Dear America,
On Tuesday I wondered if Jeff Bezos' free version of The Washington Post was co-opting me, and it was my intention to answer the question today. I have since discovered that what he gives his Amazon Prime patrons is not the straight news from The Post, but rather a "curated" version that is designed to appeal to a broader audience, and that revelation came not just from some anonymous internet source, but from the published admissions of Post staff. But if the news is curated, that means it is culled and padded in order to create a presentation rather than just the facts, and therein lies the rub. Once the news is managed that way, it is altered, and if it is altered, it is slanted. But since I asked the question, other more pressing matters have arisen, specifically the $1.1 trillion "CROmnibus" appropriations bill, which includes within it what could be characterized as either leveraged provisions or poison pills depending on who you are. Of course, since the bill comes out of the Republican House of Representatives, the extraneous provisions--one to increase campaign spending limits by a multiple of ten, and the other to roll back the provision of the Dodd-Frank Act that implemented the "Volcker Rule," thus prohibiting big banks from using investor, federally insured funds for proprietary investment, that is investment that profit's the bank rather than patrons of the bank--are no surprise. They must cause any political observer to harken back to 2010 and 2012 when they put riders on the continuing resolutions needed to keep the government running, actually shutting down the government for fifteen days once. But the difference between those previous effectively usurpatious uses of the budget process to control all of government policy and this one is that our president...a Democrat remember...has acquiesced in the attempt, and his party has consequently rebelled. The bill passed in The House on Thursday and went to The Senate, but it passed in The House with a 70% majority of Democrats voting against it, the other 30% capitulating based on the contention that the bill was a compromise.
The reason that 2010 and 2012 are germane is that in 2010 particularly, compromise really meant capitulation even though President Obama represented the spending bill that came out of the lame duck congress as a compromise. What happened on that occasion was that the Republicans got everything they really wanted, and they conceded on the things like the "don't ask, don't tell" policy repeal that they intended to relent on anyway in consequence of popular consensus. It was effectively a rape of the progressive movement with the complicity of our president. But in 2013, The President developed a spine and he continuously, and irreversibly, demanded a "clean CR," which meant that while budget talks continued in The House and The Senate, he refused to sign any continuing resolution that included riders to effect partisan goals. The Republicans took a huge political blow for obdurately refusing to comply, and thus shutting down the government, even though they tried to blame the Democrats for it; they argued that all the Democrats had to do was "compromise" and the shut down would end and thus it was the Democrats' fault, but the voting public didn't buy it for a second. That is how the election-refortified Barrack Obama handled the Republican attempt to extort their agenda out of The Congress and The President. He refused to be bullied, and he prevailed, as did the American people. But some time between last year and this--mind you, that strategy worked a few times during the last fiscal year, and the Republicans didn't dare try extortion as a partisan ploy again--the courage injection Obama enjoyed from the public rebellion against Republican partisanship wore off, and once again he is in capitulation mode. That is why 30% of the Democrats in The House voted with him for this "compromise" that restores to the big banks the ability to use derivatives to do to us what they did in 2007 and 2008 courtesy of the capitulation of Bill Clinton in repealing the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. So, despite the fact that deregulation of the financial industry after 66 years prevented the debacle that occurred in late 2007 when so many big banks sat on the edge of the abyss of failure and had to be "bailed out" by us taxpayers, President Obama is agreeing to it again with the repeal of the operative provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act, exposing us to the next financial debacle. Set your watches. We should have about ten years until the next near-depression, which is being brought to us by the Republicans and the financial industry with no small contributions from President Obama and the Democrats who never seem to learn that they can say no.
I'm so tired of the pusillanimous practices of my party that I recently found myself thinking in apostatic terms. Maybe the Republicans are right. Maybe they can govern better than we can, though the wars and financial chaos that developed during their last period of hegemony argues strongly against that proposition. The next great political hope may be a Republican. Jeb Bush believes in immigration reform, for example. Maybe we should stop looking for a Democratic leader who is liberal and start looking for a Republican one who is.
Your friend,
Mike
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