Cutting Deficits: Cleaning Up the Bush W. Bailout

Deficit Reduction: $70 Bn

Mechanism: Collect Past Due Accounts of Bailout Money

2012 Federal Deficit: $1.1 Tn 

[$1,100 Bn]

Ryan-Murray Deal Deficit Reduction

 $21 Bn

The "Gift That Keeps on Taking"

 The George W. Bush "Christmas"

Most Americans with whom MeanMesa visitors might be acquainted need very little "prodding" before expressing the lingering bad taste of the W.'s $1+ Tn dollar emergency bailout to the bankers in 2008.  Yes, it turns out that the thing was a scam.  The glistening surface of the scheme was dutifully painted with bright sugary icing as a desperate, immediate necessity, but, predictably, when it came to the monster's long term economic damage, "the devil was in the details."

Now, five years later, those "devilish details" have everything to do with paying back the money.  Surprisingly, beyond the very reasonable cynicism of the average American who "footed the bill" on the Bush bailout, a remarkable number of the recipients of TARP money [along with some additional funds from other bailout sources] have paid back their loans -- in a good number of cases with "profitable" increases.

One of the most informative sites for those interested in a detailed picture of "who has done what" with respect to the massive bailout can be found at ProPublica.  While the graphic at the right, shown here only as an example, is merely a screen shot of the Pro-Publica page, a visitor to the actual site will find a massive, interactive spread sheet which details every dollar of TARP money, its destination during the bailout and the current status of the account.

Pro-Publica Spread Sheet of all TARP Disbursements

and

Pro-Publica Site: Bailout Article

On the actual Pro-Publica page, you can click on the name of one of the bailout recipients, and the site will pop-up the entire account details of the amount provided, amount repaid or still owed, dividends paid and so on.  

MeanMesa selected JP Morgan from the list, popped up the account details and took a screen shot [in two pieces -- top and bottom].  When you make any selection from the list of bailout benefactors, you will get roughly the same analysis of that specific account.

The Bank Bailout

What exactly happened?

The banks on the Pro-Publica spread sheet were, at the time the financial system collapsed under its own weight, functioning in a "pre-Dodd-Frank" mode, that is, they were, again at that time, completely free to legally mix their high risk/high return gambles right in with their "regular bank" money which came from deposits, loan payments, mortgages and so on.

However, this post is not about the Dodd-Frank bill or the upcoming [April 2014] Volcker "addenda" which are both intended to rationally limit the damage from banks' irresponsible risk habits.  This post is all about what can be done with the lingering financial damage of the Bush W. bailouts.

It may be a suitable moment to review the basic "business model" of a bank.

Generally speaking, when a bank has money, it can make more money, and, quite predictably, most of the banks which received their share of the bailout's billions have, in fact, made money since then.  Yet, as we look down the list of bailed out banks, we see an impressive total of un-repaid bailout debt.  In fact, the Pro-Publica site spells out the "batting average" for the whole group of benefactors.

• 936  Recipients of bailout money
• $608B   Total disbursement
• $381B   Total returned
• $198B   Total revenues from dividends, interest, and other fees
• $-29.1B Total net to date

Further, the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 [Pro-Publica Report: Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008], designed to pull the federally guaranteed mortgage companies, Fannie May and Freddie Mac, back from their own Wall Street brink, moved another $187 Bn of US Treasury dollars onto the bailout "poker table." When the dust of the 2008 collapse cleared, these two lending institutions remain around $41 Bn in the red.

So, we can add the Fannie and Freddie remaining bailout debt to the uncollected total bill coming from the "regular" banks on the Pro-Publica list.

• $29 Bn  +  $41 Bn = $70 Bn

[A MeanMesa "calculative" note:  The commonly mentioned "damage" from the W.'s bailout is $800 Bn.  We see that the amount distributed to "regular" banks was $608 Bn, and when we add the $187 Bn handed over to Fannie and Freddie, we arrive at $795 Bn.]

It's hardly a mystery at this point.  MeanMesa thinks the Congress and the Treasury Department should collect -- preferably the entire $70 Bn -- but at least the $29 Bn still on the balance sheet and use it for deficit reduction.

The Congressional Politics of Bailout Debt Collection

Of course, there are plenty of other pressing uses for the money, but the owners of the Republican Party will already be screaming is we just go this far.  Freddie and Fannie need to be "repaired" or "replaced" with new institutions which are more stable. A reasonably effective Congress could do this.

The remainder of this debt -- the $29 Bn -- is now -- after five years -- officially "bad debt."  The Treasury Department needs to "own" the banks and corporations which still owe money.

The Treasury took our tax money and propped up the reckless businesses who had managed to slit their own throats during the Bush W.'s mad looting festival.  It's high time that we were made whole after the gang rape.  We of the "less than sparkly" 99% are still daily paying the price for the "missing money" with arcane "punishment tactics" such as phony austerity, management by one crisis after another, hungry children and frothy calls for war with Iran.

We pay that price every time the tea bag losers in the House of Representatives trot out their next horrifying "ogre de la dette colère" ["debt ogre tantrum"] just prior to continuing their toxic attack on every American without a lobbyist.  Yes, these were the same fools relentlessly chanting the "jobs, jobs, jobs" mantra while their Party was rigging the House elections in 2010, but now they are wailing forth only with their last, desperate, new tune "debt, debt, debt."

They borrowed and spent every dime that wasn't bolted down during the W.'s looting festival, and now, they find themselves without any idea of how to pay it back.  Naturally, we find them now "dans le carnaval," spinning incoherently as tragic "one trick ponies" with only News Corps.' Murdoch pulling the reins.

This, however, is without question the bloody political debris from their own past, and cogent American voters know that.  For precisely this reason demands by the surviving electorate that these bailout debts be collected have political traction.

Ideologically, that traction might possibly extend even to the more stable remnant of the Republican base, although the mainstream GOP dinosaurs such as Mitch McConnell and John Boehner will probably, as usual, not see the train coming.

Conclusions

And...the Herald of Coming Good

MeanMesa is just "Chuck Full" of snazzy ideas about ways to lower the deficit, cut spending and generally "straighten things out" with respect to the government and national economy.  The media has been spending millions while talking for hours to sell the idea that there is simply nothing to be done.  

Pig feathers.

There's plenty that can be done.  All we need is a Congress that works for someone else besides the oligarchs.

Watch this blog.

[A special note from MeanMesa:  Compliments to ProPublica for the impressive amount of hard work and good journalism in preparing and presenting the bailout facts and figures.  All of this would have been admirable under better conditions, but while we are "flying blind" without responsible media, it is sincerely appreciated.  Thanks.]

