,500 for emergency repairs to the Sam Rayburn Library and Museum in Bonham, Texas into the stimulus plan.  Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., joined state colleagues to wangle $1.425 million for Nevada "statewide bus facilities." The top two Republicans on Congress' money committees also inserted local projects. Rep. Jerry Lewis of California, the top Republican on the House Appropriations Committee, slipped in $3.8 million for a Needles, Calif., highway.  Have you ever been to Needles?  I have and I can tell you it's the kind of place where the rattlesnakes outnumber the people. So why isn't that "pork" -or maybe just so much rattlesnake meat?

     The validity of so-called "earmarks" must always be determined by reasoned analysis, in light of the overall policy that informs the spending plan, like how spending money to support the honeybee industry really benefits agriculture as a whole and therefore the nation as a whole.  You don't do this by poring over a list of some 9,000 local spending projects to find a few you can ridicule as being "pork," based on nothing more than their potential as inflammatory sound bites as the GOP" obstructionists are doing.

     One prominent Republican, Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi, the top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, got a significant "earmark" into the stimulus plan with  a $950,000 grant for nature education center in Moss Point, Miss. But unlike so many of his fellow Republcians, he is not a blatant hypocrite. He defends "earmarks" by saying:

You have to take these on a case-by-case basis, A lot of these projects are justified.

Now, that's an intelligent appeal, coming from a Republcian too,  for analysis, as opposed to the anal retention we're getting from the GOP minority's purely political obstructionism, in it's ideological attempt to derail the Democrats' recovery plan.  

     I don't know whether Hall's repairs to the Rayburn Library, or Ensign's bus facilities in Nevada, or Cochran's nature education center in Mississippi will be effective or not in promoting the overall policy of the stimulus plan.  But I do know that even if one or two of them were not, it is a small price to pay politically to get the votes necessary to pass the legislation and put the overall policy in place.  

     I will take their word for it, based on their superior knowledge of their local economies, that such projects will serve the overall national policy of Obama's recovery plan, to rebuild the economy from the ground up, without all the  inflammatory, politically driven second-guessing  we are getting from the GOP obstructionists in Congress and on Fox TV.

E.  Given the gravity of our present economic crisis, and the clear and present danger it creates for the very survival of our Constitutional democracy, the GOP's political obstructionism, intended to see Obama's policy initiatives to restore the economy fail, is the moral equivalent of treason.

     Before you even think of  taking all that GOP bellyaching about "earmarks" and "pork" seriously, just look at the hundreds of billions of off-budget dollars that went to petroleum service contractors and the defense industry to finance Bush's oil war in Iraq, a war intended solely to gain control of Iraqi oil fields to benefit Exxon-Mobil -money that was just given to these dollar patriots of the corporate elite, Bush's "pioneers," through no-bid contracts without all the open and transparent negotiation that occurred in Congress before passage of the stimulus package.

     Now that was serious "pork", hundreds of billions of dollars going to a handful of favored contractors with close ties to Bush and Cheney, while the malevolent clowns in the GOP minority are nickel-and-diming Obama about $200,000, going to help former East L.A. gang members clean themselves up so they can get good jobs.  So why don't we  hear "Rush," or John McCain or the demagouges on Fox TV bleating about the "pork" on which Halliburton, Bechtel and KRB have been stuffing themselves at the public trough for the past five or six years, the way they're doing today with their potshots at the earmarks in the stimulus package?

     Oh, I know, we're at war in Iraq, but without even getting into the merits of why we are at war there, just remember that the Constitution, Article I, Sect. 8, provides for Congress' power to levy taxes as follows:

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes . . . to pay the debts and provide for the common defence and general welfare of the United States. . . .

Here, both the common defense and the general welfare are stated as equally important objectives for spending our tax revenues, with neither given any precedence over the other. 

     This is why I can say, with valid reason,  that today's economic crisis, as caused by the GOP's ideological irresponsibility, is the moral equivalent of war.  We are certainly in greater peril today, right here on Main Street,  from the continued collapse of our economy, with thousands of average Americans being laid off every week, than we ever were from the toothless rantings of a tin-pot dictator like Saddam Hussein a half a world away.  And the continued obstructionism by right wing media hacks, and GOP congressional hacks, solely for political gain, is clearly the moral equivalent of treason.  If promoting the failure of our once world-dominant economy as Rush Limbaugh does for ideologically driven political reasons is not calculated to give "aid and comfort" to our enemies, what is?