Romney's devastation: Bain, vulture capitalism, and massive profiteering off human suffering

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Romney may be defending his extremist vulture capitalism, capitalism that destroys jobs and ruins lives, and Republicans may be rallying to his side, aghast that anyone should dare question even capitalism at its worst, but there's no doubt one of his core weaknesses has been exposed. As Andrew Sullivan, hardly one to advance a left-wing take on capitalism, writes:

I just watched the Bain documentary featured below and being broadcast throughout South Carolina by Newt Gingrich's SuperPac in full. It's loaded with out-of-context quotes and heavily biased; it focuses on the specific human suffering of the necessary "creative destruction" of capitalism not its general benefits to the economy. It does so through the voices and stories of ordinary Americans. And, as an emotional bludgeon, it's devastating.

But what makes it so dangerous to Romney, it seems to me, is that the Bain Brahmin didn't just fire thousands of working class people in restructuring and in closing companies. He made a fucking unimaginable fortune doing it. That's the issue. Other Republicans can speak about the need for free markets in a sluggish economy. But with Romney, we have a singular example of someone who made a quarter of a billion dollars by firing the white middle and working class in droves in ways that do not seem designed to promote growth or efficiency, but merely to enrich Bain.

*****

I simply cannot imagine a worse narrative for a candidate in this climate; or a politician whose skills are singularly incapable of responding to the story in any persuasive way. This ad is powerful. Romney has already seen a drop in South Carolina. I suspect he'll drop some more. And I suspect once the potency of this line of attack is absorbed by the GOP establishment, there will be some full, if concealed, panic.

I'm not exactly as fond of the "creative destruction" of capitalism as Sullivan is, nor do I think it as "necessary" as he does, and I'm not sure this video is quite as twisted as he says it is, but otherwise I'm in agreement. It's a pretty "devastating" line of attack. And one based on Romney's actual record, not one just made up to make him look bad.

I suspect he'll still go on to win the Republican nomination, not least because many Republicans (particularly the elites) applaud his brand of capitalism and the immense wealth he made at the expense of others, but the long-term damage to his electability could be immense.

**********

In case you haven't seen it yet, here's the preview for the documentary. It's pretty powerful.

Mitt Romney and Bain Capital: destroyer of jobs, destroyer of lives

By Michael J.W. Stickings

*** Must-see video below. ***

It hardly matters whether Mitt Romney likes to fire people or not. What matters is his record. What matters is what he did at Bain Capital. And what he would try to do if elected president.

After all this time, with Romney not just the frontrunner but the likely GOP presidential nominee, his weakness appears not to be Romneycare, his health reforms in Massachusetts, but his work at Bain, where he made a lot of money, millions upon millions upon millions, buying up companies and tearing them down for profit, putting a lot of people out of work and destroying a lot of lives. As Politico explains:

Forget his specific rivals. The biggest threat to Mitt Romney is hitting now and set to fully detonate in South Carolina: It's the Bain bomb.

While conservatives look unlikely to unite around one alternative to Romney, the campaigns themselves are uniting around the theme that the former head of Bain Capital looted companies, tossed people out of jobs and is now exaggerating his success at the venture capital firm.

In other words, he was (and is) a capitalist -- profiting on the dark side of capitalism (capitalism not always being the fun and games its ardent and usually delusional right-wing adherents make it out to be). But what's crazy, given Republicans' general enthusiasm for capitalism, is that Romney's rivals (most of them now mere also-rans) are using his work at Bain, that is, his capitalism, to try to knock him off his perch. This includes, strangely enough, Newt Gingrich, never one to pass up a chance to make a buck, though perhaps nothing is strange in the shameless pursuit of votes, and Newt certainly has a long history of hypocrisy. As the Times reports:

Thanks to a $5 million donation from a wealthy casino owner, a group supporting Newt Gingrich plans to place advertisements in South Carolina this week attacking Mitt Romney as a predatory capitalist who destroyed jobs and communities, a full-scale Republican assault on Mr. Romney's business background.

The advertisements, a counterpunch to a campaign waged against Mr. Gingrich by a group backing Mr. Romney, will be built on excerpts from a scathing movie about Bain Capital, the private equity firm Mr. Romney once ran. The movie, financed by a Republican operative opposed to Mr. Romney, includes emotional interviews with people who lost jobs at companies that Bain bought and later sold.

Note: a movie "financed by a Republican." You can watch the preview below.

Jon Chait writes that Gingrich is swift-boating Romney. That's not the right word for it. The swift-boating of John Kerry was based on lies, whereas these attacks on Romney, while certainly lacking nuance, are based on Romney's record.

Otherwise, though, Chait is right: "Newt Gingrich's new message assailing Mitt Romney is a remarkable breach of protocol" in that it violates the informal rule that "the closer a candidate gets to wrapping up the nomination, the more gentle his opponents must be in assailing him." In this case, the reverse is true: the closer Romney is getting to the nomination, the more vicious the attacks are getting (assuming that Newt actually follows through on this). We've been waiting for the anti-Romneys to turn their fire on Romney instead of each other. That now appears to be happening. And the damage to Romney could be enormous:

Politically, the ads are devastating to Romney, whose message against Obama is that he is a "job creator" who understands the private economy. The message of the ads is that his private-sector experience consists of looting companies and destroying the livelihoods of working-class people. The victims testifying in his ads are the working-class people who have suffered economic stagnation over the last three decades that was accelerated by the revolutionary changes to the economy of which Romney was at the forefront. (If you haven't already done so, read Ben Wallace-Wells's story on Romney, Bain, and the transformation of the economy.)

The political effect of these ads is to turn Romney's chief selling point into a liability – his private-sector experience becomes an indicator not that he will fix the economy but that he will help the already-rich. It's a smash-you-over-the-head blunt message, with ominous music and storybook dialogue. At one point, the narrator says of  Bain's executives, "their greed was only matched by their willingness to do anything to make millions in profits."

Chait also makes the case that Romney was just being a capitalist -- for worse, not for better:

He was in the business of creating wealth, not jobs. Capitalism increases a society's standard of living, but it does not increase its rate of employment...

