Melt-Down?

The Non-Economic Analysis of What Just Happened.

The endless story of the primary and secondary models? 59

If you are George Bush, you have presented the primary model which argues that the national economy is going to meltdown any moment. You have also produced a secondary model which should propel the primary model to your desired results. The secondary model was the first dismal failure. Its increasing odor has now drawn the primary model into the swamp with it.

I have watched this unfold with the other politics wonks on my favorite web site. Comments and posts which had previously only infrequently amounted to more than a few paragraphs now present multipage quotations about who did what, when they did it and what the results were. The least interesting but probably the most educational are accounts of past legislation, particularly Senator McCain’s endless penchant for deregulation following his rehabilitation to the neo-cons after the Keating Five problem.

Rest easy, dear visitor. This post is all about models not history. Those energized web posters mentioned above can either establish a compelling argument for the culprit in this mess, or at least, wall paper the entire affair with their too-easily-copied-and-pasted quotations. (If you still have an appetite for more of that stuff, visit my favorite after you finish here.

http://www.thomhartmann.com

and on to the forums “Domestic Politics” and “Economics.” It’s all there waiting there for you.)

Now to the models. A quick description might be in order. The primary model of any communication defines the essence of it, the question, the answer etc. The secondary model defines the mechanism of its transmission. In a sense, the primary model is the message; the secondary model is the massage.

Primary models have the foundational quality of being about something. Secondary models, on the other hand, deal entirely with the business of communicating the primary model. Both are critically important aspects of communication’s effectivity as one of the pillars of human affairs.

Concerning the proposition of Mr. Bush’s inflammatory warning about the economy, no one I’ve encountered can confidently say whether or not the threat he describes is real. That state of affairs, for example, decries his track record of secondary models in rather harsh terms. Yes, we know what his initial proposition contains, however, the secondary model he employed to manipulate us into action is, frankly, insulting. As such, it is nothing new.

So, what exactly is this secondary model we are looking at here? That is, of course, the secondary model as we see it, not the “lipstick” version rolling around the House Committee Hearings.

It’s suspiciously intriguing that, like the last one, this one began on 9/11.

The Secondary Model:

The President approaches the nation breathlessly communicating an immense threat. No one has any particular way of knowing any more about the threat than they did the last time he did this Once more, we only seem to know what he and his cabinet appointees are telling us about it. Now come the questions.

Do we trust this man? Has he told us the truth before? Has he always acted sincerely in our interests? Does it turn out that our idea about his judgment could bear the facts that came out later? Like last time?

Did he tell us the truth about the threat? Did he know about it earlier than when he told us about it? Is he telling us everything he knows now? Is he telling us enough so we can make a reasonably good decision about what to do? Or, is it like last time?

The “when” became a rather “pregnant” issue with the last threat he told us about. Did this new threat of his just “pop up out of the blue” without warning? Like last time?

The President has told us that we must act fast, and by “act” he means that we should do what he suggests we do, fast. Like the Patriot Act. Like the Military Force Authorization. Like the pharmaceutical bill. Right away, please! We have to do everything right away or face the dire consequences? Of course. It’s urgent. If we are foolish enough to wait, to think about it, all will be lost!

We can think about it later. This is a lot of our money. We’ll have time to think about it while we are paying it back.

Do we trust this man with even more of our money? Has he done a good job with the money we have given over to him in the past? Has he told us what he bought with it? Who got it? Where it is now?

Then, of course, there are the experts. They are the ones who know all abut this. Why it is urgent. Why it is worth so much. What happens if they don’t get it. Have we had good results with his experts in the past? With Donald Rumsfeld? With Carl Rove? With House Speaker DeLay? Does this President show us his good judgment in picking his experts? Do we think that, somehow, he has started to do better? Did we trust those people? Should we have trusted them? Like last time?

The expert here is Treasury Secretary Paulson. The company that is getting discussed as the next corporate fatality of this mess is called Goldman Sachs. Treasury Secretary Paulson used to be the CEO of Goldman Sachs. He apparently has $630 million dollars worth of Goldman Sachs stock in his personal fortune.

