Latimer on Law & Politics

How many trillions would you spend to protect shipping lanes for camel cheese?

     How Many Trillions Would You Spend To Protect Shipping Lanes For Camel Cheese?

               President Barak Obama is confronted with two interrelated hot-button issues separated by an ocean and a continent.  The first is Iran's threat to block all shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, and the second is the proposed Keystone XL pipeline to bring Canadian tar sands crude oil to the Houston refineries.  Both pose equal threats to our long-term health and welfare.

               Both of these issues underscore the utter folly of America's ongoing dependence on fossil fuels to meet energy needs across the board. Both of these issues also involve the truly massive costs of relying on 20th Century petroleum technology, as against renewables like solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro-electric, for meeting America's 21st Century energy needs.

             The short-sighted politicians, and the oil-industry lobbyists they listen to, argue that renewables like wind and solar cost the consumer far more than oil and gas, but that begs the question.  It is only true for myopic folks who can't see beyond their own noses or think any further ahead than the next financial quarter.

            The problem with that kind of thinking is it totally ignores both the real present-day costs of continued reliance on petroleum and other fossil fuels and the fact that fossil fuels, being non-renewable, will continue to become costlier and costlier as supplies are depleted and energy demands continue to increase. Fossil fuels are so-called for the simple reason they are the by-product of decayed vegetative matter that flourished on Earth millions of years ago.

            We can pump crude oil out of the ground and refine it into usable fuel, but we can't make any more of it. Once the existing oil fields are depleted it's gone, not necessarily  forever but at least  for a million years or so.  So what is needed today -indeed was needed twelve years ago, is a far-sighted plan to wean America off of fossil fuels quickly through rapid development and integration of as many renewable energy technologies as possible.

            Depletion of the world's fossil fuel resources is inevitable, and the costs of extracting them are inexorably increasing as the years and decades go by.  These costs include both direct production costs and indirect environmental and health costs.  To ignore this reality is to act as the proverbial ostrich with our head stuck in the sand and our rump exposed.  The Preamble to our Constitution states that We the People established the  government of the United States,  not simply to provide for our common defense, but to promote our general welfare as well. 

            This, ultimately,  is meant  to "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity," but what kind of future are we leaving to our posterity if we continue on the present course of oil and gas dependency?  What kind of future will that be if we continue to pollute our lands, our waters and the air and if we continue to squander trillions of dollars for defense of the petroleum industry in places like the Strait of Hormuz?

           Thus, the true, present costs of continued dependence on fossil fuels don't show up at the gas pump or the fuel oil meter.  They are embedded in our medical bills and our tax bills, both state and federal.  They include the obvious direct costs for oil-spill clean up, and the obvious indirect costs for treatment of widespread pulmonary disease caused by breathing polluted air.  

          Those indirect costs for gas and oil which never get counted into the equation as compared with renewable energy, include the obvious direct tax subsidies and allowances to the oil industry.  They also include the massive, ongoing subsidy given to Big Oil in the form of tax moneys spent on military operations calculated primarily to expropriate foreign oil reserves and/or protect those which have already been expropriated. 

           The Bush administration's failed oil-war in Iraq is a prime example of the former, where the only real objective was to oust Saddam Hussein for the purpose of securing long term leases on Iraq's vast undeveloped oil reserves and establish permanent military bases there to protect them.  The Bush administration was negotiating with the new Iraqi government for thirty-year oil leases right up to their last days in power, and they didn't get them. 

            The cost of that war included nearly a trillion dollars, mostly borrowed instead of being paid for with tax revenues collected from the intended beneficiaries, Bush and Cheney's true constituency in the oil and defense industries.  It also cost nearly 4,500 young American lives with very few of our troops, if any, coming from the economic elites who benefit the most from both lower taxes and the ongoing ascendency of oil and gas as the basis of our national energy policy and our foreign policy.