Since we want to increase our standard of living, we want capitalism. That wealth benefits the whole society over the long run, but in the short run it can destroy lives and communities — which, of course, is one justification for the role of government in siphoning off a portion of the limitless wealth generated by the Mitt Romneys of the world in order to alleviate social dislocation. But the thrust of Romney's platform is that people like himself give too much already, and those left behind get too much. His self-presentation as a "job creator" is an attempt to paint over that ugly reality.

The huge wealth Romney created was for himself and others like him, not society. (And I'm not so sure that capitalism always creates wealth and always "benefits the whole society over the long run. It really depends what sort of capitalism is in place.) What's remarkable, though, is that it is Republicans who are now making the case that he wasn't a good capitalist:

Gingrich's assault relies on drawing a distinction between real capitalism and the "looting" undertaken by Bain Capital... The distinction is utterly ephemeral. It's a way of saying you'd like all the nice aspects of capitalism without the nasty ones – creating new firms and products without liquidating old ones.

I tend to agree with this. Such "looting," like it or not, is an essential part of the capitalist way. And Newt and others making the anti-Romney case with him are driving a wedge into the hyper-capitalist Republican Party.

Generally, a party of plutocracy like the GOP -- one that pushes for tax cuts for the wealthy, spending cuts to programs for everyone else, and the cruelty and brutality of free market absolutism -- would be happy with a multi-millionaire looter like Romney, but these times are weird. Now even Newt Gingrich is making sense and appearing to want to constrain capitalism with social justice (even if it's just a last-ditch effort to turn the tables on Romney).

Gingrich is hardly endearing himself to Republicans with this line of attack, but there's certainly a constituency even on the right that's receptive to such anti-elitism. It won't be enough to stop Romney in the primaries, but it will certainly help Democrats make the case against Romney in the general election campaign. Bloodthirsty capitalist looters, after all, generally don't go over all that well beyond the confines of the GOP, particularly at this time of economic uncertainty.

The free market case against capitalism

By Carl 

Theoretically, laissez-faire capitalism predicts that the actions of self-interested individuals, on the whole, will benefit society. The balancing act any society has to commit to is to ensure that the community standards are upheld while people pursue their greed (itself a moral value that is antithetical to any society).

There are very few political systems that allow for the existence of capitalism. Certainly, democracy's attempt to "form a more perfect union" is diametrically opposite of the goals of capitalism, which is to destabilize and unbalance society as much as possible.

Still, capitalism does work in the framework of a society if it is kept reined in. Democracy can exist with capitalism, even thrive if, as with religion, the two are kept separate.

That crucial distinction is starting to fray.

Now, we may find capitalism itself has come unglued. Comes Rana Foroohar of Time magazine:

A new study from the Kauffman Foundation, a Kansas City, Mo.–based nonprofit that researches and funds entrepreneurship, has found that over the past several decades, the growth in size and importance of the financial sector has run in tandem with lower — not higher — rates of new-business formation. In the 1980s, when Wall Street really took off, the number of new firms created fell, and in the 1990s, it plateaued and has been stagnant ever since. Basically, the facts show the opposite of what Wall Street would have us believe. A number of factors explain that, but one of the most important, argue the study's authors, is that the financial sector is sucking talent and entrepreneurial energy from more socially beneficial sectors of the economy.

You can see it in the graduating classes of the country's top universities. Harvard graduates, for example, enter financial occupations at a far higher rate now than they did in the 1970s. It's a trend that accelerated markedly in the past decade, as the computerization of finance made the profession both more lucrative and more intellectually stimulating (one can now think about the 12th dimension rather than just golf). The proportion of graduates from MIT, for example, who went to Wall Street rose from 18% in 2003 to 25% in 2006.

The problem is that these are the types of people most likely to start the sort of dynamic, job-creating new companies that we need. No wonder economists like Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps speculate that the financialization of the U.S. and subsequent dampening of entrepreneurship may be at the heart of our long-term productivity slowdown (average productivity rates have been lower in the decades since the 1970s than in those before).

Whatever the corporate titans lobbying in Washington say, statistics show that it's new companies, not old, that grow the economy. Some 40% of U.S. GDP this year will come from firms that didn't exist in the 1980s. And nearly all the new jobs in the U.S. are created by firms less than five years old. "The political emphasis shouldn't be on making big firms work," says Kauffman Foundation head Carl Schramm, "but on helping new ones take root."

In other words, distilling these paragraphs to their essence, it's not the poor economy that's responsible for the slow creation of jobs.

It is, ironically, the excellent economy that's hampering job creation. The excellent economy in terms of Wall Street.

There's no getting around the fact that any rational person is going to engage in behavior that provides them with the best opportunity to create the most comfortable life for themselves. It's why Alex Rodriguez makes almost as much as a player for the Yankees than the entire Kansas City Royals baseball team.

It's why every kid on the farms of Indiana or the streets of the inner city plays basketball, for that one shot to make it to the NBA and earn bookoo bucks.

And it's why its ridiculous to whine about athletes when quants (those mathematicians who create these complex instruments that no one can explain without using higher mathematics), who do even less for Main Street America than any high-priced athlete, make fortunes while not creating a single job.

I mean, at least A-Rod puts fannies in the seats and that means you need a stadium and ushers and peanut vendors and security guards and ticket takers, all jobs for people like you and me.

Indeed, one could make the case that the job of a quant is to destroy jobs by betting on inefficiencies in the markets that hurt individual companies as well as individual investors. They suck money out of the economy and hide it in complicated financial instrument that can lose value faster than a banana can rot.

You'll notice that the free market still works for the community as a whole but the community itself has changed. Wall Street has wholly divorced itself from America, just as the rise of multinational corporations have guaranteed that "American" companies are no long American.

Wall Street has about as much fealty to Main Street as you have to the colony of mosquitoes forming on a puddle in your backyard. You come to view them as at best a nuisance and at worst an enemy.

I worry about the future of this country. Can you blame a kid who's really good at math for going in and making as much money as he can without risking a dime out of his pocket?

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

What will it take for Americans to wake up and reform capitalism?

By Carl 

This is what:

Yes, the rich live in a different world. And no, information won't change them. But a revolution will. Revolutions build slowly over a long time. Then, suddenly, a critical mass, a flash point, something totally unexpected ignites the ticking bomb.

