It is a piece of traditional wisdom that if they can’t fall in love with a candidate Republicans will, in the end, simply fall in line. The primary goal of the Republican party is to defeat Obama and the view of the Republican establishment is that Romney is most likely to be able to do that. Evidence: McCain rushing off to endorse Romney.

On the other hand,  Romney’s eight vote victory margin over Santorum isn’t exactly an overwhelming vote of confidence considering the immense amounts of money spent by his “independent,” I-don’t- know-anything-about-those-guys, political pac.

John Huntsman, potentially the most appealing Republican of the bunch, didn’t contest the Iowa dog fight. He understood that with the nation’s most powerful geo-political and financial adversary being China, Iowa conservatives would be quick to reject him. Hey…who needs a former ambassador to China who speaks Mandarin. (Certainly not supporters of the neo-isolationist Ron Paul.)

The next primaries are going to be immensely amusing…noisy, rancorous, and expensive. If the three (or four) survivors continue until the convention, and the convention deadlocks, who knows…maybe Jeb Bush will step in to try for a Bush family political hat trick.

All this sound and fury signifying nothing would be really funny Reality TV if it weren’t so serious.

The Scene hasn’t been around for some time and has disappeared as a separate TC.com blog. But gone is not forgotten and the Data Port still throws a leg over the scoot so It will appear here from time to time.

Sunday morning saw the traditional first ride of the year up Mount Lemmon. This is pretty much an undertaking by the SEAT (Southeast Arizona Touring) Riders. SEAT is a chartered BMWMOA club, but has a “ride what you got” policy so this year saw Honda, Ducati, Triumph and one Royal Enfield represented as well.

Mr. And Mrs. Data Port and Hack at Wind Point

On the subject of hacks and hacking, sidecar fans can begin to plan for the:

39th Annual Brass Monkey Sidecar Rally.

February 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th

Location: Fisher’s Landing and Resort

10882 Swede Way

782Yuma, AZ 85365

Phone: (928) 782-7049

Most rally-goers camp, but it’s not unusual for the comfort lovers to motel. Solo riders are welcome, too. More details to follow.

Moyers gave the keynote speech at the 40th Anniversary celebration of    Public Citizen, the legendary nonprofit consumer advocacy organization founded in 1971 to represent consumer interests in government. The entire speech is too long to repost as a blog entry, but in sum he argues that although most of us pay lip service to the traditional ideals of the American dream we have largely given up the notion that it’s possible for us. The oligarchs have won.

The great American experience in creating a different future together this voluntary union for the common good has been flummoxed by “a growing sense of political impotence, what the historian Lawrence Goodwyn has described as a mass resignation of people who believe “the dogma of democracy on a superficial public level but who no longer believe it privately. There has been, he says, a decline in what people think they have a political right to aspire to, a decline of individual self-respect on the part of millions off Americans.

You can understand why. We hold elections, knowing they are unlikely to produce the policies favored by the majority of Americans. We speak, we write, we advocate,  and those in power turn deaf ears and blind eyes to our deepest aspirations. We petition, plead, and even pray, yet the earth that is our commons, which should be passed on in good condition to coming generations, continues to be despoiled. We invoke the strain in our national DNA that attests to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as the produce of political equality, yet private wealth multiplies as public goods are beggared. . . .

. . . And the property qualifications for federal office that the framers of the Constitution expressly feared as an unseemly “veneration for wealth” are now openly in force; the common denominator of public office, even for our judges, is a common deference to cash.

It is not hard, Moyers says, to understand what Occupy Wall Street is all about. It is about the sign he saw being carried by a woman at an OWS march: “I can’t afford to buy a politician so I bought this sign.”

Moyers goes on to quote from a surprising source:

We know what all this money buys. Americans have learned the hard way that when rich organizations and wealthy individuals shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they get what they want. 

They know that if you don’t contribute to their campaigns or spend generously on lobbying, you pick up a disproportionate share of America’s tax bill. You pay higher prices for a broad range of products from peanuts to prescriptions. You pay taxes that others in a similar situation have been excused from paying. You’re compelled to abide by laws while others are granted immunity from them. You must pay debts that you incur while others do not. You’re barred from writing off on your tax returns some of the money spent on necessities while others deduct the cost of their entertainment. You must run your business by one set of rules, while the government creates another set for your competitors. 

In contrast the fortunate few who contribute to the right politicians and hire the right lobbyists enjoy all the benefits of their special status. Make a bad business deal; the government bails them out. If they want to hire workers at below market wages, the government provides the means to do so. If they want more time to pay their debts, the government gives them an extension. If they want immunity from certain laws, the government gives it. If they want to ignore rules their competition must comply with, the government gives it approval. If they want to kill legislation that is intended for the public, it gets killed.

I didn’t crib that litany from Public Citizen’s muckraking investigations over the years, although I could have. Nor did I lift it from Das Kapital by Karl Marx or Mao Tse-tung’s Little Red Book. No, I was literally quoting Time Magazine, long a tribune of America’s establishment media. From the bosom of mainstream media comes the bald, spare, and damning conclusion: We now have: “a government for the few at the expense of the many.”

