Corporatism vs. Capitalism

When I heard the word "corporatist" a couple of years ago, I laughed. I thought what a funny, made up, liberal word. I fancy myself a die-hard capitalist, so it seemed vaguely anti-business, so I was put off by it.

Well, as it turns out, it's a great word. It perfectly describes a great majority of our politicians and the infrastructure set up to support the current corporations in the country. It is not just inaccurate to call these people and these corporations capitalists; it is in fact the exact opposite of what they are.

Capitalists believe in choice, free markets and competition. Corporatists believe in the opposite. They don't want any competition at all. They want to eliminate the competition using their power, their entrenched position and usually the politicians they've purchased. They want to capture the system and use it only for their benefit.

I don't blame them. They're trying to make a buck. And it's a hell of a lot easier making money when you don't have competition or truly free markets or consumer choice. All of these corporations would absolutely love it if they were the only choice a consumer had.

Blaming the corporations for this is a little silly. It's like blaming a man for breathing or a scorpion for stinging. That's what they do. In fact, they are legally bound to make their best effort at not just crushing the competition, but eliminating it. Lack of competition will lead to making more money (presumably for their shareholders; though realistically it winds up being for their executives these days).

As the saying goes, "Don't hate the player, hate the game." We have to understand how this system works and then account for the abuses that are likely to arise out of it. I don't hate the scorpion for stinging but I also wouldn't put a bunch of them in my bed. And I wouldn't take kindly to someone else putting them there, either.

Politicians are very cheap to buy (and senators from smaller states are even easier to buy - great bang for your buck). So, obviously corporations are going to look to buy them so they can pass laws to kill off their competition. If you don't understand this, you're being at least a little bit dense.

You should lose significant credibility as a journalist if you're naïve enough to believe that corporations would not do this out of the goodness of their hearts. Come on, can anyone really believe that? Yet, in today's media atmosphere, saying politicians are in the back pocket of the corporate lobbyists who raise the most money for them is seen as an unacceptable comment. Anyone who challenges the system is portrayed as an outsider, fringe element who must be treated with scorn and shunned. We are told in earnest tones we must trust the corporations and not question the motives of the politicians.

The sensible approach would be to recognize the problem and figure out a way to avoid it the best we can. Money always finds a way in, but we can at least be cognizant of the issue and try to combat it as much as possible. We must do this as citizens who care about our democracy, but we must also do it as capitalists.

I believe in the capitalist system. I think it makes sense and it is attuned to human nature. People do not work to the best of their ability and take only as much as they need. They work as little as humanly possible and take as much as humanly possible. Capitalism helps to funnel these natural impulses in a positive, hopefully productive manner.

But in order to have capitalism we must have choice. If consumers do not have different companies to choose from, if the markets aren't truly free and there is no real competition, then you kill capitalism. Corporations are a natural byproduct of capitalism, but as soon as they are born they want to destroy their parent. Corporations are the Oedipus of the capitalist system.

In order for capitalism to work, they must not be allowed to succeed. We must guard capitalism jealously.

So, it is of the utmost importance that we watch politicians with a very wary eye. Campaign contributions are a tiny expense to a large corporation. And the politicians treasure them too much. It is an easy sale. So, beware of politicians receiving gifts.

The perfect example of this is the health care reform debate going on now. And perhaps there is no better example of a politician who works for his corporate overlords than Max Baucus, who has received nearly three million dollars from the health care industry.

I don't blame the health care companies. I would do the same thing in their position. In fact, it is their fiduciary responsibility to buy an important (and cheap) senator like Max Baucus (he's cheap because he comes from the small state of Montana, where it is far less expensive to buy ads and crush your political competition with money they cannot possibly match).

If the health care companies can eliminate their competition, they'll make a lot more money. That is why there is so little competition among corporations in so many parts of the country now and why they are desperate to avoid the public option. They'd have to be stupid and negligent not to buy Max Baucus. He is the head of the Finance Committee and in charge of writing the most touted and awaited version of the health care bill.

