I'm reading a new book by Bill Bradley. That Bill Bradley. Its title is "We Can All Do Better." It's not a wonderful read. Bradley writes in an earnest honest style that is probably what guaranteed he would never survive primary season to be a candidate for President. The book suggests simple practical things that could have been done to keep us from the morass we are in and, alas, in my opinion, not likely to get out of.
Bradley writes with what seems to be an aim to speak to both sides of the political divide and to show us what could be possible if we actually worked together to solve problems in practical ways rather than cling to our ideological mantras. I haven't finished it yet. The book is a bit like homework. But I do like how it is going so far. He's even-handed with his assignment of causes of our dilemma. He is critical of the conservatives' bête noirs, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He asserts that Dodd-Frank actually does more to preserve the "too big to fail" institutions that gambled with all of our money than it does to regulate or control them. He also points to Glass Steagall repeal, done by a Republican Congress and signed by Bill Clinton, as a kind of linchpin that enabled the whole debacle that became The Great Recession. Few of us were around for it, but Glass Steagall was the act the separated investment and commercial banking after the start of The Great Depression. It seems the money boys can't help but play with our futures unless the law prevents them.
A telling critique is for President Obama. Despite promises that his administration would be different, Obama was quickly captured by the Washington insiders that surround every President these days and was told that no he could not tackle campaign finance reform first because it wasn't in the polls as on the public radar. I guess 300 million Americans can't be wrong. Of course without getting the corporate money out of politics there wasn't a hope in hell of really doing anything meaningful about anything else. Even his signature health care reform fell well short of what it might have been so that the insurance companies could hang on to the whole pie and not even have a viable public option that would allow us to hold them up to scrutiny. [Personally, I was fascinated by the whole "death panels" baloney, since if there ever were such, they existed inside the insurance companies denying coverage.]
And now that the Roberts Court has enshrined the corporate ownership of the other two branches of government we are well and truly screwed. Bradley proposes an amendment to allow local, state, and federal governments to limit campaign spending; and barring that legislation, as strong as can be made within the SCOTUS restriction that compliance must be voluntary, to encourage public funding of campaigns. The opening would still allow individuals to use their own money--one reason we have so many millionaires in Congress is that the first qualification in the vetting of a candidate is whether they can fund their own run.
To describe what our America, "land of opportunity," has become, Gentleman Bill (how I think of him) uses an analogy put forth by economist Lawrence Katz. In it Katz describes the American economy as a large apartment building, once "the object of envy" around the world, but in the last generation it has changed. The penthouse on the top keeps getting larger, the apartments in the middle floors more and more squeezed, the basement flooded, and "to round it off, the elevator is no longer working. The broken elevator is what gets people down the most."
It struck me as truly apt. My father got a job in the thirties from the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of the things Franklin Roosevelt did to put America to work again. My father was from an upper middle class family, and his generation did much to erode the advantages that gave him thanks to drink and other profligate habits. My mother was probably lower middle class. Her father had been a small businessman but died young, leaving his family of five children in some tough straights. They made it largely by helping each other. Three of them got college degrees, two on the GI Bill. In my father's family, two of the four siblings went to college. For the most part that generation in the end did better, not without struggle; but I grew up in a solidly middle class family with middle class aspirations. My father's issues with alcohol left me to start afresh leaving home at 17. But I was fortunate.
Education was not out of reach for me. There were schools where you could work part of the time and study part of the time. That's where I began and then got lucky enough to go to a place that provided great scholarship aid for those who needed it. We managed our way to a reasonable life with both parents working. It still often seemed paycheck to paycheck, There was always a roof and food, though in the end we didn't have enough to provide much help to our own children to get an education, but there were still ways at the time that something could be worked out. One son made use of a good state school and a graduate fellowship, the other got help from his father-in-law.