Moyers goes on to to say:

But let me call another witness from the pro-business and capitalist- friendly press. In the middle of the last decade, four years before the Great Collapse of 2008, the editors of The Economist warned:

    A growing body of evidence suggests that the meritocratic ideal is in trouble in America. Income inequality is growing to levels not seen since the (first) Gilded Age. But social mobility is not increasing at anything like the same pace

Everywhere you look in modern America, in the Hollywood Hills or the canyons of Wall Street, in the Nashville recording studios or the clapboard houses of Cambridge, Massachusetts’ you see elites mastering the art of perpetuating themselves. America is increasingly looking like imperial Britain, with dynastic ties proliferating, social circles interlocking, mechanisms of social exclusion strengthening, and a gap widening between the people who make decisions and shape the culture and the vast majority of working stiffs.

Hear the editors of The Economist: “The United States is on its way to becoming a European-style class-based society.”

 

Read the full speech here.

On balance the literal occupation of public space has been successful. The focus of public attention has been shifted from the single issue of national debt to the fact that our financial and political systems have become so dysfunctional  that they are resistant to reform or problem solving.

A commenter to an earlier post observed that the number of people actually in tents was a vanishingly small percentage of the nation’s population. True enough, but immaterial. The same was true of marchers for women’s suffrage, active protestors to the Viet Nam war, Mahatma Gandhi or Rosa Parks.

Those protestors were symptoms of a dis-satisfaction with underlying social and political conditions and they would soon become the centers  for general protest and reform.

It is hard to ignore the fact that OWS quickly spread from coast to coast. The conservative press tried to characterize the occupiers as a kind of children’s crusade aided by drummers, pot smokers and the unwashed. It is certainly true that a majority of the tenters were young…although not all…but there were plenty of older folks on hand, too.

Some conservative pundits are apparently heaving a sigh of relief now that OWS is “dead.” They equate the removal of the physical occupations with a removal of the movement. They are, of course, wrong; and apparently blind and deaf to the impact of the social media.

OWS has simply moved to another level of political action and different bits of real estate. We should expect to see flash mobs, organized protests, marches, and other forms of guerrilla consciousness raising keeping on the pressure for reform.

These actions will be very annoying to the establishment. Good.

Less annoying, and possible more effective, will be a technique borrowed from a more traditional campaign book: The campaign  coffee gatherings in private homes.

Occupy Your Living Room is a way to take part in OWS without camping in the park. Simply invite your friends and neighbors to your home for an “Occupy Coffee.” Explain why you are sympathetic to the movement and be ready to point out facts about the way (for instance) the financial industry, left unsupervised, was responsible for the nation’s economic near collapse.

There’s no telling what you might learn. At a recent social gathering a friend mentioned something that he thought was outrageous: Apparent legal insider trading by members of Congress. It was new to me. Is it new to you?

Have a look.

If  I say I have a plan for my house, you understand one thing; if I say I have a vision of what my house will be you understand something different. My vision is more than a scheme for the mechanical arrangement of rooms and utilities, it suggests how it might fit with the world around it, and the sort of life I will live within it.

City planning that is not also informed by some less mechanical, some wider-reaching vision of what the city is, or is to become, plans for a body without a soul.  A city not anchored by some vision of itself is nothing more than a developers’ town.

There was a time when thinking of ourselves as the Old Pueblo was enough to impose, on what we built and how we lived, a certain character and style of life that made Tucson distinctive. Our public buildings, like the old courthouse and the veterans’ hospital were built in an exaggerated  Spanish Colonial style.

The interior decoration of our homes reflected the Southwest, Native American and Hispanic traditions. We wore boots and bolo ties, and gentlemen were excused by the mayor from wearing suit coats or jackets during the summer. Our sense of ourselves was that we were a vacation place, a dude ranch place, a place where Spanish was spoken as well as English, a place that was part of the cowboy west  and its traditions.

As we grew in size we outgrew the Old Pueblo sense of who we were. Does rodeo week still express to ourselves and others what we are? I think not. Rodeo is still fun, but it used to be downtown, when there was a downtown, and it was somehow at the heart of things, a culturally defining event. Now it’s banished to the south side and many families use the rodeo week school holiday to take the kids to Disney Land.

Tucson needs a new sense of itself if it is not to be just another sprawling, boring builders’ town.

There’s plenty to build on, including the Spanish accented cowboy west of the Old Pueblo, and the deep cultural traditions and touching cultural pretension that would build a theater and then call it The Temple of Music and Art.

We have made a start in a small way by redefining ourselves, on the electronic billboards  that welcome travelers arriving at the airport, as “Optics Valley.” Corny, derivative, commercial, but not bad. Beats “five dollar town” or “phone center central.”

If we’ve decided to be  the center of  a high tech, well-paid industry, attractive to an intelligent and well educated work force we’ve gone a long way toward redefining who we are.

