Don't be such a Dick

I spent the weekend preparing to write my usual fly-by-night analysis of what I’ve come to affectionately think of as Great Depression II, wherein I was set to take the Obama Administration to task once more for its unapologetic use of the former Bushies and Clintonites who orchestrated this entire mess and their methods of printing and shoveling trillions of dollars into the collapsing financial markets, ostensibly so that we can continue to borrow and consume beyond our means, allowing the stock market to enjoy a few teensy upward ticks so a small number of investors can make off with a few more dollars, while the geniuses who stole everything in the first place walked away with “retention bonuses” and other multi-million dollar stipends with names that were euphemisms for “bonus” so the American public might not think that we’re paying them bonuses for crashing the industry that’s “too big to fail.”

I was going to castigate Obama for keeping guys like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, whose answer for our financial travails is to recycle Bush policy and purchase “toxic assets,” creating phony market values for them and hoping that some rube would come along in the future and buy them up like they were precious rocks of grade A Columbian blow.

And further, that we really don’t know what the plan is, and that we should be really upset that our tax dollars are going to pay off AIG debts to foreign banks and other financial institutions that have already received big glittery piles of bailout money from you and me, the American taxpayer. AIG posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — about $61.7 billion — in the last quarter of 2008, by the way for those interested in the track record of the clowns who are getting those fat bonuses.

But my focus changed after Obama made his appearance on the teevee game show “60 minutes,” and answered Former Vice President “Dick” Cheney’s charge that his policies are making us “less safe.”

Cheney went on a national interview show on March 15 and was allowed to blather on about the effectiveness of torture and preemptive military attacks at keeping us safe from the “terr’sts.”

CNN interviewer/hack John King encouraged Cheney to continue the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) meme and trash Obama for his stated intention to close the American-sponsored torture camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“I think those programs were absolutely essential to the success we enjoyed of being able to collect the intelligence that let us defeat all further attempts to launch attacks against the United States since 9-11. I think that's a great success story,” said the Dark Lord, about his obsession with torture. “President Obama campaigned against it all across the country. And now he is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack.”

Let’s put aside the fact that had anyone criticized the Bush Administration is such stark terms, the national media would have been in an uproar and eventually the offender would have bowed his/her head in public shame over their perceived act of treason.

But a wonderful thing happened. Obama went on the teevee and actually shot down the urban legend that Bush policy was effective, and rather than making us “safer,” torture policies likely created more terrorism and enemies to the west in the Muslim world.

"The vice president is eager to defend a legacy that was unsustainable," said Obama, adding that the policies have “done incredible damage to our image and position in the world.

“You know, I think that Vice President Cheney has been at the head of a movement whose notion is somehow that we can't reconcile our core values, our constitution, our belief that we don't torture, with our national security interests. I think he's drawing the wrong lesson from history. The facts don't bear him out,” Obama said.

And then he went to the heart of what we “conspiracy theorists” have been saying for years:

"I mean, the fact of the matter is, after all these years, how many convictions actually came out of Guantanamo? How many terrorists have actually been brought to justice under the philosophy that is being promoted by Vice President Cheney? It hasn't made us safer.”

It was doubly refreshing that Obama didn’t rush to bow down and kiss Cheney’s pasty white butt on Monday like any national Republican or many Democrats such as Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi might.

It reminded me why I voted for Obama. He’s articulate and usually the smartest guy in the room.

After more than 20 years of Kennebunkport/Hope Arkansas hillbillies and a decade of Reagan’s simplistic populism, it’s refreshing to have a hip, articulate urbanite in charge, who has his feet firmly in the “reality-based” community.

It was one of those brief moments where I gave up my bitter cynicism, and for a few moments believed that maybe things in my lifetime will be alright.

Ah, the joys of free choice

It’s kinda cool being human sometimes. Not only do we have opposable thumbs, but we also have what some people consider the god-given gift of free choice.

Oh sure, we have to wear clothes most of the time and create controlled climates in order to survive comfortably in a harsh, uncaring world, but we have other advantages not shared by the rest of the animal kingdom, not the least of which is the ability to record and learn from history.

For instance, in the art of war, military planners can look at battles that have gone before and learn tactics that can give them advantages on the battlefield in order to ensure a greater chance for success.

Unless of course, said military has far superior weaponry — thanks to centuries of scientific research and collective memory — and simply “shocks” and “awes” a technologically inferior enemy into temporary submission to declare “mission accomplished.”

The devil is in the details though, so in the aftermath of that sort of military action our commanders have the ability to turn to another playbook when the subsequent occupation turns into a quagmire, and our brilliant military leadership can then show us charts and graphs demonstrating how well the invasion is going. They can also orchestrate sham elections and talk about the occupied country “taking responsibility” for its own destiny.

Think “Vietnam-ization” here, and the Kabuki Theater of such geniuses as Robert McNamara, who later took his abilities to the Ford Motor Company.

It seems as if failing upwards is another quaint advantage afforded Homo Sapiens.

But free choice, personal responsibility and historical memory can extend to the areas of finance and economics as well.

For instance, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the financial industries of the U.S. became so large and incestuous that the entire world financial system collapsed, leading to a worldwide depression.

In an attempt to stanch the bleeding, our 32nd President Franklin Roosevelt enacted the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and created major banking reforms, some of which were designed to control speculation. It also prohibited banks from owning other financial businesses such as insurance companies (think Citigroup).

Roosevelt and many other observers of human nature thought free enterprise was fine, but when greed is allowed to go on unfettered, regulation helps to preserve a fair distribution of wealth. It’s also a matter of economic survival.

In more recent history, we can observe the “boom and bust” cycles of the economic bubbles that coincided with the final destruction of financial regulation thanks to 42nd President Bill Clinton, who was impeached for the wrong reason.

In 1999, Clinton repealed Glass-Steagall, after deregulating the communications industry in 1996.

The subsequent speculation exploded the tech market and led to a series of fiscal bombs, which became larger and more destructive as the financial industry gorged on empty profits and the agencies that remained to regulate them looked the other way.

A lot of people who should have known better claim that no one could have seen our fiscal collapse coming, but I don’t believe that. Those who predicted this collapse for years were marginalized, while the people who said we couldn’t have predicted it ignored history.

But like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, people in the “reality-based community” who warned of the folly of our fiscal irresponsibility were shouted down and called un-American or Chicken Littles by Pollyannas who insisted that the stock market would always go up, even if there were little burps.

But there is historical evidence to justify the nay-sayers, and now we have reality to match. It’s much like Intelligent Design butting up against the theory of evolution. Evolution has historical records in the form of fossils. End of discussion.

So maybe if we survive this economic meltdown we can learn from the past this time. Maybe we can learn that no entity should get “too big to fail”; maybe we can learn that it’s not a good idea for major financial industries to be deregulated to the point that we have no idea what’s really going on; maybe we can learn that personal responsibility is a two-way street and we cannot count on the good faith of greedy people to police themselves in the name of the common good.

I think history’s against me on that one, though.