Your Tax Dollars At Work

Your Tax Dollars At Work

“The general American public should not have to make up the balance as corporations avoid paying billions in U.S. taxes,” Senator McCain said.  NYTIMES 5-23-13

“The middle class and future generations are being robbed by U.S. tax policy, as it presently stands.  The middle class, what remains of it, cannot escape paying taxes, and pay a higher rate to subsidize those entities, individuals and organizations, which often pay at half the tax rate we do, that is if they pay any taxes at all.”  JM Hamilton Blog, 3-17-12 – Mr. Demagogue?

By J.M. Hamilton (6-8-13)

This blog has gotten a number of things wrong, but over the last couple of years, it’s nailed a few calls, too.  Among the issues it has correctly called is the grand heist the American taxpayer suffers daily, when it subsidizes major corporations and wealthy private enterprise, and the numerous tax loopholes these entities lobby for, write, and embrace.  Tim Cook, Apple CEO, was recently before a Senate committee, and elaborated on how Apple dodges taxes by shifting earnings to subsidiaries that do not exist anywhere.  That is to say these subsidiaries are domiciled nowhere on this planet (maybe – this being Apple- they are in the cyber realm?).  The “check the box” loophole, along with the “Double Irish, and Dutch Sandwich” loopholes, et al., are said to allow Apple to avoid paying $9 billion dollars in taxes last year, per a recent Insight piece written by Reuters (5-31-13).  

Even the CBO estimates the wealthiest will enjoy a tax break of $12 trillion in the coming decade.

Apple is not alone.  G.E., Facebook, Google, you name it, if a major multinational isn’t deploying these strategies, their tax department would probably be responsible to their shareholders for errors and omissions, and fiduciary liability.  What’s galling is not that these corporations deploy these lawful strategies, but that our elected officials allow these loopholes to exist at the taxpayer’s expense, and that nation states – and these United States - allow themselves to be played off upon one another, in a tax arbitrage/tax code race to the bottom.  Meanwhile, Europe and America suffers from economic malaise, wage stagnation, fiscal austerity, record budget deficits, and high unemployment and underemployment.  Politicians being what they are, and in many cases owned by these corporate and private interests, it should not surprise any of us that this goes on.

Mr. Cook was recently filmed and quoted, as shown on Bloomberg, telling students from his alma mater, Duke, that they should break existing rules, and write their own rules.  Sounds like a recipe for anarchy, civil disobedience, and nihilism that the elites are said to abhor.  Then again, these same executives are often fond of talking about capitalism’s “creative destruction.”  Yes, their creativity (1%), and our destruction (99%).  Perhaps Mr. Cook is merely stating the obvious:  that he who owns the gold makes the rules.

It’s not just that the average taxpayer is paying a higher tax rate to subsidize the low rates corporate and private enterprise pay, and that this means the public has less discretionary income to spend within the economy, but an even bigger problem is what the G.E.s, Apples, Googles, and private equity does with tax dollars they are able to retain, as a result of the public’s tax assistance for the wealthy. 

A quick digression: Taxes are not only meant to pay for the various services government affords to maintain the capitalist system, but they also are used to guide and direct social policy (e.g. the child tax credit and/or the punitive tax on tobacco). 

Therefore, we can read into today’s tax code that you, Dear John Q Public, are being penalized for being an ordinary citizen, and the tax code is rewarding the aristocracy and the elite for being wealthy.  In short, you are being penalized for minding the rules, while they make up the tax laws as they go along.  But I stray.   Back to what these monopolies do with the tax dollars that they are able to retain and dodge paying, as a result of our dysfunctional political leadership and government institutions.

What these entities do with your tax subsidy, mixed in with earnings and ldebt, is eradicate and buyout competition, which often eliminates management and jobs from going concerns.   It’s all over the news that Apple has purchased nine companies in the last fiscal year.  With those purchases comes synergy and pink slips, and a growing Apple monopoly on products and services, which translates into fewer jobs and opportunities for the American public, not to mention fewer product and service options.  It also means fewer investment opportunities for those who would like place their money into Silicon Valley stocks and bonds. 