Should we trust him? Has he always done a “good job” in the past? Was he as surprised as the President when this just suddenly happened? Would he have come up with the same plan if Goldman Sachs weren’t tanking with the other investment banks?

All of this is the secondary model. These unfortunate men have started this sales effort with utterly derelict credibility. The taxpayers they are trying to convince are already exhausted, injured and, deservedly, suspicious. They are afraid. The first issue of this secondary model was to frighten them further. Like last time?

Does anybody else worry that this might not be what it is presented to be? I guess we are pretty much done with George Bush’s judgment. That leaves us stranded in an unpleasant place where we have been before, stranded with only our judgment -- our intuition. Since we have no facts, we can only try to do better than we did last time.

Honestly Appraising Why We Can't Do Much

The birthing mist of a new world order or the tears of the patriots?
It just becomes so tedious to keep pretending. 48

How far will we extend the destructive echo of this President and his tormented friends? How grave will we determine his petulance for the desecration of everything in his sight? Of course, we lick the economic wounds of a country looted to exhaustion and exasperation by his cronies, always covered by the authority of his office. Of course, we try to overlook the outrages his friends have perpetrated on our fellow American citizens, elections stolen in brazen crimes, bizarre, ambitious power concentrated with his penchant to be able to “arrest” any of us without charge, hearing, lawyer or law, policy disasters at home and over seas.

Are they somehow feeling more secure with the Governor of Louisiana secreted away in a federal prison? Are they reassured when the desperate voices of Katrina’s victims are silenced by their media friends? Do they feel vindicated when the outrageous crimes of Tom DeLay and Jack Abramhoff drift into the morass of yesterday’s news? Are they laughing and saying “I told you so! They’ll do nothing!” when they seem to have eluded the consequences of their illegal wire tapping? It is a grim picture of our descent from the rule of law, a grisly movie the world's worst watch for inspiration.

Are these usurpers frightened yet?

We, as citizens, might still claim that our failings here amount to no more than a little bad hygiene in the maintenance of our election powers and our democracy. We could, in fact, claim that had we somehow limited the spread of this greedy toxin to only the regions within our own shores. If that had been the case, our tragic embarrassment would have been solely our own private national affair, a domestic thing. We could have credibly told the world to wait, that we would correct our transgressions here at home, then, when that house keeping was accomplished, we would have once again begun to behave in a rehabilitated way consistent with our claims about ourselves. Consistent with our brave traditions. Consistent with our ideals and our national heritage.

Consistent with the incredible possibilities of our Constitution.

Sorry. It has spread beyond the borders and beyond our hope that it might be contained. It is raging around the world as a violent science fiction monster, encouraging every despicable cast off loser everywhere to abandon any fear of either our decency or our retribution. All these wretched little villains have found gangrenous bravado as they copied this President and his criminal friends. Whatever reluctance previously visited on the machinations of these little demons has been castrated. Now the brutes are finally emancipated from any concern that their monstrous ambitions might be countered, or even, criticized by the optimistic insistence of ideals from this country. Not only have we unleashed our own government’s threatening hubris on our own citizens, we have made the bloody spectacle of every tinhorn savage around the world abundantly acceptable. Once that minor detail was actualized, the blood bath began. And began quite horribly with a wrenching impunity that simply wasn’t there before we made a shallow, unmarked grave for our old high born thoughts here at home.

What in the hell are you talking about?

So the Russians invade Georgia, an ally of ours (or, at least, an ally of our President. Georgia turns out to be one of the three places on the planet where the locals still like him.). Naturally, as we sit here stupefied, bankrupt and effectively demilitarized, we are no more than a toothless bore as our President pleads with the new (not pretended) powers of the world to try to be a little more decent. Should our irritating complaints about Georgian sovereignty become too shrill, perhaps those mean old Russians will trot out the most deflating argument of all, the argument about our own failed colonial ambitions as we attack and occupy based on unexamined lies.