The Wisdom of Just Walking Away

Debt forgiveness. King Hammarapi receives divine law from God Samas. (image source)

The Gigantic Republican Bankster Debt Scam

There has been much talk about the gigantic debt and debt guarantee which lurks behind the financial calamity of the Great Republican Recession.  Some estimates range as high as  sixty times the planetary Gross Domestic Product.  The current planetary GDP is around $70 Tn US dollars.  Sixty times the planetary GDP is around $4,200 Tn.

For the mathematically challenged, $4,200 Tn is:

$4,200,000,000,000,000.

We can zip around some of the colossal economic wreckage as we attempt to convert this ridiculously high number into something more comprehensible.  The Bush autocracy's blind, unilateral, vicious banking de-regulation "released the Kraken" when it came to making us unwilling "national enablers" for the addict behavior of banking and brokerage thugs.

The present economic problems in the European Union can be traced directly back to the same feeding frenzy.  European governments in Greece, Ireland, Spain and Portugal jumped into the "high yield" promises of the mortgage securities market like drunken junkies diving into an Olympic pool full of cocaine.

We can pause for a moment to repeat one of MeanMesa's favorite quotes, the words of Vermont Independent, Senator Bernie Sanders:

"Not everyone had a hard time during the eight years of the Bush Administration.  The top 400 income earners in the country saw their net incomes INCREASE by $630 billion."

More assistance for the mathematically challenged:

The United States National Debt is around $14 Tn.

$630 Billion is around 5/8 of $1 Trillion.

As individuals, the average take of those among this crowd

 of 400 is roughly $1.5 Billion per each.

Money Lenders, Temple, Credit Default Swaps.  (image source)

The massive US debt is a well documented fact.  The even more massive monster lurking out of sight in the shadows just behind it may be a tiny bit more difficult to actually "touch with a finger," but it's there too.  However, we know where the debt came from; we just don't have much of an idea of exactly where it went.

One of MeanMesa's favorite graphics shows us the origin of around $6 to $8 Tn of it, although this is only the visible part of the thing.  Since the owners of the Republican Party obviously expect us to eagerly cut spending on most of the things we like the most -- while we keep paying taxes, of course -- it's clear that they believe that we owe someone this money.

Follow the red bars.  Add them up for a grisly total.  Ronald Reagan hit the "first trillion" not long into his disastrous fiscal policy.  Remember that "debt" means money borrowed.  These shills not only emptied our pockets, they emptied treasuries all around the word. Also remember that all that red ink began to not only accrue interest, but also inflate as we bumped our way down hill to where we are now.

Our country is now best characterized as the unlikely amalgam of good credit and bad debts.

So, What's This About "Walking Away?"

Audio Greatness - open in new tab: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB4WwPVEv8c

The main part of this incredible scam is founded on the idea that, as normal citizens of Earth, WE are the ones who owe this money.  Solving this disaster is really only complicated when the main part of that solution is about US paying back all this money. 

We didn't borrow this money.  We didn't spend this money.  Further, this money wasn't spent to purchase something for us.  Our part amounted to simply signing the note -- a commitment executed by the GOPCon looters who, at that time, controlled the government, and a commitment which we found ourselves powerless to avoid.

The $4,000 Trillion figure comes from totalling up the financial and banking doo-dads, many of them guarantees that our alleged creditors be "made whole" in the event of any defaults or other interruptions in the cash flowing into their bunkers.

Now that the steam organ is silent, the clowns are whimpering and the unregulated three ring banking circus is buried under its own flaming Big Top tent, those "interruptions" and "defaults" are swarming all around us -- thicker than gnats on a sweaty preacher who just saw his mistress arrive at the ice cream social.

Does this mean that the whole planet has to commit economic suicide so 10,000 human billionaires won't be "inconvenienced?"  This might have been the "very best, sweetest wet dream deal imaginable" to the lurch jaws in the Bush Crime Family, but it tastes rather sour to the rest of us.

In fact, extremely sour.

What can be done?  The "bondholders" will instantly trot out some nonsense or other from their King James Bibles if there is so much as a murmur of default, and Mr. FOX Murdoch, the Australian fascist and servant of the oligarchs -- each one of these same oligarchs horrified at the prospect that he might be the next ox to be gored -- would rush into action, declaring that none other than Jesus himself commanded that we hand all this loot over and hand it over right away, too.  

Not a problem.

It turns out that the ancient Pentateuch of the the old King James actually contains the instructions for handling a moment such as this one.  Suspecting that many of MeanMesa's visitors are not serious bible-readers, this following little passage -- apparently the words of Moses -- is included here for your convenience.

Deuteronomy 15:1-11

The Year for Cancelling Debts

15 At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts. 

² This is how it is to be done: Every creditor shall cancel any loan they have made to a fellow Israelite. They shall not require payment from anyone among their own people, because the Lord’s time for canceling debts has been proclaimed. 

³ You may require payment from a foreigner, but you must cancel any debt your fellow Israelite owes you. 

⁴ However, there need be no poor people among you, for in the land the Lord your God is giving you to possess as your inheritance, he will richly bless you, 

⁵ if only you fully obey the Lord your God and are careful to follow all these commands I am giving you today. 

⁶ For the Lord your God will bless you as he has promised, and you will lend to many nations but will borrow from none. You will rule over many nations but none will rule over you.

⁷ If anyone is poor among your fellow Israelites in any of the towns of the land the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hardhearted or tightfisted toward them. 

⁸ Rather, be openhanded and freely lend them whatever they need.  

⁹ Be careful not to harbor this wicked thought: “The seventh year, the year for canceling debts, is near,” so that you do not show ill will toward the needy among your fellow Israelites and give them nothing. They may then appeal to the Lord against you, and you will be found guilty of sin.

¹⁰ Give generously to them and do so without a grudging heart; then because of this the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in everything you put your hand to.  

¹¹ There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land.

Go ahead and make a "Deuteronomy and Sausage sandwich" for your favorite oligarchs.  They can have a snack while the rest of us "walk away" from their monumental mischief.  Tell them sternly that we don't intend to ever let them do this again.

Heather Wilson For Senate? Right.

Speeches We'd Like to Hear - Obama on the Deficit

Of course, any blog as megomaniacal as MeanMesa entertains fleeting fantasies of our President "lowering the boom" on his prevaricating detractors.  However, reality is what it is, and our President is not an inflammatory, finger pointing imbecile.  

The citizens of the country have been edged into a neurotic state of expecting more of the autocrat's three syllable "hate phrases," and the far more genteel Obama seems unsettling secure -- and mature -- by comparison, not to mention literate.