            A good example of the latter type of indirect subsidy is the billions of dollars spent annually to maintain the Fifth Fleet keeping the Strait of Hormuz open for oil tankers to deliver middle eastern oil to the world market.  This may also lead to another costly oil war in the Mid East, with even greater loss of American lives, which the American right will inevitably characterize as "necessary."  That will be necessary, however, only because we continue to remain abjectly dependent on gas and oil to satisfy our energy needs, while putting the cost of protecting the oil industry's overseas operations on the shoulders of us taxpayers. 

            What if though, instead of electing Bush in 2000, with his close ties to both American and Saudi petroleum interests, we had elected Al Gore with his close ties to the American environmental movement?  Would 9/11 even have occurred -or would President Gore have heeded the warnings fromRichard Clarke and others about the pending attack on American soil. 

            Clarke was chariman of the Counter Terrorism Security Group on the National Security Council, and his warnings of an imminent attack in the summer of 2011 should have been of grave concern to any President, and surely would have been to President Gore.   For some reason, however,  those clear warnings were ignored by George W. Bush, Richard Cheney and Condoleeza Rice. 

            Even if al Qaeda had attacked on Gore's watch, he surely wouldn't have allowed the entire Saudi contingent in the U.S. to leave in the dead of night within a day or so after 9/11, as Bush did, without so much as a debriefing by U.S. intelligence.  Bin Laden, you may recall, was a Saudi national and came from a wealthy family with close ties to the Royal family. President Gore, without Bush's close ties to the Saudi Royal family would most assuredly have had all those people vetted to obtain as much information as possible about bin Laden's financial connections before letting them leave the U.S.

           President Gore would not have wanted to blame Saddam Hussein for the attack as a pretext for starting an oil war in Iraq, and would have concentrated instead on capturing bin Laden in Afghanistan where he was hiding out.  Unlike Donald Rumsfeld, President Gore's Secretary of Defense would have no need to prolong the war in order to drum up support for invading Iraq, and would therefore  have honored the generals' request for additional troops to surround bin Laden at Tora Bora, thus ending America's only legitimate military response to 9/11, a limited police action,  in December 2001.

            Most importantly, however, is the fact that President Gore would have spent that trillion dollars, the trillion that Bush squandered in Afghanistan and Iraq, on developing clean, renewable energy technologies. He would have put America on a fast track for the inevitable 21st century transition to  clean, renewble energy technologies  right then at the beginning, instead of letting us slip far behind Germany and China as we continue with our collective head in the sand and rump exposed  in the second decade of the new century.

           But no, instead of really providing for both our common defense and general welfare by electing a leader who would reduce our dependency on foreign oil producers, we elected the President from Texaco, and a good Christian man too,  don't you know.  We elected a political hack named George W. Bush, determined to protect our so-called American "family values" by perpetuating our abject dependence on fossil fuels until the American petroleum industry squeezes the last drop of oil out of the ground, drying up both the world's petroleum reserves and trashing our once robust economy, doing nothing to promote development of renewable energy technology while letting the deregulated financial industry dominate our  economy by selling crooked financial "products."    

           It didn't have to be that way, though,  and it still doesn't have to end that way if we can muster the collective will to take the fossil fuel crisis seriously enough to do something about it. That means no more trillion dollar oil wars, and no more sweetheart deals for the petroleum industry like having the U.S. Navy protect their shipping lanes at no real cost to them or building them a pipeline across our precious, diminishing wilderness.   

            You want jobs?  Fine, let's put millions of people to work in renewable energy research and development, manufacturing and facilities construction.  We can provide incentives to private industry for this by simply taking away the subsidies now enjoyed by Big Oil and transferring our money where it will do the most good, both for ourselves and our posterity.  And if private industry won't step up, we can pay for it ourselves by taxing the wealthiest Americans who continue to  enjoy more of the "blessings of liberty"  than most of can only dream of.  We can use that revenue to combine a renewable energy Manhattan Project for R & D with a renewable energy W.P.A. to build the infrastructure. 

            Think about it.  How important would the Strait of Hormuz really be if we significantly reduced our dependency on oil and gas so all the Arab nations had to sell  us would be dates and camel cheese?