Private Equity, a classic example, enjoys numerous tax loopholes and dodges, including but not limited to the tax deductibility of debt and carried interest.  When, we the people, allow our politicians to dole out tax favors to our friends in private equity, at our collective expense, not only do we have to underwrite the resulting tax liability; but we also allow private equity to turn around and gut businesses, merge, strip, and often enough bankrupt them with our tax dollars; which again, results in the 99% having fewer economic opportunities, fewer product and service options, and fewer investment opportunities. 

In short, your tax dollars at work! 

And you are paying higher taxes to allow this to happen, and incurring an ever growing mountain of Federal and State debt, and the resulting interest on same, to allow this to be done to you.   As result of all this M&A activity and taxpayer subsidized globalization, your wages stagnate, due to the lack of entrants and competition in a given business sector.

If you are middle class, or wealthy and cannot escape paying taxes, when you give a corporate or privately held monopoly a tax break, you are quite often giving them more money with which to leverage up and destroy and eliminate their competition, and solidify their economic, political and financial hold on power.  

Much of this corporate money is said to be parked offshore, which is really a euphemism for Wall Street banks (remember the offshore subsidiaries, who are domiciled no where?).  The corporates are crying out for a tax holiday, so that they can repatriate these funds to America, and pay themselves a huge dividend.  If our politicians agree to this, there will almost assuredly be no quid pro quo.  If the prior Bush Holiday is any indication, our elected officials will not insist that these tax breaks (not even a portion) contribute to jobs or investment in America… but almost assuredly, our politicians will request a campaign contribution or donation.  No direct linkage of course.

Seeing as how our tax dollars are spent by the elite, and often the resulting elimination of jobs and opportunity, perhaps it is time for the American taxpayer to insist upon their own tax holiday?  What better way to stimulate the economy?  At the minimum, the American people should insist that the corporates pay at an equitable rate.  If our corporate friends and private partners had to pay at the same rates the middle and upper middle class pay, real tax reform would begin in earnest.

P.S. 

Another thing J.M.H. called in a recent editorial (ThePolitical Tide Breaks?  Roll Tide!) was the nature of the current Presidency and our government.  Believing he was clearly the lesser of two “concerns,” I voted for President Obama twice.  Americans are often distracted by political labels (Republican versus Democrat), and social policy, which is really the only thing remaining that differentiates the two political parties, both in practice and reality (all campaign rhetoric aside)… that said, we should make no mistake about it, both parties are dedicated to the military & cyber industrial complex, monopolies, and big government.  As such, we really do live in a one party state, and this state has increasingly encroached upon your freedoms since, and at the excuse of, 9-11.

Arguably, this government is no longer by and for the people, but apparently by and for the protection of the elite. 

Given NSA data mining and intelligence gathering on U.S. citizens by the government, of which Apple and Silicon Valley appears to play an exceptional and extraordinary role, it would appear that we are all assumed to be guilty, until proven innocent.


 Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2013

Why are we paying a Cartel to do their job?

June 2, 2013 NYTIMES

Pressure Grows to Create Drugs for ‘Superbugs’

By BARRY MEIER

Government officials, drug companies and medical experts, faced with outbreaks of antibiotic-resistant “superbugs,” are pushing to speed up the approval of new antibiotics, a move that is raising safety concerns among some critics.

The need for new antibiotics is so urgent, supporters of an overhaul say, that lengthy studies involving hundreds or thousands of patients should be waived in favor of directly testing such drugs in very sick patients. Influential lawmakers have said they are prepared to support legislation that allows for faster testing.

The Health and Human Services Department last month announced an agreement under which it will pay $40 million to a major drug maker, GlaxoSmithKline, to help it develop medications to combat antibiotic resistance and biological agents that terrorists might use. Under the plan, the federal government could give the drug company as much as $200 million over the next five years.

“We are facing a huge crisis worldwide not having an antibiotics pipeline,” said Dr. Janet Woodcock, director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the Food and Drug Administration. “It is bad now, and the infectious disease docs are frantic. But what is worse is the thought of where we will be five to 10 years from now.”

Annually, tens of thousands of Americans die from infections, largely acquired in hospitals, that are resistant to antibiotics, experts say.

Doctors, faced with dwindling options and little time to decide, are often left with agonizing choices over how to save a patient’s life. For example, some doctors, in extreme cases, are again using Colistin, an older antibiotic that was largely abandoned years ago because of the damage it can cause the kidneys.