Still, there remains the fantasy.  Wouldn't it be nice to "put words in his mouth?"

The most recent flood of lies and misrepresentation of fact deals with the deficit.  As the President's approval rating dips to the 50% range, we have to conclude that the relentless barrage of fear mongering and sleazy incitation is inflicting is damage.  However unpalatable to the Commander in Chief, the consequences of this latest, cynical manipulation of uninformed voters is approaching the gravity of a national security threat.

It is time for Barack Obama to become the "teacher."  In this case, the class subject must be the deficit.

"Greetings my fellow Americans,

This evening I can no longer 'mince words' about a serious threat which is confronting our nation.  Although my political advisers warned me in strongest terms not to introduce 'charts and graphs' in this message, I find it necessary to be completely frank and open about certain facts.  Those same advisers counseled me to avoid what might seem political references to past administrations.  Regrettably, I also find it necessary to break my own rule in this respect.

I have no interest in using this opportunity to make political advantages.  However, we have no choice at this point but to face facts, and some of those facts have names associated with them.


Recent days have seen great efforts being made to confuse or misrepresent the information I intend to present tonight.  In the Congress my Republican colleagues have attempted to color the facts concerning our deficit and the resulting national debt into a political advantage for themselves.


Perhaps my talk tonight will help make these sometimes complicated matters clear.  Make no mistake.  The economy of our country is my responsibility.  That happened when I took the oath of my office.  However, as Americans we are all in this together.


For this reason and because a growing misunderstanding of the difficulties we face as a nation has begun to cloud our best common sense as a people, this speech tonight is reserved for this single topic.


Now to the charts.  I ask that every one of you give me the following few minutes to go over the facts about our deficit and our national debt.

 (Image source - MeanMesa)

The first chart shows the annual deficits our government has incurred since 1975.  Each year is shown, red bars representing the years of Republican administrations and blue bars the years of Democratic administrations.  To make this even more clear, the names of the respective Presidents are shown above the bars.


The scale on the left is marked in 'Billions of Dollars.'  The actual deficits for each year, in billions of dollars, is marked above each bar for each year.


We can see that the Federal Budget of this country has operated at a deficit for the entire span of the years on the graph.  We have continually spent more money than we have received in taxes.


Each of these annual budget deficits gets added to make the total of our national debt.  We, as a nation, find ourselves borrowing the money required to 'service' this debt.  Some of the borrowing is from citizens in the United States, but much of it is borrowed from other countries.  The interest we pay on this borrowed money is immense, getting higher and higher every year.


That interest cost is now so high that it is beginning to harm our national economy.  Our national debt has grown so large that it is becoming more difficult to borrow more money.


As we look over this first chart -- by the way, there are only two of them -- we see that some of the loudest voices in the Senate and the House of Representatives who are now attacking this administration on the deficit of our budget were voting in favor of the exact spending which sky rocketed our debt.


My Republican colleagues have voted lock step against every piece of legislation we have introduced to 'bend the curve' on this deficit and debt problem.  They recently voted against an extension of unemployment payments.  They voted against childrens' health care, against regulations for banks and Wall Street, against mortgage foreclosure assistance and against plans to spur jobs growth.


In every one of these cases, their complaint was that such legislation would increase the deficit.  Yet, when we look at this chart, we have to think that such a position is a new one for them.  These same Congressman and Senators voted for more deficit with every Republican administration since Ronald Reagan, the first American President to preside over a $1 Trillion dollar debt.

(Image source - MeanMesa)

Now, I really have some explaining to do.  This year, my budget showed a $1 Trillion deficit -- roughly twice as high as the last year of the previous administration.  Why am I sitting here saying these things about past deficits when my own record is even worse?  Why were we spending money at that rate?

I added the actual cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to my budget.  They had always been 'emergency supplemental' bills before. 

The answer is in my first chart.  As the national debt sky rocketed, especially in the last few years before I became President, our economy began to feel the heat.  Unemployment shot up out of control during the last seven months before I took office.  The economic downturn of the recession and other regulatory problems reduced the entire national wealth of the United States by roughly one third.

Everyone with a 401K plan or a house which has lost value knows that first hand.  The value of the stock in your retirement accounts went down.

As our economy contracted, the revenue the government receives from taxes also went down sharply.

My advisers told me two important things, and it turns out that they were right on both counts.  First, we needed to spend money to get cash back into our economy and create jobs.  We did that with the American Recovery Act, and that part of their plan is working out fairly well.

However, the second thing they told me was that just as soon as we emerge from this recession, it would be time to cut the deficit, and not just a little tweeking here and there.  I intend to do that.

The news from Europe is about austerity programs designed to drastically cut budgets there.  We face many of the same type of cuts.  We already see teachers, policemen and fire fighters giving salary reductions or being laid off in communities which simply can no longer afford the policies they had previously.

We will likely see more.  Our economy is larger and healthier than those European cases, but some of the same kinds of austerity will be necessary here.  These changes will be painful, but they are unavoidable.  When such sacrifices are necessary for all of us, each American must understand clearly what has caused this and what we must do to correct it.

Tonight, I am asking all my fellow Americans to stay with me. We, as a nation, will get through this so long as we remain clear-headed and  keep our American common sense.  My administration is doing everything we can to make this work.  I am counting on Americans to get through this with me.

Thank you, and God Bless America."

MeanMesa's compliments to the President.

The Details of the Stimulus "Failure"

MeanMesa received the following note from David Plouffe (pronounced "pl aof "), recently the head of President Obama's campaign team.  He has now moved to a much more effective position working for the progressive candidates in the 2010 mid-term elections.  The following letter was sent by the OFA.  MeanMesa thought visitors not on the OFA mailing list might like to take a look at it.

By the way, why aren't MeanMesa visitors on the OFA mailing list?

The letter:  

Chad --

Wondering what the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act -- President Obama's stimulus bill -- has accomplished? Look at this:

(A note from MeanMesa -- you really have to click on this baby to see the whole thing!)

One year ago tomorrow, after tens of thousands of you shared stories and called your representatives, the President signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

And while this anniversary isn't a cause for celebration, there is reason to be optimistic. This chart makes it clear: We're on the road to recovery.

Still, we know there is a long way to go. Many Americans are still struggling, and creating jobs remains President Obama's top priority.

Click here to learn more about the President's record on the economy, what we're doing to put more Americans back to work, and get easy-to-share information you can pass on to friends and family:

http://my.barackobama.com/Recovery

Thanks for making change happen,

David Plouffe

At this point, we will refresh all the eager bar chart viewers with bar chart from a previous MeanMesa post.  Yes, another bar chart.