John Edwards & Newt Gingrich - what's the difference?

John Edwards & Newt Gingrich - What's The Difference?

"On a field, sable, the letter A, gules." - Source.

 "And it would be as dishonourable and unfit for God to pardon the injury without any repentance at all,  as to do it merely on the account of a repentance that bears no more proportion to the injury, than none at all. Therefore, we are not forgiven on repentance. . . ."  -Jonathan Edwards, Concerning The Necessity And Reasonableness Of The Christian Doctrine Of Satisfaction For Sin

"But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly"-                                                    -Jesus, Matthew 6:6, King James Bible

 It's been rather amusing of late to those of us who believe in the positive, life affirming teachings of Jesus, as opposed to the fire and brimstone fundamentalists, to see how the religious right is struggling with the fact that Newt Gingrich may well be the GOP standard bearer in the upcoming election season.  They are anxiously grappling with the fact that Newt is a chronic sinner, with multiple marital infidelities, and he now seeks to lead the party of their cherished "family values."  The hand-wringing is audible on the street coming from fundamentalist churches all over America.

             The official party line, of course, is that Gingrich has repented of his former sinful ways, and now claims to be back in the fold, following the path of righteousness and all that, don't you know. That is the position of the Catholic Church, but many Protestants on the religious right have doubts, and with good reason.  After all, while repentance is a necessary condition for salvation, as the great fundamentalist theologian Jonathan Edwards taught, it is not by itself a sufficient condition. 

            For redemption, there must also be a degree of genuine humiliation and suffering by the sinner, some outward manifestation that the sinner has in fact felt the sting of his sinfulness, which is best understood by the term "atonement."  In Edwards' words:

None will deny that some crimes are so horrid, and so deserving of punishment, that it is requisite that they should not go unpunished, unless something very considerable be done to make up for the crime; …

                                                              *                                  *                                  *

And therefore, unless conscience has been stupefied by frequent violations, when men have done wickedness there remains a sense of guilt upon their minds, a sense of an obligation to punishment.”

Works (Yale) 18:434 and 436-7. 

               Here, it is not enough merely to say one is sorry for his wicked deeds, as Gingrich claims to be today.   One must also  suffer the pangs of moral punishment, an obligation for which there is no evidence on the part of Newt Gingrich the serial adulterer who now asks the religious right to vote for him as President of the United States.  Gingrich has done nothing "very considerable" to make up for his sins, and he has in fact done nothing at all by way of atonement.

             Yet,   Gingrich  is now asking those on the Christian right who believe in the doctrine of sin to help put him and his equally adulterous present wife in the White House, based on nothing more than his claim that he has now repented of his lifelong habitual sinfulness.   As  Dana Carvey's Church Lady would surely say "Isn't that con-ven-ient."

             Again, I'm coming from a different Christian perspective here, based on Jesus as the messenger of God's love for mankind as a whole, while the basic tenets of Christian fundamentalism, as articulated by theologians like Jonathan Edwards who  reject that view, posit a much harsher doctrine in which God is the arbiter of divine justice and for whom  salvation is only for His elect.

             It is that harsher view of man as inherently sinful that informs and defines  much of the Christian right today, exemplified in politics by the likes of Rick Santorum who would not only overturn Roe v. Wade, but would turn the clock back even further to overturn Griswold v. Connecticut to let the states ban contraception again -all in the name of getting "big government" out of our lives of course.

             This is the same theological mindset that Hawthorne elicited in The Scarlet Letter, set in a Puritanical society where adultery was considered to be a grave, mortal sin.  In the novel, the good Christian citizens of Boston sought to have Hester Prynne put to death for having borne a child out of wedlock, but the more enlightened elders decided it would suffice for Hester to wear a scarlet "A", for adultery, sewn on her bodice for the rest of her life, and stand on the marketplace pillory for three hours of public humiliation.