“A drug like Colistin would not be developed today because it is too toxic,” said Dr. Helen W. Boucher, an infectious disease expert at Tufts University in Boston.

Under a plan proposed by a professional medical group, the Infectious Disease Society of America, new antibiotics approved through quicker testing would carry a special label specifying that their use be limited to very sick patients.

But critics of the plan argue that merely putting a restrictive label on a medicine is not enough, and that limited tests might not be adequate to determine a drug’s safety and effectiveness. They say they worry that the new medications, without the more comprehensive testing, could then be used on healthier patients who do not necessarily need them.

“There is really no way of knowing how these drugs are going to perform,” said Dr. John H. Powers, a former F.D.A. antibiotics reviewer who is now an associate professor at George Washington University in Washington.

The overuse of antibiotics in people and animals, often for conditions for which the drugs are ineffective or not needed, is seen as a driving force in the development of resistant bacteria. As these organisms have evolved and developed resistance, the development of new drugs has not kept pace.

Pharmaceutical companies have frequently chosen to put their resources into developing drugs with bigger payoffs than antibiotics. Also, the F.D.A., after a scandal several years ago involving an antibiotic called Ketek, which the agency approved on the basis of fraudulent data and was subsequently linked to severe liver damage, has been cautious in approving new drugs, infectious disease experts say.

“It has been progressively more difficult to usher a new anti-infective to market,” said Dr. Vance G. Fowler Jr., an infectious disease expert at Duke University.

Efforts to develop new antibiotics are not limited to the United States. In Europe, several big producers including GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca recently became part of a joint government and industry initiative to develop antibiotics that kill resistant strains of bacteria. As part of the project, companies are pooling their resources and research data.

Along with the recent grant to GlaxoSmithKline, federal officials have also been giving grants to drug makers worth tens of millions of dollars to help them underwrite the costs of developing new antibiotics.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/health/experts-debate-plan-to-speed-antibiotic-development.html?nl=afternoonupdate&emc=edit_au_20130603


 Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2013

THE PROBLEM WITH MONOPOLIES...

MRSA and Private Equity

For both there is a cure!

By J.M. Hamilton (11-7-10)

Several interesting titles came to mind for this week’s editorial, among them:  Private Equity, the Killer Whales of Capitalism, or Private Equity & Saturated Fat, Clogging the Arteries of Commerce and the Economic Recovery.  But hey, I have nothing against Killer Whales, who are only acting out their role in nature by culling out the weak and infirm from the seal population.  And saturated fat is absolutely benign compared to private equity.   At least with a little will power we can avoid saturated fat.  Private equity, on the other hand, is more pernicious, insidious and prevalent in our society; that is to say, private equity is much more analogous to the super-bug, MRSA or methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus.  Besides, the government’s concern about MRSA, and required intervention into market place, nearly completes the hook, and allows this piece to run full circle.

Government Intervention into the Market Place: Democrats, Republicans and Bears!  Oh My!

The Times ran a story this week, Antibiotics Research Subsidies Weighed by U.S., where for once, we may actually have both Democrats and Republicans coming to agreement that government intervention into the market place might be a positive thing.  Its seems as though MRSA, and assorted superbugs, are overthrowing and growing beyond the reach of medicine; and Big Pharma has more profitable endeavors to pursue (like adding vitamins to medicines, so that patents and monopolistic profits can be extended), than developing new antibiotics to fight MRSA and his deadly friends.  Funny how the most ardent Laissez Faire Capitalist becomes all “lovey” about government, when the market falls on its ass, and there’s a life threatening crisis at hand.

Seems as though both Democrats and Republicans want to throw all kinds of financial incentives, tax breaks, and other assorted financial goodies, Big Pharma’s  way (on top of the multitude of breaks Big Pharma already receives), so what would transpire in a more perfectly capitalist system, can now happen through government intervention into a oligopolistic market place.  Unfortunately, as usual, government is attacking the symptom of the problem (Big Pharma intransigence and greed), instead of the problem (Monopolies authorized by our government), essentially applying a band aid to the boil on the skin instead of addressing and attacking the MRSA that lurks beneath the boil. 