This chart, of course, deals with the money totals of the national debt.  If one wishes, this can be inverted, then compared to the OFA "Jobs" chart.  During the W's autocracy, not only was the treasury being looted by the neo-cons (Yup, the same ones who are now bitching about deficits... Most of the Republicans now doing all the whining were like  mindless zombies, very busy voting "yes" on all that debt.) but, predictably, job losses unavoidably followed.  On the OFA "Jobs" chart, the autocrat's interest in doing anything for "Main Street" -- like trying to stop the plummeting employment numbers -- were entirely neglected.

"Durn, is et ever hard t' fahnd tahm fer stuff lahk thet when thur's, ya' know, lootin' to be done!"

To update the "looting" report, two very snakey Senators, Max Baucus (D[?]- Montana) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) groomed what was presented as a "bi-partisan" jobs bill in the Senate.  Now, MeanMesa can remind all visitors -- as evidenced in the first chart above -- Republicans are allergic to actual jobs bills dues to a tragic genetic defect.  Senator Baucus, infamous for heading the Finance Committee which produced the Senate Health Care Bill (also known as the Senate Wealth Care Bill for health insurance corporations...) reached across the aisle to birth this thing.

Naturally, to make the thing a little more "palatable" to the looters, certain, well, uh, pork had to be added.  The exact recipe called for 10% of the bill's cost to be TOTALLY DEDICATED to job creation and 90% to be either out right pork or a tasty Senate pork flavored substitute ingredient available only at the room temperature "day old counter" of WalMart.

The Senate:  Where dreams go to die.

The looting was so outrageous that, although Senator Reid would have eagerly agreed to contributing to a testicle implant program to get a bi-partisan anything through the paralyzed Senate, he killed it, saying that it would be simply too embarrassing to let it pass.

Thank you, Republicans.  All of us here, staggering under the economic train wreck you left when you were through last time, realize that your politics trumps our need for food on the table.  Egad! What were we thinking?

 

A Visitor to MeanMesa! Enjoy!

A quick note of introduction from MeanMesa: The following is an absolutely delightful comment posted on Thom Hartmann's web by my respected friend "antifascist." That avatar is highly suitable once one gets to know him. He provides a link to the website of the material's initial origin and its author.

It is included here because it is simply too thought provoking to just abandon, leaving it where I encountered it.

“Facts Are Stupid Things” (http://badattitudes.com/MT/archives/2009/02/facts_are_stupi.html)
badattitudes.com
February 21, 2009

The title above is a quote from Ronald Reagan at the 1988 Republican National Convention. He was trying to access a John Adams quote, “Facts are stubborn things,” but something more appropriate to the man and the occasion popped out.

The essay below is from my neighbor Jim, more of whose stuff can be seen here (at the site in the link).

Compare and contrast:

1980 may seem kind of arbitrary as the jump off for the end of empire, but the economics bear it out. Under Reagan, government disbursements and revenues, as a share of GDP, jumped a full six percentage points. More, if you include his unfunded moral hygiene mandates.

All the Republicans talked Rand, Friedman, inter alia, but they acted like straightforward right wing military Keynesians. Military Keynesianism is of course nothing new in the US. But prior to 1980 there was a dominant Bismarckian consensus (have I dropped enough names yet?) that it had to be matched by social spending, otherwise the exercise of hard power would eventually become financially unsustainable.

You cannot extract surplus value — i.e. have capitalism — in great heaping bushel baskets unless you have a government willing to exercise single payer monopsony power over basic human needs, basic scientific research and renewable sources of the energy needed to drive all this. Lo and behold, the exercise of hard power is now done on credit, with only the threat of mutually assured destruction holding our creditors at bay.

I suppose one could point to a cultural shift in the eighties, as there certainly was one, but I prefer a bit more systemic determinism.

The political economy of capitalism is easiest to manage through psychological terrorism. It’s a cheap and effective way of outsourcing the quotidian enforcement of corporate feudalism to vigilante moral panic artists. There’s no shortage of people willing to enforce for free. Hell, they’ll even pay for the dubious privilege.

People become inured to this, querulous and rebellious, and the terrorism has to be stepped up. Red scares have to be coupled with ethnic scares, drug scares, satanic child care scares and so forth. Going against that, as Carter did in an achingly minuscule way, is a positive step for capitalism and a negative step for capitalists. Their enforcement costs look to climb. People who aren’t constantly depressed and frightened get a little feisty.

Under Reagan, the “clever” work-around was burgeoning unfunded mandates to make the states take on domestic psychological terrorism, and yanking the social safety net away, while the central government threw surplus value to the cretinous capitalists, hand over fist. It’s been down hill ever since.

I can’t see why anyone would want to be president after Bush. It’s not a sane thing to do. I thought, and still think, that the Democrats would have been better off throwing the election. McCain would probably not have lasted four years and right wing military Keynesianism would have been discredited for a good long time. Getting stuck with cradling the appalling, ghoulish offspring that are roving mindlessly over a dying empire would have ruined him, and the most cretinous of the cretinous capitalists.

The Democrats could have trotted out old social democratic wine in new bottles and enjoyed thirty or forty years of crowing from the top of the DC shit hill. So it goes, I guess. And my goodness, doesn’t Carter look like a saint in comparison to every asshole that’s come since.

Pretending It’s Just More Politics

Cut the drama already! It's just another election.
Right? So, chill. Everything will be back to the way it was in no time.70

Here, in America, we love our politics. We take great pains to say we don't, but we do. These athletic contests we hold periodically allow those of us with an appetite for any channel of respect and superiority to proffer up “the right answer according to me,” along with every manner of dramatic persuasion. It seems that we have an unending ambition to have been the ones with insight or perception remarkable enough to either prognosticate our future dilemmas or offer up spectacular solutions which testify to all who watch of our remarkable savvy or, perhaps, even our startling genetic, intellectual prowess.

We also have an indulgent taste for predicting exaggerated dire adversaries and other threats.

We comfortably perceive our politics as an indulgence directed at “better” or “worse” answers. After all, in the past even our worst decisions have been survivable. So far in our entire national history we’ve sought out every answer by dissecting the more acceptable alternative topics not included in the “burning question of the day.” To date we’ve never paid too great a price for our foolishness or naiveté. We’ve never been successfully invaded, conquered, attacked or damaged -- nationally -- so gravely that we could not endure and recover.

Having never been laid that low, our pretense about politics continually provided the narcotic implication that we dealt with every challenge from a position of strength, that is, strength sufficiently great that we would inevitably emerge to correct our errors. Living in that unlikely fantasy, we encountered no events so troubling that we couldn’t disregard them in favor of debating nuances of our national reality as if they were the substance of everything.

