Category Archives: Essays

Recently, I have been making the argument that the U.S. should be defined more by government intervention than by truly free market capitalism. Since Reagan in the 1980s, in spite of the propaganda to the contrary, we have seen a consistent and significant increase in deficit spending and in the government’s share of GDP (i.e., more, not less, government participation in the economy). Thus, it seems completely absurd to hear Republicans suddenly complain that the Obama administration is somehow bringing back “big government”.

Maybe Obama’s promise to provide universal health care significantly alters the rhetoric of the role of government in society. Some conservatives may call that type of government intervention — spending tax payer dollars on services that go to tax payers — socialism, but then how would they describe the previous thirty years of government intervention? The government intervention in Iraq, equaling the cost of the stimulus; defense spending disproportionate to that of the rest of the world, without a convincing military victory since World War II; deregulation of financial services, health care, and industry that does not benefit the consumer or the free market but only the banks, HMOs, and oil companies; and policies that subsidize and perpetuate mega farms and uncompetitive mining and automobile companies at the environmental and health expense of citizens. When the government, be it at the helm of Bush or Obama, passes bailouts and stimulus packages that protect the mismanaged from the free market, that is not socialism. It is more like national corporatism, a.k.a. fascism.

Even the moral hazard argument has been applied with a clear bias. When people have been unable to meet their mortgages, there has been a tendency to say tough luck, caveat emptor. You were stupid and the government’s role isn’t to help the stupid. But when Wall Street can’t meet its obligations, it is still considered highly qualified, sophisticated, and its livelihood essential. Simon Johnson describes the banking industry as an oligarchy comparable to those in emerging markets. Ironically, the U.S. is bailing out the oligarchy with the exact opposite remedy we have always proscribed to failing economies. So then where do these bailouts and stimuli leave the U.S. on the political spectrum? Closer to socialism or fascism?

I just read this article about how a man kills his wife by cutting her head off. The title of the article is “Muslim TV exec accused of beheading his wife”. Maybe I could understand if this article were written say in the Spanish press where the nationality or religion of a crime suspect (when not Spanish) is considered newsworthy as if criminality and ethnicity were intimately related. But in the American press, political correctness and journalistic integrity long ago recognized the racist pitfalls in defining suspects by their race, religion or ethnicity.

Nevertheless, a man kills his wife and he happens to be Muslim, so there is the presumption that Islam is the culprit. Isn’t it funny how the political correctness of the American media and society would never have allowed anyone to bring up the man’s race or religion were he Jewish, Christian, Black, or Hispanic?  It would not be considered newsworthy, but Islamophobia is so strong that no one complains and everyone is eager to draw conclusions. Meanwhile men are killing there wives all the time throughout the world. In Spain, it is actually a big problem, but no one is claiming there is a Spanish tradition of honor killing.

I love my country. I love the fact that we are a nation based on a political ideology of separation of powers and separation of church and state. I love our notions of equal protection and due process, and the uniqueness of our civil rights movement. I love that we are a nation of immigrants and have no official language. You won’t find that anywhere else in the world.

But just as you won’t find a Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, or George Soros flourishing elsewhere in the world, the United States is due for a serious wake up call; it is falling behind. The best example of this are the ridiculous accusations of “socialism” by America’s conservatives as a last ditch effort to dissimulate their own lack of ideas and deflate Obama’s optimistic bubble.

Let’s look at the facts. Republicans have nothing left but fear-mongering, falling back on the 1980s Reagan anti-communism rhetoric to call Obama’s stimulus plan socialism. Ironically, just as the Republicans have deified Reagan as capitalism’s heroic slayer of communism, the majority of the world now views American capitalism as the principle culprit in the global economic crisis. America has become the easy scapegoat.  Here’s how the story goes: when we’re not bombing the world to fuel our SUVs at home, we’re bullying countries to open their markets to American goods and services and to liberalize their banking systems. They followed suit, got burned, and now have to pay the price for a failed economic policy.

As I have already mentioned, free market capitalism has never been honestly practiced in the U.S. Rather, our government has consistently intervened, through corporate tax breaks, licenses and permits, deregulation and military action, in favor of large companies at the cost of taxpayers and the free market. So what are the Republicans proposing now? More of the same. As Paul Krugman writes in The New York Times:

But it’s now clear that the [Republican] party’s commitment to deep voodoo — enforced, in part, by pressure groups that stand ready to run primary challengers against heretics — is as strong as ever. In both the House and the Senate, the vast majority of Republicans rallied behind the idea that the appropriate response to the abject failure of the Bush administration’s tax cuts is more Bush-style tax cuts.