I don't blame them, I blame us. How stupid and negligent are we to let that guy write this bill? The media should be treating Baucus and many of the other senators (who all get millions from the health care industry) with enormous skepticism. Instead, they are treating them as if they are honest actors who would never be affected by all that money.

They treat their concerns as if they are legitimate issues. The Republicans and the corporatist Democrats pretend to be fiscal conservatives who care about the budget when they are trying to kill the most important cost constraint in the whole bill - the public option. If you're a budget hawk, that's the last thing you'd kill, not the first. That's what keeps our costs down.

You see, these politicians betrayed their real motives in this debate. They made it crystal clear that they are not, in fact, conservatives or moderates or centrists or even capitalists. They are corporatists. They look out for the interests of the corporations that pay them above all else. Capitalists believe in competition. They believe it lowers costs and gives consumers better choices.

So, I would ask the media to please stop calling these politicians conservatives or even capitalists. And could you please look out for the rather obvious fact that they might not be working for us but for the people who pay them?

Of course, the media outlets might be able to better recognize this if large corporations didn't also own them. But that probably wouldn't affect their judgment either, would it?

~Cenk Uygur

Pining for the Fjords

"To allow private insurance companies to let private profit maximizing decisions get in between a patient and a doctor is close to unethical for us."


A Real Socialist State

As a Norwegian, looking at the U.S. health care debate from the outside, I cannot help but laugh sometimes. It seems like the word “socialism” has become a swear word. In Norway, we just re-elected a “socialist” government. That does not mean that we live in a communist state. We have full-fledged capitalism over here, and we are just about the richest country in the world, per capita. But we have chosen to let the state supply world class health care to all inhabitants.

To allow private insurance companies to let private profit maximizing decisions get in between a patient and a doctor is close to unethical for us. In Norway, you get the same care no matter if you are a homeless drunk or the C.E.O. of one of the biggest companies. And that’s how it should be. They say that the measure of a country’s success lies in how it treats its most unfortunate citizens.

— Gjert Myrestrand

Snake's Navel

I used to know a carnival man turned preacher who said the key to his success was understanding the people of what he called Snake's Navel, Arkansas. He said in Snake's Navel, the biggest thing going on Saturday night was the Dairy Queen. He said you could get the people there to do damn near anything --pollute their own water, work at five-dollar-an-hour jobs, drive fifty miles to a health clinic-- as long as you packaged it right. That meant you gave them a light show and faith healings and blow-down-the-walls gospel music with a whole row of American flags across the stage. He said what they liked best, though --what really got them to pissing all over themselves-- was to be told it was other people going to hell and not them. He said people in Snake's Navel wasn't real fond of homosexuals and Arabs and Hollywood Jews, although he didn't use them kinds of terms in his sermons.

~James Lee Burke

Vacuum

The following is so astute, on-point, and well-written, that I've simply posted it in its entirety without my customary witticisms and embellishments. Certainly it illustrates, if such an illustration were necessary, why Mr. Rich is lead columnist for the Times in the featured Sunday slot while I write on a self-published blog for a handful of leftys, right-wing nuts and the occasional poor soul who wanders in looking for a recipe for strawberry syrup.

Obama’s Squandered Summer

In the meantime, a certain damage has been done...The inmates took over the asylum...poisoning the national discourse... The lies...ran amok... culminating with the ludicrous outcry over the prospect that the president might speak to the nation’s schoolchildren on a higher plane than, say, “The Pet Goat.”

FRANK RICH
September 12, 2009

The day before he gave his latest brilliant speech, Barack Obama repeated a well-worn mantra to a television interviewer: “My job is not to be distracted by the 24-hour news cycle.” The time has come for him to expand that job description. His White House has a duty to push back against the 24-hour news cycle, every 24 hours if necessary, when it threatens to derail his agenda, the nation’s business, or both. This was a silly summer, as wasteful in its way as the summer of 2001, when Washington dithered over the now-forgotten Gary Condit scandal while Al Qaeda plotted. The president deserves his share of the blame.