Some of our population saw the contest between the extremely old and the frighteningly new in the last election in just this superficial manner. All the banter seemed quite comfortably moribund, couched in no more than another set of traditionally indulgent details to be chewed as fat by fish wives whose entire universe extended only to the last tents in the market square. We moan and reassure ourselves about our skeptical superiority, romantically akin to desperately swimming to the nearest lifeboat -- or any accessible flotsam -- after a sudden and disastrous capsize, then, once again, devolving into endless arguments of inane ideology before scrambling on board.

The United States is not smoothly dipping through another period of “corrections” for some trivial miscalculation, anticipating a few weeks or months of being denied a few normally available prerogatives. Our descent is suspiciously steeper than that, and deeper. We are apparently dumbfounded at the full scope of the damage now that it is revealed in a more rational light.

We have been, perhaps, mortally injured. We may not survive the damage we’ve suffered. The stakes are that severe.

It seems that not a single tool of our national sustenance remains in tact after the last outrageous subversion. We face the possibility that neither our military, our economy, our Constitution nor our spirit has survived in a form strong enough to hold us together while we frantically rebuild what we have left. The final looting of the treasury might be the bright spot. It suggests that the thieves believe the currency will have value again someday.

Of course there’s still the currency exchange.

Obama might be a solution to this national hemorrhage, or he might be just a hopeful triage or, at least, a soothing first aid placebo able only to comfort us for our final denouement. His election may have harnessed a horse which can pull us through this Bush crisis or maybe offer only a lessor promise, that is, a delay and a respite until its final, inevitable outcome.

A few matters are becoming more clear. Yes, we were stunned at the $700 billion cash affair. Those of us who paid just a little more attention to the news now know that the total is actually approaching $8 trillion and that the credit swaps and other doodad parasites imposed on our economy amount to more than $500 trillion.

By the way, that last figure is more money than there is in the world.

We are led to believe that we dare not simply stop, but that we still need to pay it back. Otherwise, those folks who managed to take it will return and scare us even more.

We are led to believe that it was something ugly that “just happened,” that is, “just happened” like a sudden rain storm or a flood. We are led to believe that those who profited so much cannot really be expected to repay the larceny extracted during their schemes. We are led to believe that the same thing would have happened no matter who was in charge of the country. We are even led to believe that the whole business actually has very little to do with us, that it is a problem inhabited by pain and recovery only for the stratospheric elite.

There is a storm coming.

Remember the endless discussion during the most violent period of the Iraq invasion? "Gosh, is it a civil war or not?" The new version addresses whether or not it is a recession, or, even a depression, as if anyone walking on the earth here could still wonder. We may need a new, even more depressing term to describe what awaits us.

The current job loss figure is around 15,000 per day. The value of trillions of dollars worth of retirement investments is around 40% of what it was a year ago. The individual tax burden of Washington’s most recent largess amounts to around $140,000 for every taxpayer. The ninnies of the far right still explode with fractured indignity at the prospect of talking to the enemies they’ve made for us.

Just another election?

Just another correction?

Imagine holding the 23rd century history book which accounts the story of the world. Perhaps, mid way through there is a chapter describing the period of the democracies, two or three centuries around the second millennium. Place the story of the events of the last eight years toward the end of that chapter.

Now, for the “politics as usual” crowd of cynics, try to ignore it. Convince us that it amounts to no more than a wild, silly exaggeration. Just another election.

So, how are the levees? It's Pearl Harbor Day.

Fill in the holes. Exactly what could this turn into? This is an account of a similar situation as it developed in Argentina (you know, that country in South America where the ruling class were crooks):
http://seekingalpha.com/article/111315-america-s-economic-collapse-how-bad-will-it-get

The Collapsing American “Sphere of Influence.”

Pretending Everything Ugly Is Actually Only Temporary 67

A few words of a CNN, sub-editorial news report called for more attention. Among the now well worn list of the new President’s priorities was the inclusion of Chinese and Russian Federation diplomatic and economic entries into the Caribbean and South American countries of Cuba and Venezuela. You know, countries which we are supposed to “own” under the Monroe Doctrine.

The CNN report characterized these incursions as challenges to American leadership. If they weren’t challenges would that mean that we were either so strong or so threatening that we might have avoided them?

Are these incursions challenging our hegemony? Was our idea of a good time to never have any of these subservient Southern nations even so much as flirt with our ideological, international competitors?

Please.

We are quite possibly more bankrupt than industrious China or petroleum rich Russia. Any traditional military advantage is now “on the table” with the Russians, that is, no, they can’t take us, but, yes, they can project power pretty convincingly now that George Bush has so savagely consumed our own military pursuing his “oil war” in a devastating leadership vacuum and our infuriated alliances with his cheap, irritating ideology.

We won’t recover from that damage any time soon. We should probably try to get a little more comfortable with photos of the Chinese Premier visiting Fidel Castro or Russian war ships lazing off the coast of Venezuela.

Bush’s childish “cat fight” over his empty scheme for U.S. missiles in Poland reveals a whining, toothless, embarrassing, over weight giant, not a respected leader of the Free World.

We have a new President, but he, and we, still have a terrible reputation. Our toxic debt has fairly thoroughly poisoned the water world wide. We can ponder a graceful approach to our collapsing sphere of influence while we pay down Bush’s ten trillion dollar balance for the next few decades.

What exactly did we buy, again?

Earmarks and Ear Rings

How to strike a deal with a prostitute.
How to look beyond the insult of the ear marks to the real injuries of the budget. 53

At election time we are usually bombarded with promises to relieve the burden of earmarks. It is a promise made by the man who is not “behind the curtain.”

There are indeed two great currents of our money flowing through the process in Washington. Like a tsunami, there is a small wave traveling along the surface where we can see it, but there is an immense movement below the surface, finally materializing as it ultimately inundates our coastal cities. Concerning the matter of earmarks, the situation is the same. They are little more than insulting distractions, mosquito bites on the tail end of a bull.

A short note on the meaning of term may be in order. In the old days, that is, in the days when people read books, the corner of a page might be turned to assist the reader in returning to some specific material of special interest. Translated to the hundreds of pages of a typical issue of legislation, earmarks , at least in concept, serve the same purpose. Whatever the original focus of the bill in question, earmarks typically appear in some convenient, rarely read section, thus, the name.

To the originator of the earmark, however, a convenient means to locate his “little jewel” among the great body of “other stuff” in his bill, might include folding the corner of the page containing his earmark in his copy.

