No Blame Warranted, Only Thanks: The Bailout Fails

Today was a good day for America. Blame? What Blame? Just, THANK YOU, brave members of the House of Representatives who voted No on the so-called Emergency Economic Stabilization Act.

This is the letter I wrote to my political leaders after today's happy defeat of the proposed Act. I also mailed this message mutatis mutandis to the Obama and McCain campaigns. If you wish to express your disapproval of a Secretary Paulson-based plan, in favor of a plan that addresses the root cause of the credit crisis and that gives relief to the victims of the bankers Paulson's plan would reward, I urge you speedily to write to your policital leaders at Congress.org and to urge your like-minded friends to do the same.

Message sent to the following recipients:
Secretary Henry Paulson
Representative Don Young
Senator Lisa Murkowski
Senator Ted Stevens
President George W. Bush

Robert Elston
[Street Address]
Juneau, AK 99801

September 30, 2008

[recipient address was inserted here]

[recipient name was inserted here],

I want to express my thanks to Representative Don Young for having the courage to vote No on the so-called Economic Stabilization Act. That bill was fundamentally flawed and would have enacted an unprecedented boondoggle that rewarded the financial institutions whose unscrupulous practices caused the current financial crisis, that put too much power into the hands of a man who has too many conflicts of interest with the financial companies that stood to gain, and that did not address the root problem and thus was destined to fail, both in the long and short terms.

Secretary Paulson's approach needs to be scrapped because it protects and further enriches the perpetrators and does not rescue the victims. Instead of a bill that bails out investment banks and other unscrupulous companies, that keeps the hen house under the guard of the foxes, and that spends future taxpayer revenues, adding nearly ten percent to the already obscene national debt, Congress should enact a bill that costs the taxpayer nothing and teaches Wall Street needed lessons by making it suffer the consequences of its risky actions. This bill would address the root cause of the financial crisis by focusing narrowly on judicial loan modifications for at-risk homeowners. This focus would stem the tide of foreclosures, thereby resolving the credit crisis, and alleviate the pain of homeowners instead of bailing out rich bankers while leaving homeowners unprotected.

What bothers me about Secretary Paulson's plan is that it focuses on bank bailouts and leaves mortgage foreclosure mitigation as a secondary, discretionary issue. Instead, foreclosure mitigation should be the primary and non-discretionary backbone of the bill, and bank bailouts should not be included at all. Quite frankly, I do not trust Secretary Paulson, or any forthcoming Secretary of the Treasury, to act on behalf of American interests, because he and likely candidates in the next administration, whether Republican or Democrat, have conflicts of interest deriving from their past professional associations. He has too many friends and former associates in whose interests he would be inclined to act. The American public would be derelict of citizenship and its House of Representatives and Senators would be derelict of duty to cede wholesale discretion to a single man who is an insider to the investment banking industry.

Please consult the plan outlined by the Center for Responsible Lending.
This plan notes the problems with the Paulson plan and recommends a simple remedy of empowering homeowners with the recourse of renegotiating their home loans through the judicial system. The current HOPE act is not sufficiently empowering; the Center for Responsible Lending's plan would broaden the powers of the court to force a recalcitrant lending industry to lighten loan terms. It is telling that the industry decried the defeat of an act today that would have enriched it further and relieved it of the consequences of its profiteering actions, but it has been lobbying against giving the courts greater power to act in the interest of homeowners who seek to soften the terms of their loan contracts so that they can avoid foreclosure.

Please DO NOT ACT IN THE INTERESTS OF THE BANKING INDUSTRY MALEFACTORS, BUT DIRECT YOUR BILL TO MITIGATE HOME FORECLOSURES IN THE INTEREST OF HOMEOWNERS, AT NO RISK TO THE TAXPAYER.

Sincerely,

Robert Timothy Elston

John McCain, Have the Decency to Look Someone in the Eye When He is Talking to You.

I thought John McCain did a good job at debating tonight. I sat in the car in the Fred Meyer parking lot and listened to the entire debate on the radio, before I went in and bought my groceries. As I turned off the radio, I thought, Both of these candidates are good, qualified men. I wish they did not come with their parties, or I might even vote for one of them.

I came home and fixed dinner and watched the debate on television, twice. Half-way through the second viewing, it struck me. I did not see John McCain once have the decency to turn his head and look Obama in the eye. For the rest of the debate I watched intently to see whether McCain would pay Obama the respect of human eye contact. All the while, Obama looked regularly at McCain and spoke to McCain directly. McCain so steadfastly did not turn to look at Obama that I can conclude only that McCain refused to look at him. That must have taken some force of will to avoid looking at a man who was speaking to him. That must have taken quite the disrespect.