Adam Smith and an “Absurd Tax”

We’ll eventually get to private equity, but first a quick visit to our friend Adam Smith.  Mr. Smith warned about the pernicious tendency of capitalism to metastasize into monopoly, when he wrote:

(The interests)… “in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public.   To widen the market and narrow the competition, is always in the interests of the dealers… and can serve only to enable dealers, by raising their profits above what they would naturally be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow citizens.  The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order (Merchants, Dealers, Monopolies), ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention.”

No way.   Adam Smith, a free market deity, nearly 235 years ago warned that monopolistic profits are a tax on society, and warned about capitalism’s tendency toward combination?  And as this blog has written about (see Monopolies and Double Standards, Et Al.) monopoly can only occur by the grant and authority of the government.   And hence, the market place failure we are now witnessing:  Having created the oligopoly, Big Pharma, the government now has to go begging this oppressive power for core and fundamental medicine.   Had the government not allowed Big Pharma to consolidate and grow so powerful, there would be many varied entities and entrants in the pharmaceutical market place, each seeking out their own niche, presumably one of these would have been antibiotics to keep up with superbugs.  Instead, we have a few powerful actors, Big Pharma, who can hold out for compounded government largess, at the expense of the tax payer and general welfare of society, before developing drugs that would otherwise, most likely, be developed in a less monopolistic market sector.

“This is market place failure,” states California Democrat Mr. Waxman in the Times article.   Indeed, Mr. Waxman, but rather than throw yet more tax payer money at Big Pharma (in the form of financial incentives and tax breaks), perhaps the real solution is the break up the pharmaceutical cartel, so that there are more players to address life threatening disease and illness?

How the Game is Played

Enter private equity…. Shadow banking’s co-evil twin.  Private Equity makes its money by acquiring, merging, leveraging up perfectly healthy companies and corporations with colossal amounts of debt, front loading profits, extracting huge management fees, of course taking a portion of the profits (if any) from the targeted company, tax deductibility on the massive debt, and even enjoys the kicker of special tax break, under the guise of “carry forward.”  Private equity further guarantees profitability by sealing itself off from loss by creating LLC funds and holding companies; hence, profits can flow up, but losses and bankruptcy may stay below with the LLC.  But the really big pay off occurs when the private equity company takes the acquired firm and flips it, by taking it public (IPO), merging it with another company (M&A), or tossing said company to another private equity firm (to be leveraged up and “debted up” all the more), much as a pack of Orcas does with baby seals.  Of course, private equity, like MRSA, goes barely unnoticed when things are going along swimmingly; but when the economy heads south or the bubble bursts, all that leverage, and the debt service load, tends to tear a company apart at the seams, to the detriment of:  society, management, investors, employees, bond or debt holders, vendors of the bankrupt company, and the tax base.

Witness a record number of business failures in this country in the last couple of years, possibly half of them pushed over the edge by their recent, or present liaison, with private equity.  From the NY Times story, Profits for Buyout Firms as Company Debt Soared (10-5-09), we get the following:

“A disproportionate number of the companies that were acquired during that frenzy are now struggling with the enormous debts. More than half the roughly 220 companies that have defaulted on their debt in some form this year were either owned at one time or are still controlled by private equity firms, according to analysts at Standard & Poor’s. Among them are household names like Harrah’s Entertainment and Six Flags, the theme park operator.”

Gee… all those tax breaks and special considerations, do you think private equity has some ties to the Federal Government?  You bet.  Why look no further than the occupations of our recent Treasury Secretaries: 

*Mr. Henry Paulson (Bush Administration) former Goldman Sachs, CEO and creator of TARP.  Say no more. 

*John W. Snow (Bush Administration) now a member of Cerberus Capital Management Groups, private equity, and the fine folks who helped bring Chrysler down.

*Larry Summers (Clinton Administration), lieutenant of Robert Rubin, and a key player in the deregulation of the derivatives industry.  The derivatives industry will and does, undoubtedly, play a significant role in private equity, and yet another round of M&A activity to come.

*Robert Rubin (Clinton Administration): Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, both of which ran and supported private equity operations.