             The father of Hester's child, Pearl, is none other than the highly respected minister Arthur Dimmesdale. In the end, after much soul searching, Dimmesdale decides to share Hester's humiliation by carving an A onto his bare chest and standing on the pillory with her.  After they die, they share a common headstone with the inscription "On a field, sable, the letter A, gules."  That's the last line of the novel, i.e. on a black field a red A. 

             So, looking at the revived candidacy of Newt Gingrich, one can't help but marvel at how he's deflecting harsh criticism of his well-known serial adulteries by claiming that he has now "repented", and then we look with astonishment to see so many on the religious right are desperately struggling to accept that "mere repentance", as Jonathan Edwards would call it, at face value. Again, these are folks like Santorum who believe contraception is a sin even by married couples!

           So let's look at Gingrich's adulterous "sins," not compared with Slick Willie Clinton but more closely with John Edwards.  Gingrich and Edwards both cheated on their wives while their wives were gravely ill, completely dependent and in in great need of their full care and support.  Clinton, by contrast, cheated on Hillary who was and still is a very strong, healthy woman.  If she can forgive or at least tolerate Bill, who are we or anyone else to second guess her?

           But Gingrich's surviving ex-wife Marianne is still bitter today, and justifiably so where he started cheating on her after she was diagnosed with MS.  That's when he started an affair with his present wife, the metal-haired Callista.   Marianne says he asked her to agree to an "open marriage" so he could fool around -basically the same thing that  he and the Republican "values" voters so harshly criticized Clinton for. 

            Before that, Gingrich cheated on his first wife while she was stricken with cancer, which is exactly what John Edwards did, and that is equally reproachable -or "sinful" if you will - for both of them isn't it?   The only significant difference between the two men is that Edwards, unlike Gingrich, has clearly shown that he has felt that sting of moral failure, not by mere words but in all that he has done since his fall from grace.

            Edwards  fathered a child out of wedlock, and he initially denied paternity.  But then, like Dimmesdale, he acknowledged paternity and has, as appropriate to someone who feels morally humiliated, taken himself out of politics.  He has turned to doing good works with a low profile, including charitable post-disaster relief efforts in El Salvador and Haiti.

           That kind of repentance, accepting public humiliation and seeking atonement through good works, still might not completely satisfy  the harsher judgment of his namesake Jonathan Edwards, but it clearly does show a genuine repentance by John Edwards that contrasts sharply with the present ostentatious  pieties of Newt Gingrich.  Gingrich, for example, has flatly denied ex-wife  Marianne's highly credible claim that he had asked her for an open marriage before dumping her, calling her a liar.  Then he angrily  lashed out at the media for asking about  it, as if he were a victim instead of the weasely adulterer he in fact is.

             Gingrich's self promotion, seeking public acclaim while defiantly deflectng public humiliation for his misdeeds, stands in stark contrast with John Edwards genuine repentance through atonement. It stands in marked contrast with Arthur Dimmesdale who carved the scarlet A, for adultery, onto his chest and then stood on the pillory to accept public humiliation from a judgmental Puritan society.  Gingrich's present posing as a Christian penitant is instead the same kind of conspicuous public piety that Jesus condemned in Mark 6:6.

           Gingrich, instead of standing on the pilloryand accepting  public disgrace like Edwards and Dimmesdale,  is now standing for high public office while indignantly brushing aside any public attempt to call him to account for his serial adulteries.  That is not genuine repentance, as Jonathan Edwards would surely tell you, as it comes nowhere near even the slightest degree of atonement and is wholly out of proportion to the grave seriousness of his "sin" in the eyes of God, at least as sin is understood by the "family values" Christian right today.

            The purportedly repentant Gingrich of today shows no signs that he is in any way morally different from the hypocritical, opportunistic Congressman who, while committing adultery himself,  led the religious right's  "family values"  charge against Clinton for the very same thing.  Sure, Gingrich now splits hairs about it, saying he was only attacking Clinton for having lied about it under oath, but to the genuine Christian fundamentalist the adultery itself is just as sinful as the lie.  And are we to believe that Gingrich never lied to his wives about his sexual infidelities?  Sure, that's  not perjury, but in terms of Christian morality it's just as sinful. 