It happened recently in a remote Tunisian village. Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old college graduate, unable to pay bribes, set himself on fire to protest police confiscation of his unlicensed vegetable cart. That triggered a revolution. And his death rapidly led to the collapse of a 24-year dictatorship.

Today we have four hot time bombs, tick-ticking, soon to make history; any one can easily accelerate the revolution that's already killing Wall Street from within. 

I'll list them but I urge you to go to Market Watch and read the descriptions in full:

1. Wealth gap: Super-Rich vs class wars, death of democracy
2. Wall Street's doomsday capitalism vs rule by anarchy
3. Pentagon's perpetual war machine vs America's budget time bomb
4. Global population explosion vs resources, jobs, better lifestyles

ANY ONE of those will trigger a mass collapse of the American economy. Any one. All four are in motion already.

You see, the rich really are different. As the article notes, they vacation in elite resorts, they meet at elite clubs, and they manipulate the economy from behind barriers and firewalls that would make Fort Knox blink. 

And they are woefully out of touch with the nations they "reside" in. "Reside" is in quotes because like there are now transnational corporations, there are now transnational people. They may reside in the U.S. or Britain or Switzerland or some small tropical island, but their power and influence and economic activity is so globally pervasive that they can influence far flung regions of the globe.

Prime example? Rupert Murdoch, an Australian who made his media bones in the UK before crossing the Atlantic, and then the Pacific to set up Asia's first pan-national satellite television system.

The rich not only are different from me and you, they don't even care about me and you.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Are we all socialists now? Glenn Beck, Lawrence O’Donnell, and the politics of name-calling

By R.K. Barry

MSNBC political commentator Lawrence O'Donnell recently identified himself as a socialist in an on-air discussion with prominent blogger Glenn Greenwald. Whatever his motivation, one result of this self-identification may be to begin the process of reclaiming a term that the right has been able to completely remove from our political landscape. 

It would be interesting if this started a more public discussion about what this term means and how an examination of its main points might be useful. O'Donnell was not, I am sure, unaware that this would all be red meat to certain of those on the right who don't care how embarrassing they appear to others.

You would not be surprised to learn that Glenn Beck rose to the bait. No analysis, no thought at all, just silly Beckian name calling. Quelle surprise! Has anyone else noticed that Beck comes across mostly like a bratty nine-year old hell-bent on annoying his siblings? 

To call someone a socialist in America has always been just about on a par with saying that the person kicks puppies as a hobby or steals lunch money from five-year olds as a way to make a living. There has never been much debate. Just launch the epithet and watch the subject of the attack reel in horror and protest vigorously. 

In point of fact, the term "socialist" is just too complicated, ambiguous, and multi-faceted to really mean much of anything specific in the modern context. But it does mean something. And if you happen to live in Europe or Canada, the term can actually be a conversation starter rather than a dirty name called to make cheap political points and shut down any further discussion. 

At the risk of oversimplification, most of the people I know who either identify with the term or look favourably upon it consider the power of corporations, the gross concentration of wealth, estimation of life chances tied directly to socio-economic class, the systemic inequities and terrible degradation endured by the underclass in capitalist society, etc., etc., as being circumstances that require some degree of state power to remedy. 

Not long ago, Newsweek magazine ran a cover story stating that "We Are All Socialists Now," and the right-wing howled. But obviously Newsweek was right, up to a point. We have government pension systems, Medicare, progressive income taxes, and all manner of government activity that socializes risk, and, yes, redistributes wealth. Now we even have health-care reform, and though it is hardly socialized medicine, it moves in that direction. In a manner of speaking, we are all socialists now. 

If we are to be honest, decades ago capitalist countries realized that in order for them to function at all, certain kinds of government intervention would be necessary: child labour laws, occupational health and safety regulations, social security legislation, all programs under the general heading of "welfare," etc. Capitalism just proved too blunt an instrument not to be counterbalanced by collective action in some way. 

Some sort of interventionist state has been a reality for a long time. We don't even need to go into the fact that George W. Bush understood as well as President Obama that the federal government would have to spend its way out of the current recession. The hard right claims not to approve in either case, but they're just wrong. 

A lot of people who identify themselves as socialist may not think that nationalizing major industries is a good idea, or that a command economy run by government is workable, or that there is a very good alternative to capitalist markets. Just as those who consider themselves more pro-capitalist want the latitude to consider a range of policy tools, self-described socialists can reserve the same right. 

But what we should all understand is that we live in a mixed economy. The private sector does a lot of things. Government does a lot of things. The key is in working towards a better balance between them that might just result in greater numbers of people having more than a slim chance of living a decent life. 

The point I am trying to make is actually quite simple. I have been calling myself a socialist for a long time, though I recognize it is an imperfect term. The important thing for me is that it suggests a constellation of ideas that we should welcome into the mix, such as: how much government intervention is justifiable in the lives of Americans; what limits should we place on private property for the sake of the common good; are there enterprises that might best be run by the government, like health care; are there goods so basic that they might be provided by government, perhaps like housing? I would want to talk about what factory owners owe local communities when they contemplate pulling up stakes after many years. I would want to talk about how governments ought to work with business to help create jobs. All kinds of stuff. 

Having the tools to explore these questions is what the concept of socialism makes possible. 

Yes, we can look at certain strains of socialism and try to connect them to state communism and then say that anyone who wants to argue for an expanded government role in the economy in the early part of the 21st century is a Stalinist in waiting, but, with all due respect to Professor Hayek, that would be silly. We might as well say that every capitalist is no better than a factory owner in some sort of 19th-century Dickensian hell or at least on the slippery slope to becoming one. 

Times change. The meaning of words changes. Like it or not, what the Newsweek headline should have read is that "We Are All More or Less Capitalist and More or Less Socialist Now." (I know. I'll never get a job as a headline writer). 

These days, any discussion about the relative merits of capitalism and socialism is really about how much government involvement in the economy is advisable. We can't know in advance. We have to take every case as it comes and work it out. 

If being a socialist means that I am more inclined to think that government should have an expanded role in ensuring that greater and greater numbers of Americans have a chance at a good life, then, along with Lawrence O'Donnell, I'm a socialist. 