After a good couple of years of living with the guy, we know the drill that defines his leadership, for better and worse. When trouble lurks, No Drama Obama stays calm as everyone around him goes ballistic. Then he waits — and waits — for that superdramatic moment when he can ride to his own rescue with what the press reliably hypes as The Do-or-Die Speech of His Career. Cable networks slap a countdown clock on the corner of the screen and pump up the suspense. Finally, Mighty Obama steps up to the plate and, lo and behold, confounds all the doubting bloviators yet again by (as they are wont to say) hitting it out of the park.

So it’s a little disingenuous for Obama to claim that he is not distracted by the 24-hour news cycle. What he’s actually doing is gaming it for all it’s worth.

As a mode of campaigning, this tactic was worth a great deal. Obama not only produced eloquent speeches — especially the classic disquisition on race that silenced the Jeremiah Wright pogrom — but also executed a remarkably disciplined tortoise-vs.-hare battle plan that outwitted and ultimately vanquished the hypercaffeinated political strategies of Hillary Clinton and John McCain. As a style of governing, however, this repeated cycle of extended above-the-fray passivity followed by last-minute oratorical heroics has now been stretched to the very limit.

Wednesday night’s address on health care reform was inspired, lucid and, in the literally and figuratively Kennedyesque finale, moving. It was also (mildly) partisan, a trait much deplored by high-minded editorial writers but in real life quite useful when your party is in the majority and you want to rally the troops to get something done. But there was little in the speech that Obama couldn’t have said at the summer’s outset. Its practical effect may prove nil. Short of signing a mass suicide pact, the Democrats were always destined to pass a bill. Will the one to come be substantially better than the one that would have emerged if the same speech had been delivered weeks earlier? Not necessarily — and marginally at most.

In the meantime, a certain damage has been done — to Obama and to the country. The inmates took over the asylum, trivializing and poisoning the national discourse while the president bided his time. The lies that Obama called out so strongly in his speech — from “death panels” to “government takeover” — ran amok. So did all the other incendiary faux controversies, culminating with the ludicrous outcry over the prospect that the president might speak to the nation’s schoolchildren on a higher plane than, say, “The Pet Goat.”

None of this served his cause of health care reform or his political standing. The droop in Obama’s job approval numbers isn’t remotely as large or precipitous as the Beltway’s incessant doomsday drumbeat suggests. But support for his signature program declined, not least because he gave others carte blanche to define it for him. Perhaps the most revealing of all the poll findings came in an end-of-August Washington Post query asking voters what “single word” first came to mind to describe their “feelings” about Obama and his health care proposals. For Obama, the No. 1 feeling was “good.” For the policy package he’d been ostensibly selling all summer, the No. 1 feeling was “none.”

It’s not, as those on the right would have us believe, that Obama’s ideas are so “liberal” that the American public recoiled. It’s that much of the public didn’t know what his ideas were. Even now I’m not convinced that most Americans know what a “public option” really means or what Obama’s precise position on it is. But I’d bet that many more have a working definition of “death panels.” The 24-hour news cycle abhors a vacuum, and the liars and crazies filled it while Obama waited for his deus ex machina descent onto center stage.

That he let the hard-core base of a leaderless minority party drive the debate only diminished his stature. That’s why his poll numbers on “leadership” declined. The right-wing fringe has become so deranged that it will yank its kids out of school to protest the president and risk yanking more Americans off assembly lines by boycotting General Motors to protest the administration’s Detroit bailout. Even Laura Bush and Newt Gingrich stepped in last week to defend Obama’s classroom homily from the fusillades by some of their own party’s most prominent ideologues. The White House should have landed a punch before they did.