It seems that we have fumbled even the cheapest of our neo-con traditions, that is, of course, the choreagraphy of our famous, Republican "October Surprise." Its rescheduling to August is understandable, given the disheartening McCain campaign. The usual, really "stinky" side of things is certainly trotted out in fine form. McCain's primary international affairs adviser is a well paid lobbyist for the government of Georgia, no doubt providing a "wink and a nod" concerning that country's self-destructive challenge to the Russian Federation's 58th Army.

Massive deception being the currency of the neo-con realm, perhaps the Georgians were led to believe that, with our backing, their aggressive moves against their giant neighbor might be tolerated. Now, the Georgians, along with most of the rest of the countries in the world, understand that our backing is not much more than talk. Our "October Surprise," usually initiated by some sort of "unprovoked" attack by one of our "saved for a rainy day" enemies somewhere, is designed this time to use the military resources (and the blood) of others.

Will someone as inept as our President actually be able to replace the old "saber rattling" of our past "October Surprises" with an entirely "privatized" version where all the players are foreign? Wasn't there another Island of Granada somewhere with "trapped" college students closer to home? Sorry. Not if it requires anything from the American military. The cupboard is bare taking care of our violent international oil extraction schemes.

At least they can film a few dead Russians there in South Osetia to “justify” their violence.

Did we think that a punkish, out of date dictator such as Mr. Mugabe would show his blood soaked indifference to his people without the benefit of a failed, vacuous government here? Once his dread of some sort of American response to his outrages was nicely laid to rest, his real nature began to surface. Hollowed out as we are, the world can hardly expect the skeletal remains of the United States to actually do anything except send our useless diplomats to whine in chorus. Without an army or an economy those diplomats have also been rendered toothless.

In Sudan we have mastered the ability to countenance genocide. All of our promises after Rwanda have been made into cold soup for our meager breakfast. We dare not ostracize our cash master, the Chinese, or in any way perturb their profitable, and now, understandable complicity in the killing. Perhaps our task now is to learn how to continue our pretenses about ourselves while we watch helplessly.

Mr. Bin Laden’s great victory was once well diluted by our media and opinions. Now we see that he has emaciated our resources with his clever management of the poor, frightened old women in Washington. Bin Laden’s targeting was superb and astonishingly effective. With only a pocketful of insurgent tactics he has disabled our Constitution just as certainly as if he had hit Habeas Corpus with a shoulder fired grenade launcher. If we think the blasted hole in the Cole was a terrifying development, perhaps we should compare it to the ashy remnants of our Bill of Rights.

Bin Laden’s suspicious immunity has even become acceptable to us. Perhaps better said, his constant escapes have been made acceptable to us. We have even been slowly convinced that this failure, among all the others, doesn’t imply that we remain anything but a super power, an absurdity made possible by the ugly implication that skepticism had become treason.

This ugly list of nobodies who have embraced this opportunity to behave any way they wish could go on for many pages. Silly us. We thought Iran would be the next addition to this rolling disaster.

Do those vacuous eyes, wallowing in a pathos of psychotic bewilderment, betray a deep inner terror when considering the murderous complexity of Hamas and Hezbollah, now met with little more than hopeful abstractions of foreign policy? Do those weary jowls blush while watching Mr. Putin, into whose soul he claims to have glimpsed a trustworthy hint of reason, massacre our friends? Can his machine of deception somehow reconcile his associates’ rage about appeasement by the reasonable to his own desperate appeasement made necessary in the ruins of no other possibilities?

The awful example of our leadership has caused harm to the people of the world far beyond our borders. His comment that “Oceans no longer protect us...” is little more than a nagging migraine to those of us left stranded here in the corpse of America. We have long ago lost the luxury of bemoaning our own dilapidated state. We are now fully in “survival mode,” frighteningly distant and uninterested in much more than the painful, grave challenges we now face on almost every front. Our intuition as citizens now faces the unavoidable. We have lost a class war.

The whole idea of the protection of the oceans, frankly, became much more a warning to those outside our country. Our national self-serving misdirection and greed seem to have established themselves as propositions both devoid of shame and quite waterproof.