Mostly I just want to ask a lot of questions to see where the answers take us. I think socialism provides some tools to help us do this. Nothing to be afraid of. 

But calling someone a socialist as a way to marginalize their ideas does nothing to help us find the answers we need. It's just dumb and par for the course for too many on the right.

Denigration and disenfranchisement: Glenn Beck, American conservatism, and the war on the poor

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Yesterday morning, guest blogger T.W. Wilson posted on Glenn Beck and the right's war on the poor:

When poor people stand up for their rights, stand up against power, that power has always been very good at pushing them aside and, not infrequently, crushing them. American history is full of examples of poor people and poor workers destroyed by power. Call it class warfare if you like.

One of the problems is that the poor just don't have the resources, let alone the political clout, to stand up to this assault. Sure, there are many admirable anti-poverty advocates and organizations out there working hard on behalf of people who don't have much of a voice in Washington, but they wield little influence compared to the right's campaign of denigration and disenfranchisement. As Wilson notes:

[T]he right wing has cleverly twisted the truth to make its case. Health-care reform is well on its way to being successfully re-branded as another entitlement program for a slothful underclass. The Republican leadership talks about unemployment insurance like it's a reward for laziness amongst the needy. The sub-prime mortgage crisis is explained as poor people wanting a life to which they are not entitled (instead of the result of unscrupulous banking practices). Tax cuts for the über-wealthy are taken to be a reward for obvious virtue, while the "have-nots" are assumed to deserve their meager lot. And lastly, opposition to progressive immigration reform is clearly a part of this narrative.

America's Puritan roots have a lot to do with this, obviously, with wealth seen as a sure sign of predestined salvation, as does American capitalism, which, developing alongside and to a certain extent out of Puritanism has created a cult of selfishness at the expense of community and social responsibility. In this sense, American society is seen less as an organic union and more as a loose collection of atomized individuals each out for his or her own good in a free market that is a sort of domesticated Hobbesian-Lockean state of nature.

In more immediate terms, though, it is political reality that drives much of this war on the poor -- and the reality is that the poor are likely not to vote Republican. Because of that, Republicans (and the conservatives behind it and within it) go to great lengths essentially to disenfranchise them, just as they went to great lengths to do the same to other groups who were for the most part non- or anti-Republican, including most notably blacks.

No, the disenfranchisement of the poor may not be formal policy, and the poor certainly to have the right to vote, but the right is nonetheless keeping many poor from full citizenship by denying them what they need to be full citizens, trying to take away various so-called entitlement programs such as Social Security, trying to remove what little security there is for those who do not succeed in the free market, such as unemployment benefits, and denying them access to health care and education, all the while working to slash government and prevent it from helping those who cannot help themselves and those who just need help getting back on their feet (the government is allowed to spend wildly on the military and national security, and may even be a Big Brother, bu it is not allowed to spend anywhere near that on social programs).

All this works to block the poor from participating fully as citizens, and from participating politically, much as voter registration rules used to block blacks from the polls. We saw this in '04 all around the country, including in Cuyahoga Country, Ohio -- the Cleveland area -- where, with Republicans running the state's elections, voters were subjected to extremely long line-ups at the polls and otherwise presented with obstacles to casting their votes.

And how do conservatives justify this? They don't. Or, rather, they don't have to. Legal discrimination, as in the past against blacks and others, is for the most part not allowed anymore. The right to vote simply cannot be denied. But the effective result of the policies and propaganda of the right is to reduce the poor essentially to sub-citizen (if not sub-human) status. According to this narrative, picked up by the media, the poor are, as Wilson writes, considered lazy and slothful, un-American and unworthy of citizenship. They may be thrown a few scraps, the wealthiest nation in the history of the world lacking compassion and understanding, let alone a genuine moral core, but that's about it. They certainly shouldn't be allowed to be politically powerful -- unless, that is, they can be manipulated into voting Republican, which is what Beck's brand of populism, one shared by the likes of Sarah Palin, is all about (in addition to the aggrandizement of Beck's and Palin's massive egos and in addition to making tons of money for themselves).

The poor are politically useful, you see, when they put aside their obvious economic needs and vote out of fear -- fear of the Other, as determined by the right. And they do this a lot. It's the other poor, the poor who aren't useful to Republicans, the poor who don't buy into the Republican narrative, who are effectively disenfranchised.

And the ranks of the poor are growing. As the Times reported yesterday:

The percentage of Americans struggling below the poverty line in 2009 was the highest it has been in 15 years, the Census Bureau reported Thursday, and interviews with poverty experts and aid groups said the increase appeared to be continuing this year.

As the country fights its way out of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, four million additional Americans found themselves in poverty in 2009, with the total reaching 44 million, or one in seven residents. Millions more were getting by only because of expanded unemployment and other assistance.

*****

The share of residents in poverty climbed to 14.3 percent in 2009, the highest level recorded since 1994. The rise was steepest for children, with one in five affected, the bureau said. 

But what do Republicans, many Democrats, the media, and the powerful care about? Bank and auto bailouts, a continuation of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, opposition to any and all government-run health care (with the exception of Medicare, as the elderly can be frightened into voting Republican). The poor and their plight simply don't register -- except insofar as the right-wing war on the poor continues unabated, including with Republicans trying to block any and all government efforts to help the poor through this horrible economic time.

It is appalling that it has come to this. The poor have been spit out the bottom of American society, victims of a social, political, and economic system that rewards wealth. They lack a strong political voice in Washington compared to conservative interests, the media generally ignores them (or mostly regurgitates the conservative anti-poor narrative), and there is little opportunity for improvement despite all the up-with-America talk about mobility and self-reliance.

The poor simply don't matter, even as their numbers swell (and would have swelled more had it not been for government spending), and this allows Republicans, and conservatives generally, to win. It is their successful campaign of denigration that has reduced the poor to sub-citizen status. Politicians do little for them (all they really do is allocate the scraps) and they just don't have the votes, with so many of them disenfranchised, to make a difference on their own.

America, as I often say, can and must do better. But it will be hard for anything to get done with a campaign of relentless class warfare being waged by the rich and powerful against those without the means to fight back. And things only seem to be getting worse.

Capitalist fools

By Carl

Capitalism is an economic system based in fear. If you're a coward, you're a capitalist.

