Democratic power abhors a vacuum... Party of Fear!

Party of Fear

The only thing we have to fear is ignorance.

“It’s what people know about themselves inside that makes them afraid.”  - Clint Eastwood – High Plains Drifter

By J.M. Hamilton  (9-21-12)

I kept thinking about Candidate Romney this week, and his staff.  This is a man who gave up being a private equity billionaire, so that he could help us all, or at least 53% of us, by becoming President.  Mr. Romney has been running for the nation’s highest office for years, the opportunity costs for this candidate are enormous.  And yet, Mr. Romney’s defeat hangs in the air, like Napoleon fleeing Russia at the onset of winter, and leaving behind his Grand Armee.  Ravenous Russian wolves in pursuit of the emperor’s sleigh, snapping at the trace horses for miles upon miles in a desolate winter scape.

Maddening.  Or for Mr. Romney’s team is it like Hitler, and staff, spending final moments with his bride, with U.S and Russian soldiers closing in, a mighty German nation ruined.  Feelings of despair and of what might have been – dashed hopes and dreams – deep down in the bunker. Valhalla beckons.

Mr. Romney’s fall, like Napoleon’s and Hitler’s, is largely self-inflicted.

Granted the candidate is no megalomaniac; but if the video that Mother Jone’s offered up this week is any indication, Mr. Romney does appear to be suffering from an acute form of socio-economic prejudice, having written off nearly half the nation (only to tell us this week, it was all a mistake and he loves 100%of us, after all).  Of course, many of those Mr. Romney wrote off as parasitic are the Republican faithful, including tax dodging U.S. soldiers (as noted by Mr. Kristof in the Times).  The very people who lay their lives down for us, the plutocracy, and the DOD.  But we can’t blame this all on Mr. Romney; he’s just the most recent incarnation of a long line of Republican Party leaders, who have suspended rational thinking for a failed ideology, with ruinous results for the country.

Mr. Romney is rich and his party represents the wealthy, and those who wish to be.  Today’s GOP is quite possibly more reactionary than ever, and it refuses to change, even at the risk of extinction.  This is a party that preys upon your fear, and has no reservation about prevarication or stretching the truth, witness Mr. Ryan’s GOP convention speech (which even his own Party assailed).   The antidote for fear is knowledge and education, and as GOP Candidate Santorum conveyed earlier in the Republican campaign, education is no good.  You see, education and knowledge gets in the in way of your exploitation, and makes things harder on the ruling oligarchs.  The only question that remains this election season is will Mr. Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers double-down?  How much money is the plutocracy willing to spend in support of a failed candidacy and an attempt to purchase the White House?  My guess is a lot more.  Cost-Benefit analysis would suggest upping the ante.

Contained is this week’s New Yorker is an extraordinary piece on the very first political consulting firm, Campaign Inc (CI).  The piece is entitled the Lie Factory, and was written by Jill Lepore.  Needless to say it is outstanding and, among other things, draws the connection between political consulting and advertising campaigns.   Both enterprises are selling something.

Among the tried and true principles of Campaign Inc. were:  make it personal; candidates are easier to sell than issues; attack, attack, attack; never underestimate the opposition; never explain anything; fan flames (embrace and win controversy); simplify, simplify, simplify.  

Said Mr. Whitaker, a partner in Campaign Inc. (CI), which was formed in the 1930′s, “A wall goes up when you try to make Mr. and Mrs. Average American Citizen work or think.  The average American doesn’t want to be educated.”

Today, political consulting is big business.  Campaign Inc.’s principals are on full display this election season, and they have been a key part of most successful campaigns for the last eighty years.  Perhaps by no coincidence, CI’s primary clients were big business and the GOP.

If we think long and hard about it, one could easily argue that nearly a century of political consulting has brought the country to where it is today.  Where glib one-liners and sound bites are not only used to gain political advantage, and admission to political office, but become public policy itself.  It’s much easier to trot out negative advertising, than to explain a highly complex problem, and the detailed solution to that problem (and the reality is few candidates have the skills to pull it off, and many have lost office trying).  Many of our problems today are so complex that the quick lie or one liner can no longer stand up to scrutiny, and so as we have seen in this election cycle, the candidates don’t even try.   Again, observe the GOP’s criticism of the Romney/Ryan tickets refusal to fill in the blanks on their proposed fiscal and tax policies.  And they are the experts?