Obama would have looked stronger if he’d stood up more proactively to the screamers along the way, or at least to the ones not packing guns. As the Roosevelt biographer Jean Edward Smith has reminded us, it didn’t harm the New Deal for F.D.R. to tell a national radio audience on election eve 1936 that he welcomed the “hatred” of his enemies. Indeed Obama instantly gained a foot or two in height Wednesday night once that South Carolina clown hollered “You lie!” (One wonders what this congressman calls the Republican governor of his own state, Mark Sanford.) As the political analyst Charlie Cook has pointed out, Obama’s leadership poll numbers have also suffered from his repeated deference to Congress. Waiting for the pettifogging small-state potentates of both parties in the Senate’s Gang of Six is as farcical as waiting for Godot.

Now that he has taken charge, Obama will speed the process and, we must hope, secure reform that may make a real difference for everyone, starting with the 46-million-plus Americans who have no health insurance. But when we gain some perspective on the summer of 2009, the health care debate, like the crazed town-hall sideshows surrounding it, may seem very small in the history of this presidency — maybe even as small as the Condit follies and the breathlessly reported shark attacks of summer 2001 now look in the history of the previous administration.

The reason is that health care reform, while an overdue imperative, still is overshadowed in existential urgency by the legacies of the two devastating cataclysms of the Bush years, 9/11 and 9/15, both of whose anniversaries we now mark. The crucial matters left unresolved in the wake of New York’s two demolished capitalist icons, the World Trade Center and Lehman Brothers, are most likely to determine both this president’s and our country’s fate in the next few years. Both have been left to smolder in the silly summer of ’09.

As we approach the eighth anniversary of the war that 9/11 bequeathed us in Afghanistan, the endgame is still unknown and more troops are on their way. Though the rate of American casualties reached an all-time high last month, the war ranks at or near the bottom of polls tracking the issues important to the American public. Most of those who do have an opinion about the war oppose it (57 percent in the latest CNN poll released on Sept. 1) and oppose sending more combat troops (56 percent in the McClatchy-Ipsos survey, also released on Sept. 1). But the essential national debate about whether we really want to double down in Afghanistan — and make the heavy sacrifices that would be required — or look for a Plan B was punted by the White House this summer even as the situation drastically deteriorated.

No less unsettling is the first-anniversary snapshot of 9/15: a rebound for Wall Street but not for the 26-million-plus Americans who are unemployed, no longer looking for jobs, or forced to settle for part-time work. Some 40 million Americans are living in poverty. While these economic body counts keep rising, tough regulatory reform for reckless financial institutions, too-big-to-fail and otherwise, seems more remote by the day. Last Sunday, Jenny Anderson of The Times exposed an example of Wall Street’s unashamed recidivism that takes gallows humor to a new high — or would were it in The Onion, not The Times. Some of the same banks that gambled their (and our) way to ruin by concocting exotic mortgage-backed securities now hope to bundle individual Americans’ life insurance policies into a new high-risk financial product built on this sure-fire algorithm: “The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return.”

When we look back on these months, we may come to realize that there were in fact “death panels” threatening Americans all along — but they were on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and on Wall Street, not in the fine print of a health care bill on Capitol Hill. Obama’s deliberative brand of wait-and-then-pounce leadership let him squeak — barely — through the summer. The real crises already gathering won’t wait for him to stand back and calculate the precise moment to spring the next Do-or-Die Speech.

A Loony-Toons Hero is Something to Be

"I’d have been willing to bet that we had a national consensus on the undesirability of a congressman yelling out 'You lie!' during an address by the president of the United States."

Gail Collins
NYT 9/12/09
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/12/opinion/12collins.html


Gail, Gail, Gail; where have you been? I would have taken that bet in a heartbeat! Had you in mind a wager of a size that would have allowed me to pay my health insurance premium this month? You had? Drat; yet another missed opportunity in a life full of them.

In fact, I would have quickly jumped on the contrapositive in any proposed wager that started out, "I'll bet that we have a national consensus on..."