Think about it. According to theory, capitalism is advanced through the "enlightened" self-interest of individuals (I'll get back to the enlightened bit later). Translation: greed. Greed is good in capitalism. Indeed, if capitalism can be said to have any morality, that morality is based in greed.

But greed is based in fear, just as nearly every negative emotion is. Greed is about the fear that you will not have enough, never have enough and therefore must always have more.

Ask anyone who was mixed up in the junk bond bubble of the Reagan years or the dot-com bubble of the Clinton/Bush years or the real estate bubble of the Bush years: it was not about having enough, it was about having more. From the homeowners who foolishly bit into a mortgage they could never possibly handle to the bankers who lent that money knowing full well those borrowers couldn't afford the mortgage to the stockholders who demanded higher earnings every quarter from the bankers who lent the money to the people who couldn't afford it, to the governments who gladly accepted the property and income taxes due on the money that the shareholders demanded by higher each quarter from the bankers who lent the money to people who couldn't afford it, all of this monumental folly was based in greed.

And enabled by countless pundits, analysts, media flacks, and government officials. "Ownership society," Mr. Bush? OWERship society is more like it, you pompous butthead!

Adam Smith in positing capitalism, even tho he called it laissez-faire (French for "leave to do"), spoke for the need for taxes on business activity, strong government oversight, and warned against business combinations of any sort that involved removing the personal responsibility for the actions of a business.

We call those "corporations". You'll never hear this from your immature libertarian friends who read Ayn Rand for the sex scenes and came away with some muddled sense of economic theory crossed with personal freedom.

Adam Smith, in Wealth of Nations, speaks of the "Invisible Hand" precisely once (Book IV, chapter II, paragraph IX , if you're playing along at home). It was in the context of domestic trade being preferable to international trade. In other words, all those "free marketeers" are bullshitting you. And yet, an entire conservative cottage industry has arisen over a gross distortion of Smith's intent.

All to support and justify naked greed. There is no community when greed is involved. You would steal from your neighbors as soon as you'd steal from a stranger if capitalism had its way. And if you don't believe that, pick up any  newspaper.

Indeed, on a macro basis, this is precisely what happens. International trade and relations are less dependent upon any sense of community than local and domestic trade, which was Adam Smith's point about the "invisible hand". Why were we attacked on September 11, after all? Was it because we're rich? Was it because we supplied arms to Israel, or Osama bin Laden? Was it because we had protected Muslims in Bosnia? Was it because we helped harm Muslims in Palestine?

Whatever part of the political spectrum you come from, it doesn't matter. Whatever answer to that "why" you feel comfortable with, it doesn't matter. All answers return to the greed of capitalism. Our private industries made money in conflict with our so-called "moral values." After all, if we fear radical Islam, why were we helping the mujahadeen in the 1980s? It's not like we were friends with radical Islam back then. We had just had hostages returned from Iran, for goodness sake!

Once you look at the world around you and do a thought experiment, you understand why greed needs to be in check, and why capitalism is for cowards. If we took morality out of the equation, if we truly allowed capitalism to be laissez-faire, crime would be a booming industry, all drugs would be legal, and porn would be available on the counter of your corner newsstand instead of bowdlerized and forced into dark corners and pay-per-view television.

Is that what we really want?

If capitalism was based on enlightened need, one could conceivably find a lot of good in capitalism. Capitalism presumes that we each have the other citizens of our community in mind.

Sadly, no...

Capitalism is not immoral, but capitalism is responsible for immoral acts. Capitalism is also responsible for the greatest man-made tragedies to befall America and by extension, the world.

In and of itself, capitalism is not immoral. It is amoral. It does not think. It only works like a vast enumbed machine, not distinguishing between friend or foe, between good or evil, between moral and immoral.

And here's the real kicker: capitalism is antithetical to American values, if we define "American values" as freedom, equality, and morality.

Those are in our Constitution. They're declared and demanded in the Declaration of Independence. And yet, self-interest sans enlightenment is harmful to all three of those. Sure, you can say that freedom exists, but is it really freedom when your boss can fire you at-will, and worse, threaten that to hold your behavior in check? Is it really freedom when that same boss can demand you work overtime or put in free hours from home, but then get all pissy when you ask for a few hours to take your sick kid to the hospital?

Is it really freedom without equality? And is it ever equal in a society where greed is honored and acquisition the goal?

And is that EVER moral?

(crossposted to Simply Left Behind)

Washington spins in his grave

By Carl 

I seriously doubt the father of our country would cotton to the whining underpants crowd:

[O]n the eve of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference in Washington, more than 80 conservative leaders gathered on the grounds of George Washington's former Virginia estate to unveil a manifesto reaffirming the movement's beliefs.

The "Mount Vernon Statement," as they have dubbed the document, seeks to tether conservatism to constitutional principles at a time when Republicans and many independents have become outraged over what they view as governmental overreach. Its authors, a group of boldface names and Beltway veterans who have been among the movement's leaders for decades, have been working for months to hash out language that satisfies the party's often fractious factions. They cite the compact as a contemporary version of the Sharon Statement, a document named for William F. Buckley Jr.'s Connecticut hometown that helped shape the contours of conservatism for the past 50 years.

Bollocks, as they say. The "contours of conservatism" is what got us into this mess, and if you think one year of a moderate-to-right-centrist administration has undone the thirty years of greed embodied by the very corpse these asshats trot out anytime someone mentions how much nicer we can make this nation for its people, I got a bridge to sell ya.

Indeed, along with Geo. Wa­­ƒhington spinning in HIS grave, undoubtedly Adam Smith is likely spinning in his grave to see the rape of the average American that has been foisted upon this great nation in a bastardization of his economic principles.

To wit:

The joint stock companies (ed note: corporations) which are established for the public-spirited purpose of promoting some particular manufacture, over and above managing their own affairs ill, to the dimunition of the general stock of the society, can in other respects scarce ever fail to do more harm than good. Notwithstanding the most upright intentions, the unavoidable partiality of their directors to particular branches of the manufacture of which the undertakers mislead and impose upon them is a real discouragement to the rest, and necessarily breaks, more or less, that natural proportion which would otherwise establish itself between judicious industry and profit, and which, to the general industry of the country, is of all encouragements the greatest and the most effectual.