           So, as I said at the outset, the religious right's present grappling with the prospect of Gingrich as the GOP presidential candidate this year is very interesting to those of us whose Christian faith is much more liberal and far less judgmental than the Rick Santorums of this world. Very interesting, and a real hoot to boot.

Hey, Willard! What Goes Around Comes Around.

Hey, Willard! What Goes Around Comes Around

"I like being able to fire people . . . ."   -Willard "Mitt" Romney, 1/9/12

Poor Willard Romney! That mean old Newt Gingrich has taken some of his words out of context to make him look like a greedy, heartless corporate raider instead of the benevolent regular guy next door he wants you to think he is.  You know -just regular guy Mitt with the designer blue jeans and Armani white dress shirt with rolled up sleeves and all. He's asking for your vote like he was your neighbor asking to borrow a ladder or something.

              So the Romney people, with the multi-million dollar campaign fund and the unlimited PAC spending are pissin' and moanin' about how unfair it all is. Willard made a remark how he really enjoyed being able to fire people, it was on video and his primary opponents have been playing that excerpt in negative campaign ads against him.

              But Willard wasn't talking about firing wage earners, see.  No, it's clear from the full video that  he was talking about being able to terminate service contracts when he wasn't getting what he expected from them.  The contractors might have to fire some wage earners after losing the business, but that's not Willard's fault is it?  No, Willard only enjoys firing the contractors, and that mean Newt Gingrich has totally distorted what he actually meant by taking a snippet of his words entirely out of context.  That was so unfair!

             So I can hear the world's tiniest violin playing Hearts & Flowers for poor Willard right now.  It was his campaign, remember, whose very first ad was an attack on President Obama on the economy.  In that ad, Romney's people took a snippet from a much longer Obama comment which, taken out of context, made it appear that Obama was somehow admitting responsibility for the still lingering economic debacle caused by the crash of 2008.

             That crash was in fact brought about by the same reckless Bush administration deregulatory policies that Romney wants to re-establish, along with even greater tax cuts for his oligarchic corporate class, the kleptocrats who don't really wear jeans and rolled-up sleeves except when they're trying to fool the American public into letting them get away with grand larceny again.

              Obama's remark, about not wanting to talk about the economy during the campaign, was actually a quote from John McCain who, as a Republican candidate like Romney, in fact didn't want to discuss  the economy for obvious reasons. That was the point Obama was making with the words taken out of context by the Romney people, so they were flat-out  lying about Obama's meaning and, by extension, his purported responsibility for the economic crash in 2008.

            Obama's words, taken out of context by the Romney people, had nothing at all to do with anything Obama had in fact ever done in any context.  Meanwhile, Romney's comment about how he enjoys firing people clearly does have relevance to his self-vaunted experience as a "businessman." 

            Sure, Romney was talking specifically about terminating service contracts, but he has in fact been involved in firing, or "downsizing" to use the preferred corporatist euphemism, thousands of  average American wage-earners, through leveraged buy outs in pursuit of bottom line profits, as the major corporate raider he actually was as CEO of Bain Capital in the 1990s.

          Now, to be fair, maybe Willard didn't actually enjoy firing, or "downsizing" all those folks, but he sure as hell did enjoy reaping the billions of dollars in profits  he took by doing it. The photo of him with his fellow Gordon Gekkos at Bain Capital, grinning with dollar bills stuffed in their pockets, shirtsleeves and collars, is the real Romney, and he clearly was not weeping then about the fact that much of that money, that profit he so ostentatiously enjoyed, was made by firing people.

                So, while Willard's words  about firing people were in fact taken out of context by his primary opponents, they were in fact highly relevant to his actual, self-proclaimed  experience as a "businessman."   He in fact really enjoyed the fruits of the LBOs he engineered, which in turn involved  firing thousands of every day American workers. The photo says it all.  Gingrich, therefore, is being both  honest and relevant with the Romney excerpt taken out of context, in marked contrast with the Romney campaign's  snippet  used to attack President Obama in their very first campaign ad.