Or witness both candidates, Messrs. Romney and Obama, failure to address the financial crisis, and the resulting mortgage debacle, four years on-going, and the cornerstone of the nation’s economic problems.

Other key examples where the quick fix, or simple solution, have failed the nation are:

Endless rounds of quantitative easing, which is nothing more than code for back door bank bailouts.  The Cartel is so powerful now that it appears to be dictating Fed policy.  The Fed has become the go to market for MBS and CDO’s, the liabilities and moral hazard for bank excess have been transferred from private sector balance sheets and onto the public’s.  And the result of the Fed’s efforts:  Stagflation in commodity prices, and Stagdeflation in home prices.  Central banks around the world have swaddled zombie banks in a cocoon of soothing liquidity, so that the inevitable write-downs can be postponed at taxpayer, market, worker and business expense.  Contagion is spreading and sound healthy currencies and economies are being dragged down with the bad, all so that we can prop up banks.  The “lost Japanese decade” scenario is with us to stay now.  One can gather from Mr. Romney’s reticence on the matter that he would have done nothing different than the President’s team, Messrs. Geithner, Summers and Bernanke.   Banking uber alles!

Check out Mr. Romney’s criticism of this administration and its handling of the Middle East.   The GOP’s solution to every problem involving an Arab country is to subcontract out foreign policy to the state of Israel, play the fear card, and reach for the DOD. That’s right, order two air strikes and call me in the AM.  That sound bite, the Arabs are the problem, and Islam is the issue, entirely misses the boat.  Some in-depth analysis might conclude that there is extreme poverty throughout much of the Middle-East, brought about by wide disparities in economic opportunity and education, and concentrated wealth and power into too few hands.  Successive authoritarian regimes, with the economic and military support of Western democracies, have amassed fantastic wealth, at the expense of Arab citizens.  Poverty stricken, these Arab citizens have turned to all that they have left, religion and the Prophet Mohammad.  In some instances these citizens have been radicalized by poverty, and are all too easily manipulated by their religious and political leaders.  The antidote for Arab radicalism is democracy, education, and greater economic opportunity; but that solution will take patience and time, indeed generations, with many problems for U.S. companies operating in the region along the way.  This scenario doesn’t fit into Big Oil’s or the DOD’s agenda, so don’t look for Candidate Romney to trot that out any time soon.  Besides the proceeding doesn’t fit into a neat power point presentation, or a Campaign Inc. style sound bite, so forget about it.

Better to sound bellicose and rattle the saber, it plays nicely into many American’s fears and prejudice.  Campaign Inc. would advise a candidate, and a political party, to have an enemy at all times, and if one can’t be found than create one!

And finally, Mr. Romney appears to have an issue with the 47%, who receive some sort of government benefit, many of whom are Republican.  The Campaign Inc. sound bite is that these folks are moochers, the state is growing, and the solution is more tax cuts for the wealthy.  What doesn’t fit neatly into this paradigm is the fact that economist after economist will tell you that concentrated wealth and power (like that which has occurred in this country over the last 35 years, with ever declining upper income tax rates) correlates into lost educational and economic opportunities, and therefore, greater reliance upon the state for solutions.  Democratic power abhors a vacuum:  and if U.S. entrepreneurs and major corporations are no longer going to hire American, pay a living wage, or provide retirement benefits, than these free market institutions are ceding authority and power to the state, and building an ever growing Democratic base.

America needs an industrial policy that includes favorable policies for business, the market, and the worker.  However, industrial policy might also include telling CEOs something that they haven’t heard from the GOP in several decades, that is the laissez faire fairy tale is dead, markets do not have perfect knowledge and are not self-regulating; hence the need for a new industrial policy.

But that’s not very “Campaign Inc.”

Much better to stick to playing the fear card, campaign on ignorance, and continue to let things slide into crisis.

 Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2013