Killing Time ‘Till the November Election

Does Our Democracy Call for More Than Knitting Socks? 30

None of us has missed the endless complaints of the political hack on the losing side of an election. For months after the fact, the same refrain seems to “seep up” from the voices of the defeated, hypothetical grumbling along the lines of “If old Harry had won that election, none of this would be happening.” No matter who “Harry” might be or exactly what “this” is, such comments seem to be unavoidable perpetual political noise.

So, what’s the problem?

Simply put, suspicious election results can no longer be dismissed as either inevitable or in any way acceptable. We have all been told about the Supreme Court’s delivery of the Bush White House in 2000. We have all heard snippets about the outrageous elections in Ohio and Florida in 2004. We have heard all the interviews warning us about voting machines, you know, the ones without “paper trails” making recounts possible. Believable recounts, that is.

We may have heard about the astounding election crimes which placed the Governor of Louisiana in a Federal Prison, the court ruling prohibiting him from speaking publicly about his case and the criminal road blocks set before his appeal. He found relief only after the House Judicial Committee, once freed of the Republican strangle hold, began to “look in” on his plight. And even that only occurred after the state Attorneys General of something like 48 states, from both parties, signed a letter proposing that his case be reviewed.

Is all this “stink” limited to Republicans? Lately, while they have held all the power in the government, the answer is “yes.” However, looking back, there was a widely accepted rumor that large numbers of the names on Lyndon Johnson’s voters’ list were residents of a cemetery in Houston. He still became a Senator, and the “story” was dismissed comfortably after he began to repay his debts to his campaign supporters.

In this system, power seems to inevitably lead to innocence.

There are apparently two essential forms of election corruption, election fraud and voter suppression. In a magnificent attempt to add another “bumper sticker” to phrases such a “Fight them over there,” “They hate our freedom” and “Stay the course,” one of our most embarrassing “throw-back” states has sponsored a successful Supreme Court ruling requiring additional identification to vote. It is a law without a criminal. There are no more than a handful of cases of actual election fraud in the entire country. It is yet another blatant design to suppress voting, especially among the poor, the wrong colored and the elderly. You know, Democrats.

It has, however, provided public cover (distraction) for the greater crime of voter suppression. In the case of this crime, the criminals are surfacing everywhere. As is usually the case with such matters, no new law is required. It is the checkered application and enforcement of the existing law that has created such a festering problem.

The Supreme Court “Prize Lottery” of 2000 represents the most compelling case of outright criminal activity. That vote count had to be terminated “before it inflicted irreparable damage to George W. Bush” according to the Supreme Court ruling. Such outrageous partisan hubris could only be reasonably undertaken with the certainty that it would deliver power sufficient to protect the guilty. It worked.

The myriad of “lesser crimes” which delivered Ohio in 2004, although lacking the preposterous glamor of the Supreme Court case, still engineered the delivery of a similar, massive felony. It was the product of “caging,” inadequate numbers of voting machines in Democratic neighborhoods, misinformation campaigns and material miscounts by election officials. The result, although more “low rent” in its execution, was just as damaging.

The “expert” (intelligent design?) for these insults was Mr. Carl Rove. You know, the one who has refused to testify under a Congressional subpoena. The President quickly selected an Attorney General who publicly stated that he would never enforce such a subpoena (the legal equivalent of “treason” under the shared powers act). After the elimination of a few “troublesome” Federal Prosecutors, there was no one else left brave enough to pursue Constitutional Law. The immense cowardice of the House of Representatives’ “Gang of Fourteen,” aside from demonstrating typical Congressional willingness to do absolutely anything necessary to get reelected, cemented the deal during his nomination “hearing.”

Don’t forget your nose plug.

Here in New Mexico we can’t really lay claim to the same caliber of outrage. Our election meddling is more of the “trailer park” variety, but still smelly enough to place us squarely on the “second tier” of states with troubled election results. Being a predominantly Catholic culture, our voters subscribe to the essential “original sin” concept of politicians.