          Sure, some of Bain Capital's startups and LBOs resulting in retaining jobs and even new hires, but that was never Romney's purpose.  His sole purpose as a "businessman" is clearly shown in the photo, and that picture, truly, is worth a thousand words here.  Besides, Romney actually used the term "fire people," not "fire companies," which clearly has all the earmarks of a Freudian slip. 

             As a wealthy, self-important "businessman", with aspirations to be President of the United States, Romney surely does relish having the power to fire whomever he wants, people or companies.  Given his real-life business experience as a corporate raider, it's all the same to him.  He is in fact on record as saying "Corporations are people, my friend. . .  Of course they are" -another direct, relevant quote preserved on video, and clearly taken here in context.

           In the photo, Romney's wearing a business suit, white shirt and tie, instead of blue jeans, as appropriate to the corporate class he really represents.  That's the moneyed class whose interests he really seeks to serve as President with more deregulation and bigger tax cuts, and to hell with any concern about creating jobs or otherwise making life easier for the 99 percent of us Americans. 

          We're the ones who weren't born with the proverbial silver spoon.  We're the ones who pay full taxes, whose kids actually fight the Republican wars for corporate opportunity overseas  and who  don't have billions of dollars to hide in offshore bank accounts.  Willard couldn't care less about us, just like he didn't give a second thought to the thousands of workers he "downsized" through LBOs with Bain Capital, making himself a few billion dollars as a corporate raider

Another Question For Businessman Willard "Mitt" Romney

                           Another  Question  For Businessman Willard "Mitt" Romney

               Willard Romney, venture capitalist cum vulture capitalist, is now running for President as "Mitt" Romney, and says you should vote for him because his experience in running a successful  business makes him specially qualified to run the government of the United States of America.  In a prior post I have questioned this claim, pointing out how dismally former businessmen,from Harding through G.W. Bush, have actually performed in the White House.  This constrasts sharply with the better Presidents who have all had more specialized professional backgrounds, including law, the military, education and even movie acting.

            Subsequent to that post, Timesmen David Brooks and Paul Kruger have also commented on this reality on the N.Y. Times Op-ed page.  Here, we don't have to go so far as saying that  a business background, per se, will lead to an ineffective and incompetent presidency, but the historical evidence clearly debunks Romney's claim that his business background will somehow ensure a successful presidency. 

            History and logic combine to refute Romney's rhetoric that his business experience will restore a prosperous "normalcy" for America. The evidence of how former presidents with business experience have performed clearly shows that just ain't so.

            Indeed, it would be a difficult task for anyone, with any background, to perform as ineptly as either Harding or his successor as worst-ever president G.W. Bush.  Bush, by the way, was America's first MBA president, and now Harvard M.B.A. Willard, who also holds a law degree, wants to be the second.  It is therefore important that we look closely at Romney's actual business experience, including both his competence and his attitudes, as that may affect his performance as America's Chief Executive officer.

           We can dismiss Romney's brief performance as Governor of Massachusetts right off the bat, as he has himself repudiated his most significant achievement, the Massachusetts health care reform law of 2006.  That legislation, conceived and signed by Romney, is what President Obama's federal health care reform law is based on, including the individual mandate that fuels the Tea Pot anger and invective against Obama.   

          Romney, a purportedly moderate Republican governor of Massachusetts back then, is now campaigning as a GOP right-wing fringe appeaser in order to implement pro-business policies including tax cutting and deregulation similar to the policies of  Presidents Harding, Hoover and G.W. Bush, in addition to repudiating Obama's adoption of his Massachusetts health insurance reform law.  Real Massachusetts Republicans, men of honor and intelligence like Frank Sargent and Ed Brooke, would be spinning in their graves if they could hear Romney's rhetoric today.