Or:

In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging, and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard with abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance in any other employment than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expence of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.

Ahem.

Not exactly the unfettered free market that conservatives go crazy over.

Indeed, Adam Smith was quite leery of business combinations that took human beings off the hook for their actions (like corporations). He understood that people are greedy, vain, selfish, and vicious asocial bastards who would gladly sell their fellow men into slavery for a bowl of porridge a la Esau.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Begrudge

By Creature

A gaffe:

"I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen," Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. "I, like most of the American people, don't begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system."

Obama's centrism makes him tone deaf. I get that he's speaking to Business Week, but to not acknowledge that the only reason a "free-market system" exists for those "savvy businessmen" is that the taxpayer made it possible is seriously bone-headed.

This will have repercussions.

Update: The full quote is here, and it's more nuanced than the screaming headlines imply. Nuance, however, doesn't drive the media. Hence, gaffe.

Update II: The White House argues "nuance" in response. They are not wrong, but when your argument is nuance, it is a losing one.

We will all be Marxists, one day

By Carl

Did you know we live in a Marxist society and have for some time?

I didn't either, until I watched this fascinating lecture given by Professor Richard Wolff called Capitalism Hits The Fan (side note: Link is in the middle of a fundraising drive, so please give. LinkTV is only available 24/7 on DISH and DirecTV, and Link in conjunction with Free Speech TV is ONLY available on DISH Network, so drop your cable, skip Murdoch's DirecTV hegemony and get a DISH!)

Capitalism in America worked pretty well for the first two hundred years of our nation's existence, even if for a large swath of that it was poised in large part on the backs of slaves. Around 1970, something happened.

Four things, actually. Production continued to rise, while the traditional tie-in to real wage growth (which occurred in this nation in every decade, including the 1930s) was severed, and wages became stagnant and even declined.

Wolff explores these four reasons-- automation and computers, global competition, immigration, the expanding role of women in the workplace-- and comes to the logical conclusion with respect to the recent mortgage meltdown (and the coming consumer credit crisis): it was inevitable that in order to "keep up with the Joneses" we'd all have to borrow our asses off.

Indeed, General Motors makes less money now off its automobiles than it does lending money to Americans to buy them (and houses, and in credit cards).

In fact, as Wolff discovered, companies realized that they could freeze wages, make enormous profits off the gap between rising productivity and frozen wages, and then make even more money lending those profits back to the working classes and earn interest on the money they rightly should have been paying in wages!

Meanwhile, Americans began working more hours to compensate for frozen wages, because, you know, you have to keep spending and paying off your credit cards and putting food on the table and, oh yea, buying a car for the wife who now works and getting her work clothes and lunches and...

Hours worked per annum in America rose 20% in the period since 1970.

For every European nation, they dropped, on average, 20% over the same period! We're exhausted here!

Wolff goes on to examine the various solutions proposed for this current and (what he feels will be) extended recession, and finds fault with all of them.

Why? Because they don't address the structural inequity of American capitalism: you can't turn the clock back to the 1970s and forgo global competition or automation or women in the workplace or increased immigration (mind you, he doesn't mean illegal immigration, which actually helps prop up the wage structure). You have to move forward, and giving money to ease the pain is putting a bandage on it.

His solution is both elegant and capitalistic, but reminds us that Marx has been distorted beyond parody.

Marxism is in America, right now, and right now, you are looking at its products, if you have an HP computer or printer or an Apple iMac or Macbook, or any countless number of "entreprenurial" products that arose in conjunction with the computer revolution.

But go watch his lecture on LinkTV to find out the real answer...

(crossposted to Simply Left Behind)

A dead meme

By Carl

The good thing about Christmas Eve is no one has anything of import to write about. The bad thing about Christmas Eve is no one has anything important to write about:

[T]he war on Christmas is a godless plot cooked up by a cabal of latte-sipping liberals, greedy retail tycoons, bearded ACLU communists and Ban Ki-moon acolytes who secretly gather in Bay Area synagogues to smoke pot, deface Bibles and perform abortions.

Or — maybe — the whole thing is just a canard, the backlash against a wave of political correctness that swept the U.S. in the late '90s, resulting in some strange new concessions to cultural sensitivity: cities insisting on calling the telltale conifers "holiday trees," efforts to ban the pleasantry "Merry Christmas" and crackdowns on the use of holiday nativity scenes and other religious iconography. But to many, the War on Christmas is a hyperbolic construct that blows the problem out of proportion. "There is no war on Santa," Michelle Goldberg wrote on Salon.com in 2005. "What there is, rather, is the burgeoning myth of a war on Christmas, assembled out of old reactionary tropes, urban legends, exaggerated anecdotes and increasingly organized hostility to the American Civil Liberties Union." According to Max Blumenthal, who published a recent article on the topic, the trope's persistent popularity is fed by financial opportunism: "The Christmas kulturkampf is a growth industry in a shrinking economy, providing an effective boost for conservative fundraising and a ratings bonanza for right-wing media." O'Reilly himself has lent credence to this theory. "Every company in America should be on its knees thanking Jesus for being born," he said on Nov. 29, 2005. "Without Christmas, most American businesses would be far less profitable."

Yup. A history of the war on Christmas!

(Long-time readers of my blog may recall I bothered to write a little ditty a few years back on the topic. Feel free to read it again.)

It's this last quote from Bill O'Reilly (the model for my novella) that got my attention.

Bill-O, really... have you forgotten Matthew 21?

12 And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves,

13 And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.

(emphases added)

Bill-O, you old Ferengi! "A good lie is easier to believe than the truth," indeed! That was Westbury, NY, right? ;-)

Christmas, in my eyes, has become nothing more than an excuse to exploit and manipulate the feelings of people, to watch those feelings manifest themselves in a spending spree.

Now, on the face of it, there's nothing wrong with that: people ought to acknowledge the folks around them who have supported and otherwise stuck by them throughout the year and the end of the years is as good a time as any to do so. By codifying the recognition of this relationship, we don't find ourselves in the embarassing circumstance of "forgetting" to get a present. It's hard to forget Christmas.