It’s time that we had an honest conversation, and by honest I am mean free of the brainwashed anxiety about socialism and bread lines. It’s time to face the fact that we have fallen behind the rest of the world. How much better are we than other developed nations? Continue reading →

My recent conspicuous absence was due to having spent the past few days in Dubai, UAE where I went to get a feel for the place and visit my friend, Deema (who has been there now for close to two years).

Dubai is, without a doubt, a very strange place indeed. In particular, it is incredibly difficult to describe. It feels like a series of exists on an interstate highway cluttered by construction sites and flanked by the desert on one side and five star beach resorts on the other. While the artificial taste of it all (not to mention the plague of detour signs everywhere) may not make you want to stay, the traditional Arab hospitality and welcoming nature of the Emirati people — something that Western Islamophobe propaganda has hoped to destroy –ultimately shines through, making Dubai a beacon for regional pride and a showcase for respectful multicultural coexistence.

It is kind of fun to hear the liberals on one side decry the evils of deregulation while the conservatives moan about Wall Street greed. Those furthest to the left triumph in the fall of capitalism while the Republican ideologues are in a panic about government intervention and seek shelter in tax cuts. But the truth of the matter is that both sides are wrong. The American free market does not exist, and while certain types of regulation are essential for the well-being of the economy, there are plenty of Democrats out there to blame for the counter-productive deregulation.

True capitalists out there have to face the fact that Bill Clinton was a much better Republican than George W. Bush ever was. Under Bush, the Republicans talked a good show, but never really walked the capitalist walk. Rather, the government systematically intervened in the marketplace. Republicans may have called them tax credits, subsidies, permits, deregulation, or even war, but they’re all examples of intervening in the marketplace in favor of industries and companies at the expense of the free market. If you associate deficit spending with government intervention, then George W. and Ronald R were the great swelling intervenors. And yes, the Republicans’ obsession with what Americans do in their private time and behind closed doors is all about government intervention.

When yesterday on This Week with George Stephanopoulos Jim DeMint (R-SC) accused the Obama Administration and the House Democrats of trying to pass the largest spending bill in U.S. history, Barney Frank (D-MA) correctly noted,

The largest spending bill in history is going to turn out to be the war in Iraq. And one of the things, if we’re going to talk about spending, I don’t — I have a problem when we leave out that extraordinarily expensive, damaging war in Iraq, which has caused much more harm than good, in my judgment.

And I don’t understand why, from some of my conservative friends, building a road, building a school, helping somebody get health care, that’s — that’s wasteful spending, but that war in Iraq, which is going to cost us over $1 trillion before we’re through — yes, I wish we hadn’t have done that. We’d have been in a lot better shape fiscally.

. . . The problem is that we look at spending and say, “Oh, don’t spend on highways. Don’t spend on health care. But let’s build Cold War weapons to defeat the Soviet Union when we don’t need them. Let’s have hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars going to the military without a check.” Unless everything’s on the table, then you’re going to have a disproportionate hit in some places.

But it’s not just military spending. It’s also the special treatment to oil companies, mega farms, the banking and auto industries, and other areas. So when Senator DeMint says that we’re facing a decision between a free market economy and a government-directed economy I wonder which country he is talking about. Continue reading →

The Bush tax cuts were nothing more than a delayed tax hike. For the last eight years, we increased public spending – especially on warfare – while decreasing tax revenues from both individual and corporate taxpayers. The way we paid for the tax cuts in the short term was to simply borrow that money abroad. Isn’t it ironic then that one of the arguments against the stimulus package by the House Republicans is that it would indebt a whole future generation of Americans. Well, Bush then already did that, didn’t he?

It is no surprise that Republican state governors see things differently from their fellow party members in Congress. With a sharp decrease in tax revenues and fees (that’s one of the tricks, decrease taxes but increase fees for licenses, etc), the states are feeling the pain and are on the verge of bankruptcy. Furthermore, states don’t have the same credit rating as the federal government and cannot turn to the Chinese as the borrower of last resort. Without money from a stimulus package (of some sort), the states cannot fund basic services like public schools, roads, sanitation, etc, and tax cuts certainly aren’t going to cover these costs, no matter what stubborn ideology you may adhere to.

I just realized that the solution is not with the U.S. tax payers, but Exxon Mobile. That’s right, we should get Exxon Mobile to pay for the stimulus. Think about it. We have already given Exxon Mobil hundreds of millions in tax breaks and incentives (we almost gave them free range to our coast lines), and we handed them our entire U.S. armed forces, including 4,000 dead and thousands wounded. After billions of dollars to fund the war, oil prices sky-rocketed and the economy sank and then the banks crashed. But Exxon Mobil reported once again record profits. If anyone has benefited from the Bush presidency’s intervention into the free market, it’s been Exxon Mobil. So now I think it’s payback time. Let’s call it corporate citizenship.