(A digressive note to sticklers of the mathematically literate variety: I don't actually recall the distinctions between reverse, inverse, converse and contrapositive, and thus it's highly likely I've misused "contrapositive". I apologize, but I really liked the feel of the world when I rolled it around on my tongue and figured it was close enough. Sue me.)

The only thing more predictable than that this clown (I may properly call a US Congressman a clown under the New Protocol, may I not?) would become a wing-nut hero, is...um...uh...er...hmmmm. Actually I can't think of anything more predictable.

My other great regret, in addition to missing the opportunity to separate you from a few bucks, is that the New Protocol was not in place during the Bush years. Can you imagine him addressing Congress and someone jumping up and yelling "You lie!" every time he did? It would have looked like a giant whack-a-mole game! Cracks me up just thinking about it.

By the way; what's the deal with these fake "Joes" the Rushfoxicans keep trotting out? First there was the presumptive nominee for Secretary of the Treasury, "Joe the Plumber", whose name was actually Sam and who wasn't really a plumber; now we've got good ol' reg'lar guy "Joe" Wilson whose actual name is Addison Graves Wilson Sr.

You neednt' answer; that was a rhetorical question, of course. In the good old days, before the dumb fucks finally figured out that there weren't enough rich WASPs to allow them to win elections reliably as their real selves, fronting their real agendas, Addison Graves Wilson Sr would have been a classic moniker for a Republican, and would have been borne with pride. Now...not so much. Pass the pickled pig balls, Janey Sue.

Almost Rational

Quasi-interesting piece by David Brooks in today's NY Times on the Obama health care speach.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/opinion/11brooks.html

Brooks is a staunch conservative who has concluded -- are you listening, wing-nuts? -- that the current health care system is unsustainable and presents a grave threat to the country's long term economic outlook.

My response follows.

Mr. Brooks:

I'm a liberal (my definition; not necessarily those of other liberals, and certainly not the caricature beloved by conservatives) who reads your column, but I admit I'm not of the "David Brooks is the Conservative Even Liberals Respect" school. Mostly you exasperate me, and I'll further admit that I have difficulty approaching your current work objectively owing to what I perceived as eight years of defending/enabling the thoroughly indefensible and detestable Bush regime, which -- putting aside ideology -- even the most charitable could only rationally describe as (at best) incompetent.

But you've apparently made a reasonably objective and intellectually respectable study of health care issues and I'd like to respond to a few points in your column of 9/11/2009.

>>...the House health care bill. That bill would add $220 billion (that’s 2.2 trillion dimes) to the deficit over the first 10 years and another $1 trillion (10 trillion dimes) to the deficit over the next 10 years. >>

Surely, Mr. Brooks, neither you nor anyone else can know this. I do not accuse you of inventing the numbers, although you offer no citation, but of repeating with certitude an inherently highly questionable estimate that pretends to exactitude.

But my objection does not rest solely, or even primarily, with educated-guesswork, crystal-ball-gazing and subjectivity masquerading as hard data ("The color blue is 18.694% prettier than the color red")

The primary problem with such a statement is that it ignores key, salient points justifying the whole exercise of health care reform to begin with, to wit: to have it function more efficiently; to ultimately reduce health cares cost as a percentage of GDP; to reduce the financial burden on American corporations and individuals.

At the risk of sounding like a loony supply-sider: must not, for example, the resultant corporate savings, increased corporate competitiveness and increased corporate profits, resulting in turn in increased tax revenues and increased numbers of employees (who also pay taxes thus augmenting the government's treasure rather than being the drains on the economy they would be if unemployed) be netted against the gross costs? I don't for a moment pretend to know the exact number of the off-setting revenues ("You're wrong; the color red is, in fact, 14.673% prettier than the color blue"), but it seems a reasonable assumption that they would not be insignificant.

>>There is no way to get from the House bill to deficit neutrality>>

As I said above, it depends on who's doing the math and the underlying assumptions/variables employed by the mathematician.