Alone, of our recent Treasury Secretaries, Paul O’Neill (Bush Administration) stands out as a man of fiscal integrity, a man who bucked the Bush tax cuts and the neo-cons, and a man who did not come from, or return to, investment banking and private equity.  Perhaps that’s why Mr. O’Neill was let go?  As for Mr. Summers, the derivatives he has championed over the years play a unique role in private equity, by allowing investments banks, and private equity, itself, to hedge their bets against targets for acquisition.  Derivatives can secure profits for debt holders, if a takeover target fails, so that, depending upon the deal, and the subsequent financial results, the investors, private equity, banks and bondholder, may actually have an incentive to see the target fail or enter into bankruptcy.  As we can see in our on-going financial crisis, Wall Street makes money coming and going (lose, win or draw), and if the system blows up, well there’s always Uncle Sam ready to offer a bailout.

Fed Reserve and QE2:

The mother’s milk of private equity is cheap liquidity.  We are talking tons of money sloshing around, like the kind we see right now under QE 1 and QE2.  Private Equity has enjoyed peak periods, during bubbles, and massive monetary easing, like that seen in the mid to late eighties courtesy of Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, and the earlier part of this decade, again under the auspices of the Fed, commanded yet again, by Mr. Alan Greenspan.  During these periods private equity awash with easy money, courtesy of investors and friends in the banking industry, runs around preying upon companies, leveraging them, merging them, and most stock analyst’s favorite, creating “synergy” and “economies of scale”…. All code for down-sizing, layoffs, and organizational restructuring. 

At a macro level, as companies merge or fall prey to their massive debt load, private equity plays a critical role in the consolidation of industry and markets, that is to say, the creation of monopolies and oligopolies, not unlike what we see with Big Pharma, and problems associated with Big Pharma, like MRSA.

These monolithic business entities have tremendous problems with risk management, as we saw with B.P. earlier this year, and often end up performing poorly for their stockholders and society. 

And the Fed’s and Treasury’s role in all this?  Well presently, the Treasury finds itself in the ownership of a car company, and several financial institutions.  What better way for the Fed and Treasury to divest themselves of these entities, than to print money, flood the market with cheap liquidity, drive down bond yields and treasury yields, and drive unwilling participants back into the stock market…. So that the Fed can exit, stage left, from its forays into the private sector.  TARP might, officially, then be proclaimed an economic/government success, and the preeminence of “Too Big to Fail,” as a government policy, upheld. 

Of course, an intended or unintended consequence of massive liquidity, and lower bond yields, is to drive investors into junk bonds, and riskier investment vehicles, such as hedge and private equity funds.  Again, all the mother's milk of private equity….so that at a time of record unemployment in this country, and with the Fed printed money so fast that the printing presses are beginning to smoke, we can reasonably expect more job killing raids by private equity in the market place.  Merger and acquisition activity should soar.

The Bottom Line:

Merger and acquisition activity, as well as, the taxation and regulation of private equity, like monopolies themselves, all fall under government purview.  One quick way for government to arrest rising unemployment is to slow merger and acquisition activity (via Justice, SEC and the FTC), and tax private equity at the appropriate rate all businesses face, and eliminate the tax deductibility of debt; all the better for the government to address unemployment, MRSA and intransigent industries, such as Big Pharma, who are literally holding public health hostage, so that they can, possibly, extract further financial concessions from our government.

Private equity, too, has a role to play.  Perhaps instead of becoming a contractionary force in our economy, it can be a force for good, by deploying its capital toward new ventures and start-ups that create jobs and opportunity, instead of the elimination of same.

At the end of the day, MRSA is a growing life taker and a threat to the nation’s health; likewise, private equity, in its present incarnation, is a threat to society, business, the consumer, management and employees, and our nation’s economic health.  For both there is a cure.

 Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2013

Just Follow the Benjamins!

For a President Romney – A Foreign Policy Preview – Just Follow the Benjamins!

Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God. 

–     Henry A. Kissinger 

By J.M. Hamilton   (10-21-12)

President Obama appeared at the second debate and conquered.  And just as J.M.H. awarded the first debate to Mr. Romney, equally clear is that the President won the second debate.  Debate three, which is on foreign policy, should easily place President Obama ahead of Mr. Romney, two debates out of three.  After all, no President, since the fall of the Berlin wall, has done more to protect the American people, and look out for U.S.  long term national security interests.

