Is Enough Ever Enough For The Deluded American Voter?

You may have noticed that the latest polls show have completely turned around from October when voters were furious at Republicans for shutting down the government and were reporting 50-42% that they planned to back Democrats in 2014. Republicans have now opened a 49-44% lead over Democrats in this generic polling. (Due to gerrymandering, for Democrats to actually win back the House, they would have to be leading the GOP by a minimum of 10 points in the national poll. Being down by 5% is potentially catastrophic.) As expected, Democrats are far less enthusiastic about voting next year-- which is precisely what led to the midterm electoral disaster in 2010.

If you follow this blog at all, you know I will be the last person to defend the revolting DC Democratic Establishment who can only ever be considered even relatively acceptable as a product of how terrible the GOP is. Outside of their progressive caucus, the DC Democrats are only marginally better than the Republicans, at best a C-minus compared to an F. Corrupt slime like Steve Israel, Steny Hoyer, Joe Crowley, Debbie Wasserman Schultz deserve the worst. But do the rest of us?

There are barely words to describe the sheer putridness of the Republican Party. They exist, like most conservative parties, to counter democracy and impose the will of an overwhelmingly criminal, self-entitled plutocracy on society. They'd all deserve to be guillotined... if we still sought to solve problems that violently.

The other day a Twitter wag asked who would be heading up the investigation of the serial lies crooked Orange County/San Diego multimillionaire Darrell Issa fed the media and the American public about Benghazi in the pursuit of partisan gain and American disunity. (The answer is no one... there will be no investigation-- other than the exhaustive one David Kirkpatrick wrote up for the NY Times Saturday.) It's long and you can click that link and read the whole thing. A few excerpts, that should be entered as evidence in the rial of Darrell Issa and the whole Republican DC Establishment:

Months of investigation by the New York Times, centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault. The attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi. And contrary to claims by some members of Congress, it was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.

A fuller accounting of the attacks suggests lessons for the United States that go well beyond Libya. It shows the risks of expecting American aid in a time of desperation to buy durable loyalty, and the difficulty of discerning friends from allies of convenience in a culture shaped by decades of anti-Western sentiment. Both are challenges now hanging over the American involvement in Syria’s civil conflict.

The attack also suggests that, as the threats from local militants around the region have multiplied, an intensive focus on combating Al Qaeda may distract from safeguarding American interests.

...Members of the local militia groups that the Americans called on for help proved unreliable, even hostile. The fixation on Al Qaeda might have distracted experts from more imminent threats. Those now look like intelligence failures.

More broadly, Mr. Stevens, like his bosses in Washington, believed that the United States could turn a critical mass of the fighters it helped oust Colonel Qaddafi into reliable friends. He died trying.

Of course, some people always think they know better than people who do careful investigations because they feel it in their gut or because it fits their worldview-- be it Republican or Zionist. On Meet the Press today, David Kirkpatrick stated flatly, "There's just no chance that this was an al Qaeda attack. It was an armed terrorist attack motivated in large part by the video." No one should have been surprised that Darrell Issa, who has lied about everything in his life since he was a youngster and was arrested several times for car theft, arson-for-hire, fraud and various other felonies before being drafted by the Republican Party to run for for Congress, disputed Kirkpatrick's thorough investigation. And it was certainly no surprise when the warmonger head of the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Rogers (R-MI), disputed the investigation on Fox News Sunday. What may have astounded some viewers-- viewers who haven't followed the bug-eyed little worm's career-- is that Adam Schiff (D-West Hollywood, Burbank, Silverlake, Los Feliz, Hollywood, Glendale), one of Congress' most pathetic agents of the Israeli government, also disputed the Times investigation. Worm: "I don't think it's complete... I don't think either paradigm is really accurate here. Intelligence indicates al Qaeda was involved."

When will the United States ever learn that you can't buy "friends" with bribes? I doubt Allen Dulles, Eisenhower's CIA chief, later fired by JFK when it was no longer possible to persuade anyone he was anything but severely senile, was the first policy maker to employ bribery of foreign leaders and groups as a key component of American "diplomacy." Throughout Stephen Kinzer's book on the Dulles brothers, The Brothers, there are reports of Allen Dulles wasting tens of millions of dollars without compunction trying to bribe everyone from members of the French Cabinet, to the Italian Mafia, gangs in Tehran and Saigon, Christian leaders willing to help him with his extremist plots, members of every fascist junta that managed to overthrown a democracy during the '50s to the king of Saudi Arabia, the mother of the king of Jordan, the members of an international tribune in Geneva and the Pakistani military. He was so breathtakingly incompetent that nothing ever worked for him except bribery-- and the bribery, of course, only worked in the short term. One of Kinzer's many descriptions of him that peppers the book:

Allen was a poor administrator. Many around him also noted a lack of intellectual engagement. He often turned aside probing discussion by telling a story, or musing about his favorite baseball team, the Washington Senators. His mind was undisciplined. By one accounted he "seemed almost scatterbrained. A senior British agent who worked with him for years recalled being "seldom able to penetrate beyond his laugh, or to conduct any serious professional conversation with him for more than a few sentences."

Bribery was all Dulles, an inbred, self-entitled Republican, ever knew how to do. And it's a policy the U.S. still practices to this day, rarely with any kind of lasting impact for the good of anyone concerned. And, of course, there was this:



It's not unrelated to point out Joseph Stiglitz's OpEd in today's NY Times, bemoaning a society where elites behave as though everyone else is a commodity to buy and sell. He could be well describing a domestic version of he Allen Dulles mentality-- and his strategy that everything boils down to the brutal power of cash without honor or dignity.

Economic inequality, political inequality, and an inequality-promoting legal system all mutually reinforce one another. We get a legal system that provides privileges to the rich and powerful. Occasionally, individual egregious behavior is punished (Bernard L. Madoff comes to mind); but none of those who headed our mighty banks are held accountable.

As always, it is the poor and the unconnected who suffer most from this, and who are the most repeatedly deceived. Nowhere was this more evident than in the foreclosure crisis. The subprime mortgage hawkers, putting themselves forward as experts in finance, assured unqualified borrowers that repayment would be no problem. Later millions would lose their homes. The banks figured out how to get court affidavits signed by the thousands (in what came to be called robo-signing), certifying that they had examined their records and that these particular individuals owed money-- and so should be booted out of their homes. The banks were lying on a grand scale, but they knew that if they didn’t get caught, they would walk off with huge profits, their officials’ pockets stuffed with bonuses. And if they did get caught, their shareholders would be left paying the tab. The ordinary homeowner simply didn’t have the resources to fight them. It was just one example among many in the wake of the crisis where banks were seemingly immune to the rule of law.

I’ve written about many dimensions of inequality in our society-- inequality of wealth, of income, of access to education and health, of opportunity. But perhaps even more than opportunity, Americans cherish equality before the law. Here, inequality has infected the heart of our ideals.

I suspect there is only one way to really get trust back. We need to pass strong regulations, embodying norms of good behavior, and appoint bold regulators to enforce them. We did just that after the roaring ’20s crashed; our efforts since 2007 have been sputtering and incomplete. Firms also need to do better than skirt the edges of regulations. We need higher norms for what constitutes acceptable behavior, like those embodied in the United Nations’ Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. But we also need regulations to enforce these norms-- a new version of trust but verify. No rules will be strong enough to prevent every abuse, yet good, strong regulations can stop the worst of it.

Strong values enable us to live in harmony with one another. Without trust, there can be no harmony, nor can there be a strong economy. Inequality in America is degrading our trust. For our own sake, and for the sake of future generations, it’s time to start rebuilding it. That this even requires pointing out shows how far we have to go.