          Looking at Romney's business career, focusing on Bain Capital where he made most of his billions, we see two distinct phases.  The first was based on venture capitalism, helping start-ups like Staples get up and running, actually creating jobs by capturing a significant market share.  That's where most of Romney's self-proclaimed "job creation" took place, even though job-creation was not Romney's purpose as opposed to profit-taking.  The jobs created by such start-up ventures were merely incidental. 

           But then Willard and his colleagues at Bain decided to get into vulture capitalism to make even bigger bucks for themselves -and to hell with how many thousnd  jobs had to be "downsized."  They began getting into leveraged buy-outs (LBOs) big time, looking for companies in trouble much as vultures look for carrion, and then taking them over to deplete assets while taking out all profits, laying off workers and then letting the companies go under. 

           Sure, some of  Bain's LBOs resulted in turn-arounds, bringing the company back into profitability, but that still involved downsizing, laying-off hundreds or thousands of employees, while Willard and his Bain colleagues pocketed the profits which, all the while, was their sole objective as capitalist businessmen. It was never aboutt creating jobs or prosperity for anyone but themselves.

          So this leads to the big question for Willard "Mitt" Romney. Which "businessman" would he be if he occupied the Oval Office? Would he be the venture capitalist, raising money to invest in an enterprise, to produce and sell a product and generate revenues? Or would he return to form as a vulture capitalist, downsizing jobs and selling off public assets via "privatization" while starving the enterprise of all revenues in order bail out via bankruptcy after bleedng the company dry?   Based on his tax-cutting and anti-regulatory rhetoric, it clearly appears that Romney as President would be the latter.    

        To get a business up and running requires money, that involves either borrowing or selling stock or both. Then, in order to maintain a successful business, there must be a  sustainable revenue stream based on selling goods or services at a profit.   But a democratic government like ours has only one sustainable means of raising revenue, which is through taxation. 

        The federal government's authority to raise revenues via taxation is stated right there in the Constitution,  Article I, Sect. 8, where Congress is empowered to levy taxes in order to pay the national debt, provide for national defense and promote the General Welfare of We the People.  Taxation and spending on government programs in fact does promote our general welfare as it sustains employment and buying power in a significant portion of the work force.

        This role of the "big" federal government is all the more important in an era like ours when private corporate employers, despite eight years of GOP tax-cuts and deregulation under G.W. Bush, just haven't created the number of jobs necessary to sustain the American economy.  That era of tax cuts and deregulation in fact led to long term stagnation in adjusted median income for Americans, for us in the 99 percent, while the 1 percent at the top, Willard's true constituency,  just got richer and richer on under-taxed capital gains and tax-free corporate income.

        So, before you even think of voting for Willard "Mitt" Romney this November, make him answer some basic questions about his self-vaunted "business" experience. What successful, sustainable business has Romney ever run on the basis of intentionally reducing revenues?  How does he expect to run a successful government, based on sound "business" principles, by further reducing revenues as with his proposals to cut taxes rates on his moneyed corporate class even further than Bush did?   

A Few More Questions For Romney The Businessman

                                                A Few More Questions For Romney The Businessman

                                           "The business of America is business."  - Calvin Coolidge

            Mitt Romney has been inundating the airwaves lately, touting his experience as a "businessman" as a reason to elect him as President next November.  History, however, refutes the logic of his claim that business experience as a corporate CEO somehow qualifies him to be the Chief Executive Officer of the United States of America.

           As a rule, businessmen have made the worst presidents.  Beyond any doubt, the two very worst Presidents since the turn of the 20th Century  were Warren G. Harding and George W. Bush, both of them "businessmen" before getting into politics.

           George W. Bush, was America's first MBA president, and he hit the ground running in 2001 with policies of deregulation and tax cuts, based on the same small government, pro business agenda of deregulation and low taxes that informed the Harding and Hoover administrations, and remains the economic agenda for today's GOP hopefuls and Romney in particular.

          Bush senior's pro-business presidency was a failure, though not as spectacularly disastrous as W's.  Earlier last century, businessman Harding was the all-time worst president before W, and he set the tone for the ensuing pro-business Coolidge and Hoover administrations, with Hoover anti-regulating  the American economy into the crash of 1929.