The list of President Obama’s foreign policy achievements are well known to all.  And here, it is best to view the Presidents accolades through the prism of a Bush (W) Presidency.  Why?  Because a Romney Presidency’s foreign policy is very likely to be a Bush redux, one characterized by chasing the Benjamins and myopia.  So here we go:

President Bush started two major wars on the heals of 9-11, and unlike his father, both were poorly executed, suffered from mission drift, and metastasized into nation building exercises.

President Obama started no wars, and has, or is in the process of, winding down two wars without loss of U.S. face, so nation building can begin in earnest, here in the United States.

President Bush’s primary “objectives” in starting two wars was to capture Al Qaeda leadership, preemptively stop the spread of weapons of mass destructions, and foster democracy.   He did not achieve the first two goals, and only time will tell if democracy will take hold in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

President Obama is not only responsible for decimating much of Al Qaeda leadership, but via special forces, knocked off OBL, the nation’s arch nemesis.  Without starting a major ground war, democracy is flowering and spreading throughout the middle-east.  To President Obama’s credit, he did not stand in the way of these popular pro-democracy movements, when the temptation to practice real politik and support existing dictatorships must have been great (see below).

Messrs. Bush and Cheney, under the premise that President Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter, were fiscally irresponsible, and paid for their wars with a credit card.

President Obama, from the party of budgetary conservatism (see Mr. Clinton’s budget surpluses), did the fiscally responsible thing, by ending two wars.  President Obama has not declared a “peace dividend,” and DOD spending continues at a responsible pace.

The spear tip of President Bush’s and the Republican Party’s foreign policy appears rooted in the 20th Century, with costly standing armies, ground campaigns, and expensive weapons systems, too often fraught with failure and cost overruns.

President Obama has shown us how the martial efforts of the 21st Century are likely to center around less costly and life saving: cyber offensives, stealth technology, robotics and drones, and specials forces.

Of equal importance to the aforementioned, President Bush “cowboy-ed” foreign policy, often thumbing his nose at the world and the U.N.  In essence, doing the very thing that Mr. Kissinger warned against, by playing God.

President Obama, no hostage to world opinion, often works with and through U.S. allies to conduct foreign policy (see the take down Col. Gaddafi, yet another GOP goal – achieved by this President).  As opposed to launching a military strike, Iran’s economy is now in shambles as a result of global sanctions – initiated by the Obama administration – and Iran is now coming to the negotiation table over their nuclear program.

The fact that Mr. Romney’s principle complaint against the administration centers around Benghazi shows how much trouble the GOP is in on an issue they used to own, foreign policy.  Ambassador Steven’s death is a tragedy, but hardly an unexpected event in any American outpost in the middle-east. And in fact, thanks to house Republican efforts to cut back on security spending for our global outposts, we might expect more of the same in the future.  That said President Obama, and Secretary of State Clinton, did what any true leader would do, they accepted responsibility.  I may have missed it, but I don’t recall Mr. Bush taking responsibility for his set backs in the middle-east.  Meanwhile, Mr. Romney’s recent global adventures were fraught with tongue entanglements – of his own making.  Whether it was insulting the British, or offending both tribes in Israeli society, a President Romney might just cause global inflammation, or calamity, by an inadvertent utterance.

So if past is prologue, and with the GOP candidate surrounded by neo-cons with itchy trigger fingers, what might we expect from Mr. Romney?  Well lets follow the Benjamins, shall we:

1)  Mr. Sheldon Adelson, this campaign season, has showered the GOP with a hundred million dollars and counting.  Mr. Adelson’s pet project is the State of Israel, a worthy U.S. ally and a great country.  However, there are some instances, no matter how rare, where U.S. foreign policy will not, and should not, coincide with Israel’s interests and objectives.  And yet, candidate Romney has basically intimated, if not stated, that his administration would surrender U.S. sovereignty, by subcontracting out middle-east foreign policy to the State of Israel.  If that’s Mr. Romney’s thinking, how much resistance is he going to give, when merited, to a phone call from Mr. Adelson?  A Romney presidency almost guarantees another war in the middle-east, or certainly increases the probability.