Our allegiance to the tradition of the old Spanish “patron” leads voters here to measure elected officials not by inspired leadership so much as by the size and frequency of “gifts” brought home by their alleged altruism and populist spirits. Republican prostitutes such as Heather Wilson are lauded for continually designing schemes which allow Congressional treasures to flow from positions of exalted power to the submissive, but loyal plebeians below who are willing to accept such behavior as “enough.”

Here, as is the prevailing case across the nation, election manipulations lack the brazen qualities of Ohio or the Supreme Court. In the high desert of New Mexico, vote management takes the form of complicated, yet petty, conspiracies to influence district and regional results imperceptibly, but still effectively, to deliver the desired product.

None of these stinky little affairs seems to amount to much compared to the huge, blatant gerrymandering of our neighboring state, Texas, under the careful husbandry of a Tom DeLay, a true Bush hero who managed to create five new Republican votes in Congress. He was no more than a failing bug exterminator before Carl Rove provided him the “training” to become Speaker of the House, but Rove (and DeLay) had the wisdom of the “fish wife.” They proved, through their complicity in such RNC projects, that great political power can be stolen a tiny bit at a time. Once stolen, it is just as tangible as something won honorably so long as all those ostensibly responsible to oversee such things are adequately paid off or threatened.

So, what’s the “hobby” idea?

It is roughly five months before we go to use those “entirely trustworthy” voting machines again. Beyond that, we can add that it is roughly five months before we once again place our adolescent, unquestioning confidence in the “entirely trustworthy” processes we count on for honest elections. But, hold on. We are ankle deep (or worse) in evidence that these “trustworthy” mechanisms have been subverted! Will we be “lemmings,” willingly marching right back into the same crooked elections like Pollyannas who still try to believe that everything is actually right on track?

If we do that, we will finally get what we deserve. “Fool me once, uh, fool me again?” So far, if we try really hard and we hold our tongue just right and it’s Tuesday, we can still claim that we didn’t deserve what we got last time. Perhaps such a position was marginally reasonable given the subterfuge of the recent past, but it grows a bit road weary as an excuse for our irresponsibility.

Are we satisfied simply with indulging ourselves to continue to complain? Are we really blessed with some sort of stoic acceptance of “That’s just the way things are.” “Get used to it.” “What did you expect?”

So, if we were to adopt this hobby, what could we do to change this mess to something better?

Plenty. Even if you are convinced that your state has none of these pesky little problems, you can campaign for greatly improved election law. It is a state matter which can reach right to Washington, D.C. Your state Secretary of State is “on the hook” to convince you that your elections will be fair, that is, that your state’s election laws and processes will be transparent and honest. That is the job of each state’s Secretary of State. The most important job.

Have you been settling for less?

The election laws in your state are created by your state legislature. This is why such ugly anomalies such as Texas, Florida, Louisiana and Ohio are possible. When the only law enforcement threatening these brassy neo-con election schemes is an unlikely “prosecution” at the hands of other brassy neo-cons in election commissions and courts, we shouldn’t expect much justice. We haven’t had much.

So, communicate. Tell your legislators that you want nice, fresh elections laws that will absolutely end these abuses. Make some noise. You can actually scare the hell out of them with this one.

Let them know that you are not going to tolerate any more hushed rumors of anecdotal election manipulation. Let them know that you are not going to be hypnotized by the results of elections at the cost of forgetting about serious questions about their execution.

Questions about invisible little rodents out in something or other county. Questions about when recounts are possible, necessary, reasonable. Questions about stinky little tricks that wind up disqualifying thousands of votes at just the right moment or at just the place to “reelect” some good ole’ boy who should be going to prison instead of the State House.

There is time to get this cleaned up pretty well before the next election in November. The folks running the country right now are convinced that we are stupid enough to elect Bob Dole President (Uh, no wait. It’s that other old guy.) and accept it as legal. We can’t count on the media to help us here. They own the media. We can’t count on the Supreme Court to help us here. They own the Supreme Court. We can’t count on the Congress to do anything honorable. We know better because we’ve seen them in action. (“Off the table. It doesn’t matter how bad it is, it’s off the table. Off the table. OFF THE TABLE, so shut up. We’re busy!”)

Are we too busy?