But this was all a little more than treading water and not exactly upwardly mobile. In my generation and theirs we public school kids competed with the scions of the rich who were assured their places in the very best schools. If we made it, we made it on work and competence. The up elevator was creaky and slow and we had to hand crank it. My brother did night school for his undergrad and then got a scholarship and used loans to attend a premier business school. His life since, featuring three marriages and two divorces (my track record as well), has also been blessed with at least three major corporate demises and subsequent layoffs, the last leaving him to find income as a night watchman and newspaper deliverer. No surprise that he has become quite cynical about the value of his MBA. I, too, have faced the layoffs of corporate America. In one I got out ahead of the wave and effectively had to start over, but the other two, both driven by economic downturns, left me on the unemployment rolls for longer than I care to remember. Only aggressive saving when I was employed and a younger wife, and the best of cash managers, have given me enough to hope for a reasonable retirement, as long as I don't live too long.
Even then we took a serious hit 2008-2009 as Goldman Sachs et al played with our money. But we'd been conservative about our housing with short term mortgages and we'll manage. I get a little pissed off that some of the people with McMansions or those who used their equity for consumption in the run up to the crash have gotten mortgage relief and bail-outs, but I can't buy getting all pissy about the people really on the low end of the totem pole getting a few measly tax credits the way the doctrinaire "no new taxes" pledgers can.
But the prospect of another financial meltdown scares the crap out of me, and I don't see how either party is offering real solutions.
We have to do things that help the vast middle have restored confidence in their own futures and fix the damn busted elevator. In the world of the "dismal science" as doctrine, I guess I'm what you would call a "demand-sider." I think the engine of prosperity is an engaged and fully employed middle class. A government owned by the corporations, for the corporations, and by the corporations isn't going to get us there. For every good citizen CEO who is trying to do the right things with his business I sometimes think there must be a thousand who are pretty much committed to lining their own pockets. Just go take a look at the 10-Ks on the SEC website.
We are in a crisis. It is a crisis that is not unlike the lead up to the Civil War or the late nineteenth century excesses of the Gilded Age. There was a theory proposed by the apologists for slavery that the lowest rung of society was a "mudsill" that was the required foundation for the upper classes to rest upon. Like so much of the rhetoric today, it was a justification for exploitation. "Trickle-down economics" seems to me just a more benign sounding term for the same thing: the coins tossed from the speeding aristocrat's carriage as it runs over the small child that happened to get in the way.
If we make it, and I sincerely hope we find the ways, it may be said of this time that "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times."
Bradley writes with what seems to be an aim to speak to both sides of the political divide and to show us what could be possible if we actually worked together to solve problems in practical ways rather than cling to our ideological mantras. I haven't finished it yet. The book is a bit like homework. But I do like how it is going so far. He's even-handed with his assignment of causes of our dilemma. He is critical of the conservatives' bête noirs, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He asserts that Dodd-Frank actually does more to preserve the "too big to fail" institutions that gambled with all of our money than it does to regulate or control them. He also points to Glass Steagall repeal, done by a Republican Congress and signed by Bill Clinton, as a kind of linchpin that enabled the whole debacle that became The Great Recession. Few of us were around for it, but Glass Steagall was the act the separated investment and commercial banking after the start of The Great Depression. It seems the money boys can't help but play with our futures unless the law prevents them.
A telling critique is for President Obama. Despite promises that his administration would be different, Obama was quickly captured by the Washington insiders that surround every President these days and was told that no he could not tackle campaign finance reform first because it wasn't in the polls as on the public radar. I guess 300 million Americans can't be wrong. Of course without getting the corporate money out of politics there wasn't a hope in hell of really doing anything meaningful about anything else. Even his signature health care reform fell well short of what it might have been so that the insurance companies could hang on to the whole pie and not even have a viable public option that would allow us to hold them up to scrutiny. [Personally, I was fascinated by the whole "death panels" baloney, since if there ever were such, they existed inside the insurance companies denying coverage.]
And now that the Roberts Court has enshrined the corporate ownership of the other two branches of government we are well and truly screwed. Bradley proposes an amendment to allow local, state, and federal governments to limit campaign spending; and barring that legislation, as strong as can be made within the SCOTUS restriction that compliance must be voluntary, to encourage public funding of campaigns. The opening would still allow individuals to use their own money--one reason we have so many millionaires in Congress is that the first qualification in the vetting of a candidate is whether they can fund their own run.