2)  Campaign contributions, and lobbying, from the Defense Industry runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars, per opensecrets.org.  Much of this money is directed to the GOP, which goes a long way towards explaining why Candidate Romney is calling on spending an extra two trillion on defense over the next ten years.  The GOP’s new found fiscal conservatism applies to social spending and entitlements (those programs favoring the 47%), but when it comes to defense, the sky is the limit, even when the DOD doesn’t find the extra two trillion necessary.  The problem is, with all that money allocated to “defense,” it makes it that much easier to go imperial or on the “offensive,” particularly with a White House full of neocons.  With the U.S. spending more on defense than the entire G-20 combined, and with the GOP being self-described fiscal hawks, one would think a Romney administration would want to root out DOD waste and fraud – and  go “private equity” on the  military establishment – before running up higher national debt to support same… but apparently not.  With a Romney administration count on more profligate “borrow and spend” Republican policies, in regards foreign policy and DOD spending, at the expense of this nation and the middle class.

3)  Being incredibly naive, I believed for many years that our foreign policy and DOD were all about spreading peace, love, understanding and democracy.  After all it was the U.S.A.F.’s Strategic Air Command that had the motto, “Peace if our profession;” but as I have learned more recently, the role of the DOD is really to protect markets and the multi-national interests of the Fortune 500 around the globe.  Which helps to explain why a political party, the GOP, that is allegedly pro-democracy, is all fired up about the recent drift in the middle-east toward democratic regimes.  You see it is much easier, in many instance, for corporations to deal with a dictatorship, and the irregularities of one man show, then it is to deal with hundreds of duly elected legislators and politicians.  Besides there is no assurance that just because a country goes democratic that they are going embrace a capitalist economy… they just might go socialist, renegotiate contracts concerning national resources with foreign companies, and they might even nationalize entire industries.  Never a pretty prospect, which helps to explain why the U.S. has supported dictatorships for so long, at the expense of foreign countries and their citizens; and why the GOP is on Obama’s back over the spread of Democracy in the middle-east, billions of dollars in corporate revenue may be at stake.

The GOP appears to believe that democracy in the U.S. is good, while democracy in foreign resource rich lands is potentially bad.  Look for a President Romney to be less supportive of some of these pro-democracy movements for the aforementioned reasons, and many others.  That is to say, a President Romney is not unlikely to be pro-dictatorship, which is extremely short sighted for the U.S. and U.S. corporate interests.

Given the state of our present economy as a result of the GOP’s thirty year reign, foreign policy doesn’t get the attention it deserves, but our economy and foreign policy are deeply interconnected.  The fact that the nation has an all volunteer military, no national draft, and no sense of shared sacrifice, as wars – at least as run by the GOP – are now paid for with debt, means that foreign policy often gets short shrift from the electorate.  But this is an area that very much deserves every American’s attention, as the foreign policy of the candidate we elect impacts our standing in the world, our national debt and economy, and the women and men who lay their lives down for us all.

Clearly, President Obama has shown he is the better candidate for our nation’s foreign policy, and its impact on our national economy.  President Obama is more closely aligned to President Reagan’s foreign policy, who did not engage America in war – during his two terms in office.  Today’s GOP is both bellicose, plagued by myopia, and geared towards battle, all too often at the expense or our economy and national security.

God Bless our fighting men and women and our Commander in Chief!

Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2013

Bob Dole no longer recognizes the Republican Party that he helped lead for years.

May 28, 2013/NYTIMES

The Wisdom of Bob Dole

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Bob Dole no longer recognizes the Republican Party that he helped lead for years. Speaking over the weekend on “Fox News Sunday,” he said his party should hang a “closed for repairs” sign on its doors until it comes up with a few positive ideas, because neither he nor Ronald Reagan would now feel comfortable in its membership.

“It seems to be almost unreal that we can’t get together on a budget or legislation,” said Mr. Dole, the former Senate majority leader and presidential candidate. “I mean, we weren’t perfect by a long shot, but at least we got our work done.”

The current Congress can’t even do that, thanks to a furiously oppositional Republican Party, and that’s what has left mainstream conservatives like Mr. Dole and Senator John McCain shaking their heads in disgust.

The difference between the current crop of Tea Party lawmakers and Mr. Dole’s generation is not simply one of ideology. While the Tea Partiers are undoubtedly more extreme, Mr. Dole spent years pushing big tax cuts, railing at regulations and blocking international treaties. His party actively courted the religious right in the 1980s and relied on racial innuendo to win elections. But when the time came to actually govern, Republicans used to set aside their grandstanding, recognize that a two-party system requires compromise and make deals to keep the government working on the people’s behalf.