Or Hannukah. Or Kwanzaa. Or Festivus. Or the Solstice.

See where I'm going with this, Bill-O? Does it really fucking matter to Wal-Mart or Target which holiday gets celebrated?

Does it even matter to you? My suspicion based on your wholly Unchristian attitude towards people is the next time you set foot in a church, it will be feet first in a pine box.

I, for one, was glad this year that we had better things to focus on than the rantings of the O'Reillys and the John Gibsons of the world regarding the lack of piety in our secular world surrounding the birth of Our Lord (no offense, atheists, Ceiling Catists, or FSM believers, much less Jews or Muslims or Hindus and Buddhists). If this article is any indication, this is a meme that has outlasted its fifteen minutes.

It is Christmas Eve. We're told it is a time to gather round your family and celebrate another year older (and deeper in debt). I like to think differently.

To me, Christmas is a time to look back on your year, your life, and ask if you could have done it better. Jews have a week-long celebration of their religious new year: the time from Rosh Hashana to Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Indeed, the entire last month, Elul, is a time of reflection, to ask and to wish to be inscribed in the Book of Life.

What a marvelous concept! If only certain faux-Christian commentators would have that much humility!

Christmas is my Father's reminder of His great gift to the world: His Son, a gift I accepted a long time ago. We may disagree about this idea, but it comforts me, and gives me strength when the world around me seems darkest. He is my candle in the night. He reminds me there is a larger world out there, one that is filled with people who have earned just as much respect for their beliefs and knowledge as I do.

After all, we're all still here. That alone is enough.

My problems, my concerns, are important to me, but in the larger picture, mean nothing. And if I had a soapbox as big as Bill-O's, I'd find something more important to talk about than a petty insignificant created crisis like The War On Christmas.

It is to mock the waste of resource that is Bill O'Reilly. Long may he stumble over his own two feet, telling me about the speck in my eye, while ignoring the log in his own.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Is the world more or less secure today?

By Carol Gee

Is the World More or Less Secure Today? There are many kinds of security. Uppermost in may people's minds these days is financial security around the globe. And probably the best place to find out about that question is the Financial Times. A good place to start is their World headlines page. There we learn that Saturday European leaders met to discuss the financial crisis. The UK may have to cut interest rates. British banks are braced for an insurance crackdown. California may have to get an emergency loan. The U.S. has lost 159,000 jobs recently, and our Federal Reserve system may have to do something with interest rates. Following the passage of the so-called "rescue" legislation, the financial markets remain somewhat in turmoil. Stocks fell sharply again the day of the vote. Financial Times also has a good International economy page.

European Leaders Hold Emergency Finance Summit in Paris -- The website Deutsche Welle has the best story about the economic Summit in Paris. It is a must read to get the full picture of the EU dilemma. To quote:

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has called an emergency finance summit in Paris Saturday. Washington has approved its historic $700-billion bailout package, but EU leaders are divided over what action to take. Disagreements, however, center around a plan, reportedly favored by France, to set up a 300 billion euro ($415 billion) fund to help troubled European financial institutions.

In particular, this has provoked tensions between France and Germany, who have diverging views of how the European Union should function. Berlin is traditionally more opposed to a centralized approach, especially in monetary affairs.

Britain, along with Germany, has been reluctant to commit taxpayers' money to a Europe-managed fund and advocates a case-by-case approach to rescuing financial institutions. . . . The British prime minister's spokesman said that while the financial crisis had a "European dimension," individual countries wanted to come up with their own solution because it is their taxpayers' money that is at risk.

The Asia Times has an Asian Economy page analogous to the others mentioned in today's post. New Zealand's market did the best this week with only a 1% drop. Japan saw declines it had not seen in almost 25 years. It was reported that Asian markets "barely blinked" at the passage of the U.S. bailout package. Gold markets in Sydney and Hong Kong have been doing a brisk business. An article, "Asia still fatally coupled," by Thomas I Palley, offers a fascinating perspective on Tom Friedman's flat world.

Another interesting perspective is the one from Russia's RIA Novosti. Their Global financial crisis page is a good place to start. There we learn that only 7% of Russians believe that the economy is healthy. And, no surprise, Putin blames the U.S. for its inadequate response to the financial crisis. Russia's Central Bank gave $50 billion (9/29/08) to bolster its financial system.

Another kind of security is national security, or being protected from terrorism. For catching up on what is going on in this world I looked to my 10/3/08 CQ Behind the Lines newsletter, by David C. Morrison. Here are a couple of paragraphs that give some hints about how much more or less secure we are this week.

About security, the answer is, we don't know yet. To quote:

Four young Muslims went on trial in Paris on Wednesday accused of operating an extremist network that planned attacks in Europe and sent volunteers to fight in Iraq, Agence France-Presse reports. The two terror suspects arrested at a German airport last Friday may be released for want of evidence against them, Cologne’s Express explains. A Thai documentary that played at this month’s Toronto Film Festival centers on a teacher who was kidnapped and beaten by a group of Muslim women in 2006, dying after eight months in a coma, Reuters’ Chawadee Nualkhair spotlights.

About security the answer is, probably more secure. To quote:

In what is likely their last public appearance before meeting an Indonesian firing squad, the three Bali bombers “acted more like pop stars than prisoners,” The Sydney Morning Herald mentions. The United States has deployed to Israel a high-powered radar for coordinated defense against Iranian missile attack, marking the first permanent American military presence on Israeli soil, Defense News notes. “The Patriot Act-protected title character in ‘Eagle Eye’ [DreamWorks] is a self-aware, anti-terrorism surveillance computer that goes rogue — deciding to assassinate the leaders of America to end the self-imposed state of terror,” The Cleveland Scene’s Jason Morgan capsule-reviews.

About security the answer is, probably less secure. To quote:

The counterterror-oriented U.S. Africa Command debuted Wednesday as well, but hostility and cynicism have forced it to shelve plans to be based on the continent, Reuters updates. “Kylie Minogue and 2,000 VIP guests could be targeted by al Qaeda at the world’s most expensive party, the Nov. 20 opening of Dubai’s Atlantis Hotel,” The Daily Star breathlessly relates.

(Cross-posted at South by Southwest.)