The exact nature of the earmark, that is, its nature with respect to more normal and transparent congressional decisions, is interesting. The usual process of allocating our tax money through the representative process of our Congress refers, somewhere, to a kind of general (majority) agreement as to the legitimacy of the proposal. In the optimistic idealism of our Constitution, a bill is written proposing an expenditure on a certain project, the Congressional Representatives all read it, argue about it, and perhaps negotiate compromises between differing views of it and, finally, pass it.

The life story of an earmark is somewhat different. Whatever project is proposed in an earmark typically reveals certain other character traits. It is something which will assist its author’s reelection. It is usually presented as something not really meriting the attention of the entire Congress in the sense that more central legislation might. Perhaps the goal of the earmark is presented as a matter of too small a fiscal significance to “tie things up.” More commonly, the benefactors of the earmark are seeking some advantage not particularly appetizing to the taste of the full House, hence the wide variety of the things -- from short expensive bridges to doughnut museums.

One might think that such highly exclusive interests would fail to garner Congressional votes, and if so, one would be partially correct. Happily, at least for the successful ear markers, this dismal possibility is mitigated by other rather arcane traditions in the Congress. Yes, although the bridge earmarked by one voice will hardly serve to interests of a constituency a thousand miles away, there remains the prospect of “mutual back scratching.” Supporting, or at least , failing to oppose, that distant pork will inevitably arise again later as a promise by its sponsor to support something much closer to home, say, so close as to be in one’s very own Congressional district. In that case, a bridge -- no matter how exclusive its benefit -- can often be converted directly into votes in a reelection campaign.

Occasionally, earmarks really do actually serve the interests of the country in some redeeming way. Usually however, this happy exception is little more than a passing dream in a windstorm. Perhaps Mullah Nassr Edin’s political axiom that “all political possibilities can also be political liabilities if they appear at cocktail parties without their lipstick” may be applied just here.

Patience, please. We’re getting to the prostitute part. A tedious context must be presented for my readers who have lives beyond obsessive political wonkerism.

We may need to ask, “What political purposes are served by ranting and railing about earmarks?”

First things first, be advised that all the earmarks (including $350,000,000 for Sara’s on-again off-again “bridge to nowhere”) in aggregate comprise no more than a “gnat’s sneeze” when compared to the massive flow of our money through the Congressional budget process. For example, we allocate around $400,000,000,000 (four hundred billion compared to $350,000,000 -- three hundred fifty million) annually for the visible elements of our defense expenditures.

Obviously, constructive efforts to maximize the effectiveness of the much larger amount would represent a laudable legislative effort on the part of a Senator. Yet, we find him repeatedly hawking one complaint after another about the smaller amount. Earmarks enjoy the unlikely advantage of being “insulting” to voters and taxpayers far away from the bridge. In fact, at least to voters and taxpayers, earmarks can be made far more “insulting” than a couple of “whoops, we missed that one” moments revealed in the review of the incredibly more massive defense allocation, for example. The "insult" is personal! After all, most of those tax payers will never have a chance to drive across that bridge.

Finally, to the matter of the prostitute. Let us imagine a sexually repressed evangelical in a distant city to attend a meeting of, say, a Sunday School Budget Convention. It is the evening after a long day of conferencing. He finds himself in the absolutely worst part of town, piloting his rented car along dark dismal streets lined with, shall we say, “women of the night.”

There they are. Lined up one after another, each competing for his attention. We arrive at the focal question. Will he select his secret evening company based on her ear rings?

Our evangelical might glance at those baubles for an instant, but his more energetic attention will quickly migrate to other features, you know, matters of a more substantial interest.

In our tortured analogy, of course, the ear rings represent the earmarks. But what do those “other matters” represent? The invitation offered to voters by the Senator’s flammable campaign diatribe about earmarks is an invitation to be transfixed on the ear rings, ignoring all the other considerations. Once again, he will say “Those bastards over in Fartandbolt County have a fine new bridge paid for by your tax dollars! Every cent interloped from the General Fund by that crooked Senator of theirs!”

It is, perhaps, a message made all the more poignant when considered in the sight of your own delapidated bridge, that is, the one right here in Boltandfart County. The ambition of this Senator, populist hero that he is -- or claims to be, is to distract us from the fact that the defense allocation contains five hundred “whoops!” items, each with a taxpayer cost ten thousand times larger than the entire cost to replace both bridges. And, that would not be the cost of replacing them with hard bid contracts, either. That would be the cost of replacing them with “brother-in-law,” no-bid babies of the worst variety! (“We simply had to buy a fleet of Bentley convertibles to pull the gravel trailers!”)

So, we have made a comparison between the bridge costs and the Congressional budget’s defense allocation. So what? Defense spending, often, but not always, at least results in something tangible (the Osprey? As in: "It's an Osprey! Don't stand under it when it 'flies' over!") which can appear on a video. The unseen killer traveling below the tsunami’s modest surface wave is comprised of far “stinkier” matters than a wasteful defense budget. In this sense, we once again descend with the evangelical’s eyes as he sizes up those now infamous "other matters" in the process of selecting his prostitute.

Yes, we can be insulted by Fartandbolt’s good fortune at our expense, but that new bridge is little more than a “slap on the cheek” when we consider the "other matters." If that new bridge in the next county is a “slap,” there are other budget drains more akin to having a vampire inserting a permanent blood capture needle in one’s artery. The campaigning Senator works diligently to keep our attention on the slap and off the needle.

Do we really want to conduct our electoral responsibilities based on an ear ring?

What exactly are these vampires extracting from us? In a land with wealth so great that we hardly notice the needle, that is, where we seem to perpetually enjoy the ridiculously false luxury of considering only the ear ring, we can be deceived by immensely over priced “elephants” (not a Freudian slip, usually...) which seem to provide at least a “little something” for a price so outrageous that it would never bear the bright illumination of a sunny day. Examples? Of course.

The pharmaceutical bill written for us by drug company lobbyists is the polar opposite of any imaginable bargain it might promise for the price. Yes, we have a nice discount on our medicine, but the price is unfathomable. Predictably, every economizing advantage is, essentially, illegal. What a coincidence!

The "deregulation of everything" seemed to be a means to eliminate inefficient and over priced government controls. Instead of the promised reduction in our costs for everything from electricity to mortgage loans, we have wound up suffering through the total exploitative vaporization of Enron and the taxpayer bail out of Bear Stearns.

The destruction of unions, for example the air traffic controllers union, was touted as a way to really save some bucks. Now we spend money at an incredibly increased rate to compensate for labor shortages. The workers remaining are fighting to perform their life saving tasks with equipment which belongs in a land fill. The airlines, far from being able to fulfill their promise to pass such savings on to us as consumers, are now raising fares weekly amid a customer population stranded in planes unable to take off where even a bag of peanuts is now offered at a price.