         The better presidents during the 20th Century have all had professional careers, not business careers, with the one exception being Truman, not a Wall Street corporatist like Romney but a Main Street businessman, a small town haberdasher before getting into politics.  Meanwhile, FDR was a lawyer, Eisenhower was an Army General, JFK was a journalist and LBJ was an educator. Even Richard Nixon, despite his fatal paranoia, was a far better president than Harding, Hoover and either Bush, and he was a lawyer, while Ronald Reagan, a movie actor, was also more effective. 

        The fact is that businessmen and business corporations are not in the business of creating jobs or otherwise serving the Constitutional mandate of promoting the General Welfare of We the People.  They exist solely to gain profits for their investors, which is a legal obligation, and they will therefore create jobs when that is profitable, and they will lay off thousands of ordinary American workers and ship jobs overseas when that is more profitable. 

         We saw that happen big time during the first decade of this century where the Bush tax cuts were a spectacular success at generating profits for the corporate elite, greatly magnifying the wealth and income gap between the billionaires and the rest of us.  For us average Americans, the 99 percent, those tax cuts have been a spectactular failure on every significant economic indicator.  

          In less than a week, the Occupy Falmouth demonstrators outside the Bank of America created more new jobs than the Bush tax cuts did in eight years.  That's the armed guard the bank executives hired to stand in the doorway to protect themselves from the forty or so middle aged, middle class protestors standing on the sidewalk holding signs every Saturday morning.

          Mitt Romney's claim that his being a businessman somehow qualifies him to lead America through these troubled times is thus just more right wing pro-business baloney.  We've recently been hearing the right-wing media complain about the two-month extension of the payroll tax cuts as being out of sync with business practices that operate on a quarterly calendar, and it's true that businesses do plan and operate on the quarterly basis.

          Running a government and a national economy, however, must be based on long term planning, sustainable growth as opposed to the kind of short-term profit taking that prevailed under the Bush administration's pro-business policies of tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation of business and finance.  That's the same outlook that, as a competent businessman, Romney took while managing Bain Capital's investments, creating some jobs when that was profitable and laying off thousands of workers when that was more profitable.

         Being a competent businessman, therefore, is no qualification for being a competent President of the United States.  Both Harding and Hoover were competent in business, and wholly incompetent as Presidents.  G.W. Bush wasn't as competent in his business career, but his pro-business Vice President Richard Cheney was a wizard in the realm of corporate capitalism, and the two of them together brought about the worst combined political and economic disaster in American history in terms of both the economy and foreign policy.

         So the question Obama has to keep hammering at Romney with during the next ten months is what exactly he would do differently from G.W. Bush as President. Don't let him get off with the airy-fairy generalizations his PAC has been floating on television lately.  Pin him down with specifics.  What would he do differently with taxes? What would he do differently with regulation of  industry and finance?  What would he do differently with borrowing to pay for foreign wars instead of taxing the corporate elite to pay for them?

         What the Democrats have to do this election cycle is reincarnate G.W. Bush as the GOP's very own favorite son and then demand that Romney either repudiate Bush's disastrous pro-business policies of tax cuts and deregulation, or give a specific and detailed explanation of why he would expect any different result if those policies were reinstated during a Romney administration.  As Einstein observed, insanity consists in doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome, and that clearly holds true for the present day GOP's persistence on the repeatedly failed free market economics of deregulation and tax cuts.  

          The GOP's continued faith in deregulation and revenue starved small government is as simplistically mindless as Silent Cal's famous remark that "the business of America is business".  It is insanely so in light of our actual history of boom and bust when unregulated businessmen have been in control.  It was George Santayana who said, "those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it," and candidate Romney must therefore be challenged to explain exactly why and how putting a businessman like him  back in control of the government will not just result in another 1837, 1873, 1893, 1929 or, most recently under G.W.Bush, another 2008. 

.