Capitalism, regulation, and stupidity

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Atrios:

The Absurdity of CNBC

The entire financial system is practically collapsing and they're lamenting the possibility of more regulation. I don't think the sports/referee metaphor is perfect, but it's probably good enough. People who prattle on about "the free market" are usually too stupid to have a clue how complicated and pervasive the "rules" had to be to get a well-functioning modern market system: sophisticated concepts of contracts and enforcement, property rights, legal entities, proper accounting, bankruptcy, limited liability, etc... etc..., did not descend from the heavens but were, in fact, created.

Exactly.

Greed is God

By Carl

Much of this week, hell, much of this year, has been about the coming economic disaster, which appears is now arriving on Track 13.

It got me to thinking a little about the capitalist system and its built-in, inherent flaw. Hell, it's such an obvious flaw that it boggles the mind that a rational people would choose it for their economy. Even Adam Smith saw it coming and warned against it.

Laissez-faire capitalism can loosely be defined as each person acting in his own interest contributes to the benefit of society at large.

For the large part, this system works pretty well: it's simple, easy to implement, and eventually, all people can benefit from truly free markets.

The one flaw in the ointment, the thing that ultimately Smith warned us on, is, well, greed. I mean, it's right there in the first part of that equation: A person's self-interest.

Implicit in that statement, of course, is the question "Which self-interest?" After all, one can be greedy to the point that it no longer is in one's self-interest. Think about Ebenezer Scrooge.

The assumption Smith made in his time was that man would remain ultimately a polite creature, fair and impartial, and more to the point, powerless over his fellow man (except for nobility, royalty and slavers).

In other words, business would remain small and personal. Indeed, his specific warning was against business combinations that would tend to unduly influence a market.

In fact, despite Republican tendencies otherwise, he insisted on government regulation in markets to assure that companies would remain beholden to the market, to the customer, and to society.

What we have witnessed over the past eight years is one of the least regulated markets in world history. Even the Romans, no socialist society, had the decent sense to keep the overseers at least nominally independent of the overseen!

The systematic deregulation, either de jure or de facto by ignoring regulatory oversight or simply paying lip service to it (SEC chairman: "Say, you boys over there at Bear Stearns aren't doing anything I should know about, are you?" *wink-wink*), of the Bush administration was teasing the tiger with a thick steak on the wrong side of a short fence. It was asking for trouble. It was practically BEGGING for it.

Combined with the recent hard-line business attitude that economic royalists have taken since at least the Reagan administration (another Republican), which has seen huge companies overthrown because any shlub with a sufficient credit line thought he could squeeze more shareholder value out of the company than current ownership, and you have a deadly combination.

Management at corporations have had to genuflect to the shareholders, but those shareholders have tended more and more to focus on the short-term quarterly profit than the more nebulous, less objective, "value of the company".

The "self-interest", if you will. As companies have gotten bigger and bigger and more out of touch with their customers and the community, we've seen less and less accountability, less and less care, on the part of the corporation.

Which I think may have been Adams' point: business combinations, whether in the form of conglomerates, mergers, or even simply a gathering of minds at the watering hole on a Friday night to split up a market, mean less attention is paid to the business at hand: providing society with the benefits it deserves from putting up with the plunder of capitalists.

Smith, in other words, believed that so long as people could remain human, capitalism would always be in balance with the rest of society.

And yet, we've all seen that this was not the case, and in my estimation, could never have been the case: Greed is a powerful intoxicant.

That may be why it is one of the seven deadly sins. Which now brings us to the message at hand for today.

I've often wondered how capitalism can exist in a society that considers itself Christian.

Indeed, for the first two thousand years, give or take a couple of centuries, Christianity banned capitalism, on the grounds that earning money on money or charging more for a good than what it cost, was a form of usury, which is barred in the Old Testament.

In 1635, a Massachussetts man was convicted of "greed"...yes, it was a crime!...because he earned 6% on his sales, which was 2% more than the law allowed.

A law! About greed! Unthinkable today!

Christ himself warned against the accumulation of wealth. You might recall the "camel thru the eye of the needle" parable.

We see that Christianity is antithetical, even hostile, towards Christianity and vice versa. Why?

Because Christianity is about your fellow man, and capitalism is about, well, taking that fellow to the cleaners. Capitalism is soulless, godless and worships nothing so much as efficiency, the more ruthless, the better.

That's not me saying that. That's the damn system, which rewards short term efficiencies, even if it means breaking the law or the covenants of society, in order to squeeze one more dollar out of a transaction.

Greed pervades the system. Greed is inherent in the homeowner who borrows more money that he can realistically afford to pay back, because he's certain the value of his home will increase exponentially, and that value is his nest egg for retirement.

Greed is inherent in the banker who finances that mortgage, who knows that when the house of cards falls down people are going to get hurt, but he can justify the month's loan activity to his regional office with increases, not decreases, only.

Greed is inherent in the broker who bundles that mortgage along with countless others in a resaleable bite-size package to a series of investors looking to make money off other people's pains. The idea was to diversify the risk, to take the mortgages off the banks' books and to hand the risk over to other people who needed to balance their portfolios, but you know what happened: everyone jumped into the game and soon not enough good mortgages were floating around, so people just effectively packaged "junk mortgage bonds" and passed them off as AAA credits.

Greed, in other words: squeeze them for every buck you can get.

Greed is inherent in the municipalities, states and even the Federal Government, who all benefit from higher home values and balance their budgets on the backs of the greedy in the form of property taxes and the income taxes upon sale or disposal of the property, as the greedy homeowner climbs the social ladder to his McMansion built on his veery own McCloud in the McSky.

Do none of these people, for there must be a whole lot of crossover here, listen in church when the minister or priest talks about the evils of greed?

I've always believed that America, being somewhat psychotic in this regard, should make a choice: God or mammon.

If you're going to choose God, then turn communist. Communism and Christianity are perfectly suited to each other: to each according to his needs, from each according to his ability dovetails nicely with love thy neighbor and turn the other cheek.

If you're going to choose mammon, money, then drop the fucking pretense of being godly. It insults my God and it's silly on its face. I mean, seriously, is there a stupider sight than to see John McCain shocked, SHOCKED, to find there's no one minding the store?

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)