I have been in situations on occasion when someone has refused to pay me the dignity of eye contact, and I know how it made me feel. It was demeaning and told me that the person to whom I was speaking had no respect for me as a person. It hurt me and felt insulting.

I watched and saw Obama regularly pay John McCain the respect of eye contact throughout the debate, without acknowledgement in return. Obama did not get angry or grow frustrated at the insult of McCain's persistent avoidance. McCain did not once speak to Obama directly, while Obama regularly spoke directly to McCain, as the moderator had requested.

I can tell you this: This behavior by McCain caused me to see him differently than I had ever seen him before. I have respected McCain for many things. And I still do respect him for some things. But I lost a great deal of respect for him tonight. He did a great job at debating substance, but he failed in being a respectful human being. That says a lot to me about how he would deal with people as the President of the United States. And in my book, his persistent refusal to pay the simplest gesture of respect tells me all I need to know about his qualifications be a next door neighbor, let alone the President of the United States.

Sorry, Senator McCain. What you, Sir, don't understand, you could learn from the man whose respect you refused to acknowledge tonight. He looked at you, he called you by name, he spoke respectfully to you. But you refused to look at him. When he becomes President, Senator, watch and learn.

"Redistribution of Wealth" Goes Both Ways

"Redistribution of wealth" is a dirty word to free market theorists. And so it should be -- especially when it signifies vertical redistribution rather than horizontal redistribution. Vertical redistribution occurs when market mechanisms draw wealth from the middle and lower classes increasingly to enrich the wealthy and widen the gap between them and those from whom they draw it. Horizontal redistribution occurs when market mechanisms pull wealth from the top tiers of wealth down to the lower and middle classes. Any shift in ratio in either direction amounts to redistribution, no matter what mechanisms cause that shift to occur.

Traditional economic theory proceeds on the assumption that the actions of government are not market mechanisms. But I argue that within a democracy of any sort -- even a democratic republic -- governmental taxes and regulations are in fact market mechanisms. They are as much part and parcel of the free market as are the actions of corporations and businesses. A free market is constituted within an arena of competing interests. Competitors seek to gain advantage against one another without limit. In a controlled market, competitors who achieve monopoly status are able to control the margin of entry so that new competitors cannot arise. A market that is controlled by monopolies is a controlled market. A free market, in traditional terms, is a market controlled by the most powerful.

Democratically induced governmental regulations and taxes, however, constitute a free market response to monopolistic control. This assumes that the market comprises an unbounded arena of interests and resources. To exclude democratic reaction from the interplay of market forces is to restrict the scope of the market in an effort to control it. Democratic reaction to monopolistic power is a competitor to monopolistic power. To disallow this competitor is to grant monopolies control of the market. A free market, on the other hand, grants the right of conflicting interests to arise freely through politically induced financial mechanisms. Democratic government is a proxy for these conflicting interests. Thus government is a proxy for competitors whose interest it is to weaken monopolistic power. This does not constitute an antithesis to a free market but extends the arena of freedom beyond the arbitrarily restricted boundaries of traditional free market theory.

For this reason traditional free-market rhetoric no longer persuades me. It is the rhetoric of the rich and powerful trying to influence me not to threaten the redistribution of the wealth of the lower and middle classes upwards into their accounts. That rhetoric is a legitimate tactic within a free marketplace, but since to support it is not in my interests or the interests of a balanced, more broadly empowered economy, I will no longer let it influence me as I cast my ballot.

Redistribution of wealth is a dirty word, and it is absolutely profane when it is verticle. That is why I will support mechanisms that move wealth horizontally.

DemocratsForLife.org and Sarah Palin's acceptance speech

A friend sent me a DemocratsForLife.org article entitled "Tiptoeing to the Right on Abortion." It claims a delicate, strategic expansion of the Democratic tent to make allowance for an anti-abortion voice, in order to woo social and religious conservatives who are disenchanted with the Republican Party.

The article gave me pause. Could I join the Democratic Party with its abortion platform, as stated? The catch-22 is that the pro-abortion platform statements are immoral, but being able to change them probably takes Party membership. The Party needs to see a benefit for “tiptoeing to the right,” or else its radicals can claim cost without gain. So unless some of us social conservatives hold our noses and vote for the Democratic ticket, the pro-life cause in the Democratic Party could face a setback. I may not be flexible enough, but I would not necessarily mind seeing others do it, if it meant a moderation of the DNC's radical denial of a fetus's right to life. At least the Democrats' (reluctant) “tiptoeing to the right” stands in stark contrast to the Republicans' boot kicking of the left. (And with "hold our noses" I have in mind the Democratic Party, not the fresh, inspiring Barack Obama.)