No-bid military contractors performing theoretically necessary tasks of all sorts at costs beyond measure (one bottle of drinking water in Iraq: $8.80?) were proposed as a means to lower the price of war-fighting. Halliburton is no petty crook. Its corporate extraction of tax money will reach toward one half trillion dollars before we finish in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that incredible amount of compensation will be for what we taxpayers might generously consider a few billion dollars worth of honest work.

If current matters are too troubling, reach back in history. The famous Keating Five bail out money is quite possibly still financing some small part of McCain’s campaign or, at least, some of his houses. Enron’s carefully engineered brown out in California, that is, the one which suddenly required out-of-state generated power to be imported at eight times the cost of the local stuff, was not “chump change.”

These are not simple cases of building a bridge for someone else. These are major withdrawals of major amounts of our economic blood. They have been carefully crafted by the most exploitative Congressmen and Senators, executed not as earmarks but as central legislation and protected by the absolute perfidy of other legislative, judicial and executive branch crooks and criminals (Those would be the “hard working” politicians who are now retired into $50 million dollar homes somewhere nice.) who were supposedly responsible for “checks and balances.”

Once these “blood sucking” programs are in place, they can last for decades, every day promoting dynastic fortunes resourced by our tax money. (For example, California is still suffering under the burden of the desperate contracts it got railroaded into to turn the lights back on. This even after the alleged death of Enron!)

So, no matter how appealing it may be to just gaze at the ear rings, keep track of the more important stuff, too. Don’t let them lead you down the path of simply responding to insults about someone else’s bridge while they slip the needle into your artery for a permanent blood draw!

They won’t quit just because you have been manipulated to deliver another election to them. Like the prostitute. They see themselves as the gift that just keeps on giving.

Only after they win their election will they notice that you've pulled out their needle!

Inspector General? Here?

Dreaming of an even bigger government

or

spending our tax money for something we actually need? 54

This election has turned the phrase “Changing Washington” into little more than a mechanical chorus. What exactly are these people talking about when they promise something like that? The more scurrilous of the politicians pound the table, threateningly, warning the “big money boys” in D.C. that “change is coming.” Although a majority of Americans feel strongly that a good number of these leeches belong in a cell right next to Abramhoff or DeLay, we may have to accept the idea that “changes” for these lobbyists and influence peddlers will probably not amount to much more than adjusting a few numbers in their seven digit “take.”

As an ardent Obama supporter, I would love to look my readers in the eye and honestly claim the prospect of a perfect difference, a perfect “change.” That would be fool hardy. We have plenty of Democrats in the Congress who haven’t even so much as lied about wanting a Washington with less corruption since they left their high school civics class.

Shooting a rubber band at a single cock roach might be effective and gratifying, but it hardly represents a serious approach to permanently eliminating the pests from your home.

Among the citizens, cynicism runs rampant. Most of them believe that we can never regain control of our country -- spelled tax dollars -- from these pandering, criminal opportunists. “K Street” has managed to castrate “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue” more effectively than the British did in 1812. Its domination of the Congress, both the House and the Senate, has no particular historical precursor. That relatively recent strategic victory for the special interests is more akin to a gay child S and M porn film.

The cynics are definitely right on one count. These high class crooks have abundantly shown that they own any part of the government which can serve them.

Enough ranting. What about a bigger government? That hardly seems like a solution to much of what is vexing us! Egads, shades of Reagan!

Well, that gloomy appraisal might be true. It depends on two questions. First, how, exactly, do we see the correct management of our national descent from a rich superpower to whatever it is we seem destined to become? Second, will we, as citizens, even dare to have the optimism to think we can still create an effective part of our government that will actually function?

What are we talking about here? What new part of government do we need to consider?

Tempting the possibility of my being, righteously, called an elitist, I direct your thoughts to a play by the old French author, Mr. Moliere. The title of the play is “The Inspector General.” It is a period comedy with a fine plot not particularly relevant right here. However, it does have a very relevant context. The basic theme of the play is about an Inspector General, authorized by the King, with the responsibility of inspecting everything all across the country, that is, roads, schools, hospitals, tax collections and essentially anywhere else that the King’s money (The King thought, in those days, that all tax revenues were HIS money. How antiquated compared to our representative form of government!) had any part in financing.

The relevance is clear for the following reason. The horrible looting which is our curse at the present moment has, as its central mechanism, fundamental deceptions with regard to issues such as cost, waste, value and effectivity. We pay monumental amounts of our tax money for things with names which suggest one thing only to get the leftover scraps of something quite completely different, utterly useless to us, after these “K Street” lobbyists have gorged themselves and their host corporations on all the sweetest meat, the freshest fruit and the finest wine in our federal expenditures.

These parasites have mastered every odious technique required to keep us confused about the actual facts concerning these undertakings of theirs. The consequences of this redistribution (a favorite word of their corporate benefactors condemning our resistance to their grotesque and growing wealth...) have grown so large as to represent a threat to national security, that is, a clear and present danger. We have become unable to squeeze enough of our tax resources through the prevailing process in Washington to accomplish things we urgently need (and should, in a more perfect world, be easily able to afford), such as school building repairs, bridges, roads, dams, hospitals and the like.

Interestingly enough, pretty much the exact things that the old French King’s Inspector General was inspecting in his ancient mission!

If our proposed addition to the size of government is to be able to confront and correct this criminal looting, it will first have to elude the inevitable sabotage which routinely perverts any actual democratic proposals from emerging from Congress alive and breathing, that is, functional in a way still consistent with some small remnant of the high ambitions of their origins.

It is no secret that the Republican strangle hold on Congress has, as its greatest ambition, the goal of proving that government will not work. Assisting these knuckle-dragging neo-cons is a convincing crowd of other half-witted reactionaries including, to our great embarrassment, more than a few fully tenured Democratic fixtures in the House and Senate. These “patriots” with such a vicious penchant to redirect honest tax money to their very close friends will clearly do anything (yes, anything...) to get the funds they need to be reelected. Their Congressional jobs are simply too profitable, we are told, to ever expect anything else from them! We regretfully embrace this dismal expectation. These “public servants” have obviously woven positions for themselves with wages so great as to unavoidably create a depressing, self-fulfilling prophecy of outrage and pilfering.

Oh yes, these bottom feeders may drink sparingly of the vast cash river rolling through Washington, just an imperceivable nip here and there when we aren’t watching, but they take enough to undercut our every ambition as taxpayers and citizens.

Can we envision a solution? Yes, we can. (!?!)