The current generation refuses to do that. Its members want to dismantle government, using whatever crowbar happens to be handy, and they don’t particularly care what traditions of mutual respect get smashed at the same time. “I’m not all that interested in the way things have always been done around here,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida told The Times last week.

This corrosive mentality has been standard procedure in the House since 2011, but now it has seeped over to the Senate. Mr. Rubio is one of several senators who have blocked a basic function of government: a conference committee to work out budget differences between the House and Senate so that Congress can start passing appropriations bills. They say they are afraid the committee will agree to raise the debt ceiling without extorting the spending cuts they seek. One of them, Ted Cruz of Texas, admitted that he didn’t even trust House Republicans to practice blackmail properly. They have been backed by Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, who wants extremist credentials for his re-election. 

 

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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/29/opinion/bob-dole-misses-his-republican-party.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130529&_r=0&pagewanted=print

You could fill an entire other library with what’s not in W.’s.

May 25, 2013  NYTIMES

Can 44 Subtract 43 From the Equation?

By MAUREEN DOWD

DALLAS — DO we dare to hope that the Bush administration is finally at an end?

After four years of bending the Constitution, the constitutional law professor now in the White House is trying to unloose the Gordian knot of W.’s martial and moral overreaches after 9/11.

Safely re-elected, President Obama at long last spoke bluntly about the Faustian deals struck by his predecessor, some of them cravenly continued by his own administration.

In a speech at the National Defense University, Obama talked about how we “compromised our basic values,” and he concluded with a slap at W.: “Our victory against terrorism won’t be measured in a surrender ceremony at a battleship or a statue being pulled to the ground.”

On the eve of the president’s speech, I was at the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum here, watching the film of Saddam’s statue being pulled to the ground.

It’s remarkable that Obama is trying to escape the shadow of the Bush presidency just as W. is trying to escape the shadow of the Bush presidency. Browsing the library, you wonder if these two presidents are complete opposites after all, as you see how history was shaped by an arrogant, press-averse, father-fixated, history-obsessed, strangely introverted chief executive.

Robert Draper, the author of “Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush,” perused the library with me and observed: “So 43 grew up entitled but could display a commoner’s touch, while 44 grew up hardscrabble yet developed this imperial mien. The former is defined by incuriosity, the latter by self-absorption. One is a late-blooming artist, the other a precocious writer. They can each make you kind of miss the other.”

Obama’s compelling speech on Thursday was his way of saying he didn’t want the seductive but morally dicey drone program he inherited from W. to define his own presidency. The way it had been going, one of the killer robots, hanging from the ceiling, might have made a fitting centerpiece for an Obama library.

W.’s library highlights his role in launching the Global War on Terror, an Orwellian phrase designed to conflate the sins of Osama, who was responsible for 9/11, and the sins of Saddam, who was not. That was the fatal mistake and hallmark of the Bush era. W., Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld declared war on a tactic, stoked fear as a smokescreen and treated pre-emptive attacks as just.

Better late than never, Obama brought his lapidary logic and legal cautions to bear. “Neither I nor any president can promise the total defeat of terror,” he said. “We will never erase the evil that lies in the hearts of some human beings nor stamp out every danger to our open society.”

Conservatives can honk, as Senator Saxby Chambliss did, that Obama’s speech “will be viewed by terrorists as a victory.” But this president has killed more top Qaeda operatives than Bush did. While W.’s bullhorn vow after 9/11 to catch the “people who knocked these buildings down” plays every few minutes at his library, I couldn’t find any photos of Osama or acknowledgment of Bush’s failure to catch him. Obama’s library will have a wing for that feat.

You could fill an entire other library with what’s not in W.’s. Cheney and Rummy have been largely disappeared, and it is Condi Rice who narrates the 9/11 video. You won’t see the iconic “Mission Accomplished” photo, or that painful video in which W. keeps reading “The Pet Goat” to children after learning that America is under attack, or the notorious “flyover” photo of a desultory Bush jetting from Crawford to the White House and looking through the window of Air Force One at Katrina’s devastation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/opinion/sunday/dowd-can-44-subtract-43-from-the-equation.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&_r=0