One of the DNC platform pro-abortion statements enshrines “a woman's right to choose a safe and legal abortion.” Technically I could support that statement, since no abortion is safe for the fetus and since types of abortion can become regulated or be made illegal. A “safe and legal abortion,” to me, would be no abortion at all. I am for it! But I cannot support the platform's strong endorsement of Roe v. Wade. And since I define the “need for abortions,” which the platform says the Party seeks to reduce, only in terms of medical necessity, I do not see how age-appropriate sex education can reduce it qua need. But reducing the needless choice of abortion is common ground I could support.

Pro-Life Democrats have a point: How do the deaths of unnecessary war weigh against the deaths of unnecessary abortion? How does an unnecessarily high mortality rate due to inaccessible health care weigh against live births into poverty due to derelict social policy? How does concessively tiptoeing toward moderate abortion policy weigh against uncritically marching into strategically motivated warfare?

I heard Governor Palin's acceptance speech tonight. Her (speech writer's) cheap shots at Barack Obama were tit-for-tat to the Democrats’ cheap shots. No imbalance there. What all the commentators I heard missed, though, was that implicit to her anti-Washington-establishment statements was an indictment of Republican corruption. I bet there were some Republican politicians squirming in their seats, hoping to the Red, White, and Blue that it was mere campaign rhetoric. I would love to see Palin get in there and show them otherwise. Unfortunately, she did not indict the abuse of Republican power in her speech, and the talking heads cast it merely as her explicit scapegoating of the media.

To win the election, the cheering Republican power brokers claim that Palin was adequately vetted. But I will be impressed with their cheers if they are still clapping when Bulldog Palin starts kicking their corrupt Republican butts into jail. RepublicansForJailingCorruptRepublicans.org - Now, that is something I could unequivocally support.

Oil's dirty, little (not so) secret

Conservatives have been calling for off-shore drilling as though the resulting oil will be “our” oil, as though it will be, ironcially to the conservative disdain for socialism, in effect, a social property. The logic is that the more America has of its own oil, the less it will be dependent on oil produced by other nations, and thus the less American citizens will pay at the pump.

The reality is, however, that newly drilled oil off America's shores will be the property of the same companies that are now making record windfall profits at “our” expense. Americans unwittingly are fantasizing that oil, as a social property, will undercut the market. But let us not get too carried away with utopian dreams of socialized oil: our newly invigorated popular support for off-shore drilling will benefit private companies who will attempt to leverage their supply to increase their revenue. The increased supply, relative to global supply, will be miniscule, and the oil companies will play that supply against the global market; they will not play it as a nationalized, socialized property that belongs to the American people, and the effect at the pump will be relative to global, not nationalistic, factors.

Oil companies’ windfall profits come at the cost of increased prices for the little guy at the pump. Higher pump prices create political support for the expansion of the oil industry, due to a misguided, unwittingly conceived, nationalistically energized notion of socialized property. This sequence is, no doubt, the dirty little secret of oil company executives and their Congressional allies. Popular disgruntlement with oil prices is being leveraged as an election issue, not to bring relief to the consumer but to expand the industry. Barack Obama knows this and thus, on principle, orates against it. But the populace generally does not know it and thus is in jeopardy of being led to the slaughter, again, tugged by the cord of myopic immediacy.

Myths of Love, Peace, and Cynicism

I was a Christian for forty years, and depending on how I want to slice it I still might be. I stumbled on what became the obvious, however: that it was not true in the sense that I had been trained, and that the Bible had trained me, to require it to be. But the details of that are more numerous than the sands of the sea, and I do not think even Abraham's descendents and I could count them all.

But there is something still compelling about noble myths, and it would be heartwarming to be able to participate in something larger than the universe again. It would be nice to live in a divinely ordered, divinely contained world. How secure and wonderful to be so significant. I think that the need for such comfort is deeply rooted in the human psyche, and that is why myths of every sort, whether religious, environmental, nationalistic, egotistical, evolutionary, ad infinitum, will continue to be endemic to our species. I am not above it, either, for even during moments of debilitating cynicism I am therein taking comfort in a grand myth of understanding, of seeing through meaning itself, as though it were within my grasp.

I think we need to give ourselves a little leeway to take comfort in our myths. The sad part is, though, that our myths alienate us and put us in competition with people whose comfort lies in myths that are seemingly incompatible with our own. Our myths divide us, put us into clans, set us in competition, and put us at odds. Our myths, even peaceful and loving ones, are ultimately what justify our aggressions, our protectionisms, our hostilities. Our gods endorse us and condemn our competitors. Of course, we do not frame it that way: “I came not to condemn the world," for example. "He who rejects me is condemned already.” How gracious are our gods. How pitiful our enemies. Our frame wholly validates our de facto rejection of those who are alien and threatening to our zones of comfort and identity.