>>...accepted the principle of tort reform to reduce the costs of defensive medicine. Once again, the specific proposal Obama mentioned is trivial...>>

I'd be glad to see some sort of tort reform enacted, if for no other reason than to silence (although a healthy bite of facts never do seem to stopper their mouths) the seemingly substantial numbers of people on the right who claim to believe that this alone is the crux of the problem with the current system. As the experiences of Texas and Florida (where vigorous tort-reform legislation was implemented and hasn't made a dent in per capita costs or rate of increase relative to the rest of the country) as well as the recent, oft-cited article by Atul Gawande in The New Yorker make abundantly clear, "trivial" is probably as good a word as any to describe the likely effect of even the most aggressive approach to tort reform. But I dislike lawyers as much as the next right-thinking fellow and I’ll cheerfully toss them under the bus on this one.

>>...the public option...the president praised it, then effectively buried it. White House officials no longer mask their exasperation with the liberal obsession on this issue>>

I don't know that this particular liberal is "obsessed" with it, but a single-payer system is simple, efficient, proven to be cost-effective, has been used and continually refined over the years all over the world, is overwhelmingly approved of by the populace of nations where it is in place, and certainly would beat the hell out of the mind-numbing complexity and dubious efficacy of the horse-designed-by-committee we are likely to wind up with in its stead. Can you say "re-inventing the wheel?"

>>...the president also buried the soak-the-rich approach. The House Ways and Means Committee came up with a plan to raise taxes on the rich to pay for health reform. That’s dead, too…The president underlined his resolve to cut $500 billion from Medicare and Medicaid. This is a courageous move that moderates appreciate. >>

Cutting Medicaid courageous?! Certainly history has taught us that nothing in this country requires less political courage than "soaking-the-poor".

As to "soaking-the-rich"...how about as a starting point merely restoring top marginal rates to those in place during the reign of that famous socialist, Ronald Reagan? I've no idea what the political calculus is inside the White House, but it is surely astute to separate the two issues. Let's reform the health care system without getting demagogued by the FOX "News", AM radio lackeys of the moneyed interests who invariably -- and oh so easily! -- manage to persuade people making $40,000 per year that they will wind up destitute if marginal rates on incomes over $200,000 per year go up a point or two. No, no, by all means let it lie, for now. Then we can soak the rich.

>>Which is not to say that this is effective health reform...Obama said that parts of the system work...they don’t...>>

Amen, brother. Our proposed solutions differ, as do our underlying philosophies, but we certainly agree on that.


Regards,

Len Safhay

I see the future...

Rather than keeping the faithful readers of Cloozoe's International House of Pancakes -- all three of you -- waiting to read the Rushfoxican Party's thoughtful, nuanced response to the speech that the President of the U.S. is going to give this evening, I thought I'd go out on a limb and report what they will say before they say it.


He's a Communist!

He's a Nazi!

Government programs are evil!

Keep your hands off my Medicare!

He hates white people!

He's going to kill my grandma!

He's going to kill all white grandmas!

He's trying to take my guns!

He's trying to take my grandma's guns!

He's going to cut off my grandma's medicare then put her in front of his death panel and shoot her with the gun he took from her!

He kicked my dog!

He kicked my dog's grandma!


Admittedly, it's not much of a limb to go out on. Kind of like predicting rain in the tropics.

And for all you moronic wingnuts who manage to allow yourselves to be whipped into a frenzy by even the most modest nods toward increased social justice and equity that would still leave us considerably to the right of where we were during your beloved 1940s-1950s (imagine if someone today proposed the Marshall plan, 90% marginal tax rates, the GI bill, etc.?!); who believe (or pretend to believe; it's hard to reliably tell the difference between willful, mind-numbing ignorance and deliberate, cynical provocation) that a two percent increase in marginal tax rates on the top one percent of earners is the acme of socialistic tyranny, here's something for you to legitimately get your panties in a twist about: the speech I wish Obama (who in truth is a centrist by historical standards; moderate in both outlook and temperament) would give, but of course will not. I, on the other hand, am moderate in neither temperament nor outlook and if you want to call me a radical, I won't quarrel with you.