To describe what our America, "land of opportunity," has become, Gentleman Bill (how I think of him) uses an analogy put forth by economist Lawrence Katz. In it Katz describes the American economy as a large apartment building, once "the object of envy" around the world, but in the last generation it has changed. The penthouse on the top keeps getting larger, the apartments in the middle floors more and more squeezed, the basement flooded, and "to round it off, the elevator is no longer working. The broken elevator is what gets people down the most."
It struck me as truly apt. My father got a job in the thirties from the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of the things Franklin Roosevelt did to put America to work again. My father was from an upper middle class family, and his generation did much to erode the advantages that gave him thanks to drink and other profligate habits. My mother was probably lower middle class. Her father had been a small businessman but died young, leaving his family of five children in some tough straights. They made it largely by helping each other. Three of them got college degrees, two on the GI Bill. In my father's family, two of the four siblings went to college. For the most part that generation in the end did better, not without struggle; but I grew up in a solidly middle class family with middle class aspirations. My father's issues with alcohol left me to start afresh leaving home at 17. But I was fortunate.
Education was not out of reach for me. There were schools where you could work part of the time and study part of the time. That's where I began and then got lucky enough to go to a place that provided great scholarship aid for those who needed it. We managed our way to a reasonable life with both parents working. It still often seemed paycheck to paycheck, There was always a roof and food, though in the end we didn't have enough to provide much help to our own children to get an education, but there were still ways at the time that something could be worked out. One son made use of a good state school and a graduate fellowship, the other got help from his father-in-law.
But this was all a little more than treading water and not exactly upwardly mobile. In my generation and theirs we public school kids competed with the scions of the rich who were assured their places in the very best schools. If we made it, we made it on work and competence. The up elevator was creaky and slow and we had to hand crank it. My brother did night school for his undergrad and then got a scholarship and used loans to attend a premier business school. His life since, featuring three marriages and two divorces (my track record as well), has also been blessed with at least three major corporate demises and subsequent layoffs, the last leaving him to find income as a night watchman and newspaper deliverer. No surprise that he has become quite cynical about the value of his MBA. I, too, have faced the layoffs of corporate America. In one I got out ahead of the wave and effectively had to start over, but the other two, both driven by economic downturns, left me on the unemployment rolls for longer than I care to remember. Only aggressive saving when I was employed and a younger wife, and the best of cash managers, have given me enough to hope for a reasonable retirement, as long as I don't live too long.
Even then we took a serious hit 2008-2009 as Goldman Sachs et al played with our money. But we'd been conservative about our housing with short term mortgages and we'll manage. I get a little pissed off that some of the people with McMansions or those who used their equity for consumption in the run up to the crash have gotten mortgage relief and bail-outs, but I can't buy getting all pissy about the people really on the low end of the totem pole getting a few measly tax credits the way the doctrinaire "no new taxes" pledgers can.
But the prospect of another financial meltdown scares the crap out of me, and I don't see how either party is offering real solutions.
We have to do things that help the vast middle have restored confidence in their own futures and fix the damn busted elevator. In the world of the "dismal science" as doctrine, I guess I'm what you would call a "demand-sider." I think the engine of prosperity is an engaged and fully employed middle class. A government owned by the corporations, for the corporations, and by the corporations isn't going to get us there. For every good citizen CEO who is trying to do the right things with his business I sometimes think there must be a thousand who are pretty much committed to lining their own pockets. Just go take a look at the 10-Ks on the SEC website.
We are in a crisis. It is a crisis that is not unlike the lead up to the Civil War or the late nineteenth century excesses of the Gilded Age. There was a theory proposed by the apologists for slavery that the lowest rung of society was a "mudsill" that was the required foundation for the upper classes to rest upon. Like so much of the rhetoric today, it was a justification for exploitation. "Trickle-down economics" seems to me just a more benign sounding term for the same thing: the coins tossed from the speeding aristocrat's carriage as it runs over the small child that happened to get in the way.
If we make it, and I sincerely hope we find the ways, it may be said of this time that "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times."