But we cannot afford to dwell on this darker side of our myths of peace and love, else we expose our in-groups of significance as terrifyingly bankrupt. At least on our better days the light that is in us is not too dark. And that is true of the people of any myth, even mine.

Supreme Court justice for Guantanamo Bay

A friend of mine was upset yesterday that the Supreme Court had ruled to grant Guantanamo detainees the right of habeas corpus. How outrageous, he said, to grant such rights to “jihadists,” to “thugs who killed 3000 on 9/11.”

Let’s not forget, however, that hundreds of Guantanamo detainees weren’t jihadists or involved in the 9/11 attacks. Many were innocent men and the majority consisted of men whose greatest crime was to defend their country against invasion. We invaded Afghanistan. How likely is it that the majority of the human beings we captured in that invasion were 9/11 operatives or militant jihadists? Even those who picked up weapons against us during the invasion had the right to defend their country and were due POW status. Instead our government devised a category in which it defined all detainees as having neither civilian nor POW rights. It declared by fiat that Guantanamo Bay was something like “within the sovereignty but not under the jurisdiction of” the United States so that it could presume itself within legal boundaries to treat these human beings like “jihadists” and “hajis” without any accountability.

Yesterday’s Supreme Court decision means that innocent men can finally not be presumed guilty without trial and held in prison without sufficient legal recourse. It means that de facto POWs may finally be under the lawful and humanitarian protections of the Geneva Conventions. It also means that sworn militant jihadist enemies of the United States can be tried and executed in a way that dignifies us as a just society.

My friend was disturbed that we were now granting soldiers captured in war access to our legal system. But these men were not granted POW status by our government. They were defined as being in the new category of “enemy combatants,” a category devised ad hoc specifically to deny them the legal protections due to prisoners of war. But now that the Supreme Court rules to grant them non-POW rights, defenders of Guantanamo policy are eliciting this prisoner of war comparison. It is a classic case of having cake and eating it, too. The prisoner of war comparison was effectively nullified when the United States defined its “enemy combatant” category as an antidote to granting its “detainees” prisoner of war status.

If we do not want to dignify Guantanamo inmates as either prisoners of war or as having civilian legal rights, then what do we want to do with them? Dehumanize them as “jihadis” so that we can sooth our consciences about holding POWs and innocent men without charge and without trial indefinitely? My friend claimed that the Supreme Court decision was absurd, but the absurdity that I see is for the state, any state, to define human beings in such a way as to claim absolute power over them. As applied to this case the absurdity is to deny men both POW status and the right to trial yet claim that the state has a right to incarcerate them because they are POWs and guilty of crimes. How much more poignant can absurdity be?

My friend appealed to Justice Scalia’s statement that the majority’s ruling will result in the death of Americans. Currently, however, Americans are dying because President Bush keeps them in Iraq. Of course, those lives do not matter for rhetorical purposes, do they? But to the point: Since when does granting men either POW status or the right to trial jeopardize the United States? Protection from the abuse of government is the preeminent mythical principle that has emboldened Americans throughout history to defend themselves against enemies whom they perceived to commit such injustices as arbitrary incarceration. Our national idealism dictates that justice is better served by trial than by stripping human beings of basic human rights. This was demonstrated, for example, in our sense of justice for trying Saddam Hussein. What makes us think that, after charging and trying Hussein, our national sense of justice does not dictate either that we grant our captives POW status or grant them the right to trial? Who do we think we are? Who do we think our captives are? Are they dogs? Are they worse than dogs? Are they sub-human “jihadis” and “hajis”? Yes, let us dehumanize them so that we can feel justified in exacting our hatred. Never mind that the majority of them had nothing to do with al-Qaeda and were defending their country from invasion. Never mind that many of them were neither soldiers nor combatants when we captured them.

In my opinion, it is past time that we humanized these people with the dignity of the legal system, seeing that we denied them prisoner of war status. Had we the decency to dignify them as prisoners of war from the start this never would have gone to the Supreme Court in the first place. This case was not about counterparts to World War II POWs. It was about granting rights to men who were not protected by either national or international law. It was not largely about thugs who killed 3000 people on September 11, 2001. It was about other men who should have been granted POW status for defending against an invasion of their country and others again who were innocent even of that. As far as 9/11 international criminals go, it was about finally charging them with their crimes in a way that dignifies us as a just society. The damage that has been done to America stems from the indignity of presuming hundreds of men who had nothing to do with 9/11 as guilty of being “thugs of 9/11” and straining at every legal and moral gnat to hold them without trial, without charge, and without even the dignity of prisoner of war status.

My friend was indignant at the “liberal justices” for how their majority decision would damage America. But the damage done to America this time was done by its highest leaders when they acted on an ad hoc presumption of the state's absolute power over human life.