Members of Congress; fellow citizens.

I'd like to begin by apologizing to all thinking people for having wasted valuable time and resources in my repeated, futile attempts to mollify the members of the lunatic fringe whose numbers are relatively insignificant but whose every howl of deranged rage -- scripted and orchestrated by the moneyed interests -- is effectively amplified and exaggerated by the media which has in turn been played by said moneyed interests like a Stradivarius.

I've come to realize that I can no more reason or negotiate with these irrational, data-denying dupes than one could reason with a particularly obstreperous two year old in the midst of a temper tantrum.

I've further come to realize that bought-and-paid-for obstructionists -- including those in my own party such as Senator Baucus -- should be exposed for what they are, i.e. corrupt tools of the plutocracy. I intend to set aside all political calculus and pragmatism and speak truly and directly from this moment on for the rest of my term.

I fully understand that the realities of our current political and media system almost certainly mean that my commitment to speaking truth to and about power will result in my being destroyed and end any chance of my achieving anything of even modest substance. Perhaps I'll even be killed by the forces of the right as President Kennedy was, but more likely and less dramatically I'll simply be marginalized, slandered, scurilously discredited and voted out of office by the oh-so-easily-manipulated public after a single term.

But I've concluded that the situation as it currently exists is intolerable and only a radical re-ordering has any chance of preventing this country from inevitably and irrevocably becoming akin to a giant version of a Central or South American kleptocratic autocracy, with the vast preponderance of the population living in squalid, pestilential slums and a tiny elite residing behind razor-wire-topped walls on palatial estates patrolled by heavily armed guards.

And while it's obvious that no one would like to live on the wrong side of the wall, it's perhaps less obvious that there is no right side. That's why, for example, the well-known communist, Warren Buffet, decries the fact that his $40,000 per year secretary is taxed at a higher rate than he is and believes that he should be paying much more in taxes than he is now. He decries this not simply as a matter of fairness and common decency; he believes this not merely out of sheer altruism, but because he is wise enough to apprehend that the greatness of America was always predicated on a large, prosperous, productive and passably contented middle class. And that a reasonably egalitarian society where even the least among us can afford the basic necessities of food, shelter and medical care is a society that ultimately benefits the most successful among us as well. In short, he understands that it is more in his enlightened self-interest to have billions of dollars in the America that once was and can yet be again, than to have many more billion of dollars in, say, Sao Paulo, where only the force of arms keeps the seething masses from the throats of the masters, the rats have no trouble breaching walls, and the air above their tennis courts is no more fit to breathe than it is outside the most wretched hovel.

This is the disastrous path we've been on for the last thirty or so years, fellow citizens; one that grew parlously steep during the Bush years. And the hidden lords and masters of this country were so emboldened by having a president and government they owned fully, that rather than being sated, they are clinging to that absolute power with a ruthless ferocity and looking always for just one thing: more.

I can no longer in good conscience fail to expose the prime movers and unbridled, unprincipled greed behind this ever more egregious state of affairs nor make any further attempts to negotiate with them; to humbly beg them to please be satisfied with something ever so slightly less than everything.

I frankly have little confidence that anything can be done to stop or even slow them -- so enormously wealthy, powerful, amoral, avaricious and implacable are they -- but I've determined that even if we are destined to go down, I for one intend to go down swinging.

Good night, fellow citizens, and may truth and justice prevail through the grace of a merciful God and the heroic efforts of honorable men and women.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

On the cusp of autumn here in the northeast, I took not a one (as mandated by the holiday) but a two day respite from my, um, labors and fished both Sunday and Monday.

The trico fishing on the Little Lehigh has been spotty of late as summer wanes. Even on the warmest recent mornings, the expected clouds of spinners have failed to coalesce to any significant degree; one encounters only a handful of rising fish in any given pool; and those paltry few only continue rising for perhaps an hour.