Consider the following proposal for a modern day equivalent to that old Inspector General in Moliere’s comedy. No, quite aside from mass lynchings, resurrected guillotines or straightforward wild west style American mob justice, we find these adversaries far too powerful and well entrenched for a head-on approach. Believe me, they enjoy a carefully constructed protective blanket constantly refreshed by their associates in places of great power.

First, the necessity of doing something. As Americans we face a very difficult decade of slowly recovering from the great looting ($10,000,000,000,000) successfully extracted from us by the Bush Government. We can fall blindly into our inevitable role as the weak, bad creditor, pathetically begging our lenders for just a little compassion over and over as we are repeatedly unable to repay, or we can dust off our famous national ability to successfully respond to our precarious position. That latter course will require that we seriously stop wasting money and begin to retire our debt. That is the “happy” story through which we will be able to stand on our own two feet within a mere decade. The “unhappy” version includes stories which either assume a much longer period or plots where we never again stand on those feet of ours.

Naturally, we will have to “make do” with a much cheaper military. Our lenders will, sooner or later, require that of us to free up the money we owe them. Perhaps spending only half of the combined allocation of the rest of the world will be sufficient. We will have to take steps to greatly improve the efficiency of our foreign policy expenditures, eliminating the looters who cling like vampire bats to every act of national altruism. On the other hand, acting reasonably internationally is far more cost effective as an avenue to national security than all those ridiculous and expensive Cold War weapons systems (the X44 Galactic Death Ray? just what we need in Baghdad or Basra...).

The reconstruction of our infrastructure, long a well worn threat to incite our fear during campaigns, will arrive at our door in a far more concrete style, you know, the sort of thing that comes with monthly bills. Big ones. Our government programs will be stripped of our present indulgent excesses either by our new high born ideals or the rather less glorious insistence of those who hold our loans. After all, we can hardly deny that we did, in fact, sign those notes George Bush kept rushing out to the Chinese or the Saudis for more borrowed money.

In the words of that great military genius, Donald Rumsfeld, “Sometimes Democracy can get petty messy.” We have definitely been pretty messy.

Did anyone think we were going to somehow wallow through this debt of ours without some serious belt tightening? It is so immense that we can’t even convince our lenders that we can quietly dump it on our unsuspecting children. Those who have financed this incredible, reckless debt of ours have in mind to start getting their cash back way before that.

What can we add to our government?

An office of schedule and budget. Oh, you say, we already have all sorts of bureaucracies that take care of that job. Really? Have they taken care of it? Does anyone think they can be “fixed” in a way that will cause them to take care of it in the future? Won’t it simply become another expensive layer of the failed system we have now?

Not if we do it right. And, it’s clearly time that we did it right. We elect managers in federal elections, enough of them to represent each district corresponding to the present rate of its consumption of federal money. These people become the staff of the Office of Budget and Schedule. Each successful candidate would win an election in his own region, the place where the most possible voters would be aware of his character. The day after the election, the names of all these winners would be placed in a giant pot. A random drawing would then assign every one of them to someplace else, that is, someplace other than the place where they won their election. Although hardly perfect, such an arrangement would make pre-established cronyism significantly more difficult.

The directors of this new government branch would be recruited from the Justice Department’s career lawyers, the professional, bipartisan staff of the Congressional Committees responsible for “getting our money’s worth,” career procurement staff from the Defense Department, seasoned engineers from the Transportation Department, etc. Every one of these appointees would receive a lifetime wage and benefits package (similar to Supreme Court Justices?) in the hope that many of them would not fall to corrupt motives. Whatever the cost might be, I suspect it would ultimately be an incredibly good investment.

No one could disagree that such a system would not be, theoretically, entirely redundant. Likewise, no one could disagree that such a system would actually be exactly the way to make drastic accountability changes in Washington. Everyone currently in a position to spend our money has trusted advisors. The problem seems to be that, although these money folks trust them, we, as citizens, can’t. We need our own advisors, and we need to place then in positions where no one can get to them for any more of those “special favors.” Let these new federal employees seek after our credibility as taxpayers instead of professing mastery of techniques certain to either confuse us or simply “keep us quietly in the dark.”

Oh my! The government would be paralyzed by the delay of channeling everything through yet another layer of regulation. Well, they, and we, have brought this on ourselves.

Give this new bunch the task of evaluating everything we intend to spend money on. Are the plans complete? Are they simply a place to start, to open the coffers, so subsequent cost overruns, suspicious changes and huge, out-of-scope additive alternatives can “slide through” a little more gracefully later? Does the program accompanying the expenditure actually have a reasonable chance of doing what is intended? Can we reveal exactly who wants it without a Congressional subpoena?

The Office of Budget and Schedule will have no voice whatever with respect to the programs proposed. That is a Congressional task. It will, however, have everything to say about whether or not a program has been accurately represented to the public, whether or not it has been prepared adequately to justify starting the flow of our federal tax dollars into it, whether or not it has been contracted and bid legally, whether or not it has a reasonable chance to succeed and whether or not any alternatives have been explored.

The “Schedule” part of this idea has to do with programs which should, at some point, end, but don’t. Aside from the inevitable excuses for this endless drain on our money, the graft seems to build in intensity the longer these jobs continue. As they extend further and further beyond their original (approved) scope, everything possible is added to them, unexamined, unauthorized and unassociated expenses approved piecemeal, usually offered up as desperate, last gasp chances to somehow salvage a poorly planned program -- or at least create additional excuses or camouflage for its failure.

Usually with only a few hundred million more dollars the sow’s ear at least begins to look like a silk purse. That is, if it doesn’t become top secret. From us.

Enforcing this new inspection regime is simple. Add another required signature to every government payment. It enjoys the full “brutality” of a one size fits all solution. Let these people evaluate everything -- military procurement, transportation expenditures, foreign aid effectiveness, emergency relief programs, every kind of civil works. Allow the evaluations to extend to nonmaterial areas -- educational improvements, crime abatement, climate and energy subsidies, corporate encouragement and assistance, borrowing money, social programs and the rest.

As taxpayers and citizens, these new “eyes” of ours must be empowered to see absolutely everything we are asked to spend our tax money creating. If there were areas where the past record of federal spending justified more of our trust, perhaps they could be excluded. But are there any areas such as those? The parasites have slowly embedded themselves and their interests into every penny we send to the Treasury and every penny which flows out of it.

It is highly unlikely that we would “throw the baby out with the bath water” by simply taking a look at some imaginary expenditure which finds itself somehow exempt from the looters. They are everywhere and in everything. The only arguments we hear are between them as they discuss who will savage our money first!

We really can do this. Register. Vote. Elect Barack Obama. Then,

keep raising hell!