Reading Too Much

I am currently watching an interview with Paul Krugman being streamed over the Internet while I sup coffee. The past several days have been a bit on the odd side. This is probably because I've been reading too much. And I've been reading lefty books, mostly. Most of my reading has been done at work. Things are usually fairly slow and, being a contractor, I'm not on any projects, have no meetings to go to, and whatnot. So, if the phone ain't ringin', I've got nuthin' to do. So I read. Today I finished reading Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty. It's about former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill who was fired by George Bush about 2 years ago. Bush comes across as being a rather ineffectual leader - a puppet - surrounded by hard-nosed puppeteers who were keen on pushing through their ideological agendas without any discussion. People like Karl Rove and Dick Cheney who have seemingly made it their life's missions to undo FDR's web of social nets, annex Iraq, and privatize & deregulate everything to line the pockets of their fatcat friends as well as their own.

O'Neill is the former CEO of Alcoa and a very wealthy man. Nevertheless, the book portrays him as a man who went to Washington to do good. His method was to gather data - hard facts - and get together with people from all sides to hash it out and come up with the best, if not the right, answer. But Bush and his most powerful cronies would have none of this. O'Neill sought to assemble communities of inquiry to find the right answer while his opponents in the administration came into power with an agenda and wouldn't let such minor things as fiscal responsibility get in the way of lining the pockets of Enron and Haliburton.

Interestingly, the book puts Alan Greenspan in a whole new light. He and O'Neill have been friends for decades and the two conspired to push sound economic policy through the Bush administration and into practice. Unfortunately, their plan went awry. Before I read the book, I knew Greenspan as the guy who goes before Senate committees and give exceedingly opaque treatises on the state of the economy. That and he was friends with Ayn Rand. But The Price of Loyalty portrays him as someone at odds with the Bush administration and a man with sound values and firm grasp on common sense. Although perhaps it shouldn't have, that seemed revelatory.

Reading all of these lefty tomes has made me feel like I've fallen into Orwell's 1984. From what I recall from 20 years ago, any analogy of the US to Oceania seemed to relate to technological advances, how stealthily and easily we the people could be spied upon. But now I've come to terms with the fact that James Bond-like spying devices are a reality. What really concerns me is that doublespeak has become the MO of the Bush regime and no one seems to care. Honestly people, there was a legitimate reason your high school English teacher made you read 1984 - it wasn't just to piss you off or keep you busy. Bush runs up a deficit of several hundred billion dollars just like Reagan yet there are still folks who view the Republicans as fiscal conservatives and Democrats as the tax & spenders. These people take their tax cut to the bank, watch the deficit balloon, and call Bush fiscally responsible. "Those damn Democrats will raise taxes and spend it all!" Just like that nasty Democrat Bill Clinton who actually balanced the budget unlike his 2 Republican predecessors and his Republican successor. Wasn't it Jerry Browne who, during the Democratic primaries in 1984, said that we're gonna have to bite the bullet and raise taxes?

We need some new rules to move this country towards a sense of Rawlsian fairness. To wit:

1) progressive taxation - Adam Smith was in favor of them. The more wealth you have, the more you use government services and protections. YO! Rich people ! YOU pay for them.

2) Pick one of the following:

a) the United States makes a serious effort to wean itself off of fossil fuels OR

b) the owners of or children of owners of SUVs that never take their gas-guzzlers offroad are the first to go off to war.

3) The Fairness Doctrine is to be reinstated. A lefty figure gets to have equal time on Fox News and the like to give an opposing view to shatknockers like Bill O'Reilly and his ilk.

4) Corporate CEOs will be held legally responsible for the crimes their company's commit.

5) Corporate CEOs cannot complain about government interference & regulation, watch the company go under, and then ask for a bailout by the Feds. If you're going to tout the virtues of the free market free of government intervention and then downsize, move jobs abroad, bust unions, get outrageous compensation packages, etc., then you have no right to crawl to Uncle Sam and the taxpayers and ask them to get you out of your mess.

Shit, there's probably many more rules but I'll stop here. November 2nd will be a nail-biter for me.