But Saturday evening I had tied up a bunch of Griffith's gnats with wispy muskrat under-fur shucks in various sizes and was eager to try them. I had found the pattern in Ed Engle's book, Tying Small Flies, in which he commends it highly. Aside from Engle's testimonial, it appealed to me owing to the use of muskrat for the trailing shuck. I can't vouch for the efficacy of muskrat as a shuck material vis a vis various other natural or synthetic substances, but I've found having a dead muskrat on my desk to be extremely efficacious at keeping Mme. Cloozoe and the little Cloozoes at bay, thus allowing me to tie undisturbed.

The fishing Sunday morning was as it had been of late; not much of a hatch or spinner fall and a mere smattering of sporadically rising fish who had honed over the summer the unerring ability to discern the artificiality of a trico pattern of whatever design or size.

But I had a long stretch of the stream to myself, caught a couple of small trout and -- just as I was about to call it a day -- hooked and landed the last fish I saw rising; a good sized brown of fine color. I caught him at end of a long, tricky cast through a stiff breeze over conflicting currents on the smallest of my muskrat-augmented Griffith's gnats. On that note, I patted myself vigorously on the back, de-rigged, and drove home happy.

Monday I decided to check in on my favorite Brookie stream. A small, rocky creek that I've only ever showed to one other person, I worry about it every summer and every winter and am always relieved each spring and fall to find it in good shape and still containing a healthy population of its own beautiful strain of wild fish.

I usually don't start fishing this stream until about the middle of September, but we've had mostly prematurely cool nights starting in late August and in any event the creek and surroundings are so lovely that a trip there is never wasted regardless of the productiveness of the fishing.

The nature of said fishing could hardly be more different than the hyper-technical variety practiced on the Little Lehigh, of course. You fish a creek like this with a six or seven foot rod. A six or seven foot leader is plenty long enough and 5x tippet is more than fine enough. The fish typically aren't fussy about pattern or size (except on rare occasions when -- inexplicably -- they are) and although you almost never see a fish rise, a good cast to a promising-looking spot is apt to be rewarded with a slashing take that quickens the heart by a wild brook trout that appears, seemingly, out of nowhere.

I arrived at the brook to find the water levels a bit lower than I had hoped, but not disturbingly so, and the water temperature nice and cold. I tied on a good sized winged cinnamon ant which I had selected almost (but not quite) arbitrarily, and on the first cast to the second pool I tried I was fast to a good sized fish.

"Good sized" must be taken in context, of course. In this creek it means an eight or nine inch fish. The largest I've caught was a deep bodied twelve-incher -- a veritable leviathan in these waters.

I worked my way up the stream for a few hours, catching fish steadily, pausing frequently to sit on a rock and smoke and daydream.

Not everyone likes this kind of fishing and not everyone is good at it, (the fish may not be selective and you've got to be pretty damned ham-handed to break one off, but they are easily spooked by clumsy or indifferent stalking and your casts, although not long, must be accurate, sometimes creative, and on the mark on the first attempt with little or no false casting) but those of us who do like it tend to like it a lot.

Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

September 2, 2009
2:53 pm

The United States is the only country in the entire civilized world that does not provide some sort of governmental health care for the general population.

The idea that somehow this problem rests partially with the Democratic party is rubbish. We have reached a point in this country where large numbers of relatively uneducated people are lead around by their televisions sets like sheep on a sheering day.

You simply have to pull out your calculator and do the math. About half of what you pay the government in taxes goes directly to the military. Half. It really isn’t that difficult to figure out why we have the fiscal problems when the internal government tax for military expenditures is, at this point, one hundred percent greater than expenditures for any health care program.

Yes, the Democratic party gets weak in the knees at times, but lets just be honest: the Republicans think corporate profits are the eleventh commandment. Some would say the first commandment. And then just throw really narrow minded bigots on the airwaves for 20 hours a day and….voila! You have your masterpiece. A country where 10 million people think Glenn Beck knows more about constitutional law and economics than Obama.

— john