But we should also aspire to become the artistic and creative center of the southwest. We invest money to bring businesses here, we should also invest money to attract, support, and encourage  the arts. We should make Tucson a place where young artists and intellectuals want to come because it is a center of creative energy.

We could use more studio space, rehearsal space, and above all  a well designed outdoor venue for  all of the performing arts. We should  build a regional art complex, with a mix of  studios, apartments, theaters, and public patio gardens; built at public expense if need be, or with the same sort of tax benefits and subsidies that we offer manufacturers and failing hotel keepers.

Let’s invite young architects and designers of all sorts, too. Let’s  start to think of ourselves as a place where all  the crafts flourish and are supported; a place too proud of its intellectual and artistic traditions to be nothing more than a developers’ town.

The Greek city of Athens was the center of its world. Athens was a great business and commercial power as well a  center of the artistic and intellectual  life of its time. There is no reason why we should not aspire to become the Athens of The Southwest.

It could be a transforming vision… and it would make excellent economic sense.

What these critics seem to want is traditional politics. Support candidates, run for office, vote. Something along these lines is certainly one way of being “political,” and the progressive movement is already ramping up to support candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

But one point that the Occupy movement has made is that the political system has become so dysfunctional that we need to broaden the definition of ‘political action.’ This has already happened. In two months OWS has shifted the nation’s debate away from the single issue of the deficit and, at least in part, refocused it on jobs and the reform and control of the financial system.

It would be a political act to hold marches and teach-ins the goal of which was to force the main stream media to expand its coverage of the influence of lobbying on legislation and the way in which our tax laws have been skewed to facilitate the flow of tax benefits upward to benefit the giant transnational corporations.

Critics of the OWS movement assume (or want us to assume) that the complaints of the occupiers are all personal, because so much of the messaging has taken the form of individual tales of hardship. Underlying all that (and some really amusing signs and slogans) is a very clear message:

This nation’s financial and political systems have become so dysfunctional that they no longer function to promote the general welfare.

So what is to be done? Certainly we should keep up the marches and General Assemblies; they are excellent tools for pointing out problems that need to be corrected and individual legislators do respond when their feet are being held to the fire of public anger.

We should support individual legislators at all levels of government, but we should be wary of being co-opted by any political party. The Obama administration would be enchanted to have the Occupiers leap upon the re-election bandwagon, but they tend to be more skeptical now than they were four years ago..rightly or wrongly. There’s still a year to go.

In these cases the lenders study the aspiring entrepreneur’s pro-formas, weigh the risks and take an ownership position. There are risks, of course. The operations may fold, in which case the bank earns no more interest and gets stuck with empty buildings or undeveloped land.

Stockholders, who are seldom in first position in a bankruptcy, will take a bath; but that’s a risk they know to expect.

When a municipality needs a hospital or library or a new slammer it issues long term municipal bonds (if the rating companies judge they can ‘service the debt.’) Municipalities rarely or never default on their bonds and the purchasers get a nice tax free cash flow.

So far we can live with all of this.

But there is a kind of OPM which is so one-sided that it ought to be avoided and that’s when it’s the people’s tax money. When the Magnifico Corp hits town with alluring tales of a job-creating factory or luxury hotel development it takes its dog and pony show to the city or the county or the state.

“Sounds great, go for it!” say the Pols.

“Well, there are certain conditions. We need sales tax forgiveness, or property tax forgiveness, and we’d like you to give us the property, too. Do you expect us to put in our own infrastructure? Hmm?”

The deals requested differ, but they are all the same in one respect: They expect the city, county, or state to spend future tax revenues…which are, after all, real money. And it never occurs to the pols that if these projects had a reasonable chance of success they would have obtained private financing.

I think we should be pretty skeptical of such deals. All across the fruited plain corporations use up their tax bennies and then move on.

But we may really really really need a new hotel. What to do? The next time one of these hustlers comes to town let’s offer to make a deal.  Demand an ownership position in the hotel corporation, or manufacturing corporation, or sales group.

The ownership position should be percentage of the company’s total capitalization “bought” with the future value of the offered tax benefits.

If the company pulls out we’d at least retain our partial ownership (and maybe some dividends) and we’d get back whatever it leaves behind.

Corporate America, particularly the financial wing, hasn’t been too keen on entering into a dialogue. Here’s a nifty way to get ‘em to hear you. Whether they’ll actually listen to you is another matter, but at least they’ll know you’re there!

There is a move afoot to “repatriate” huge sums of money currently held overseas by US-based multi-national corporations. Under US tax law those funds are not taxed until they’re brought back to the United States.

Congressional leaders and our wealthiest corporations want some help in bringing home the bacon. They are aggressively lobbying to bring those funds home for the modest tax rate of 5.2, rather than the usual 35 percent corporate tax rate.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) explains the effect of permanently deferring taxes on overseas holdings:

“This effectively allows such firms to defer payment of the U.S. corporate income tax on their overseas profits indefinitely, even though they may obtain an immediate tax deduction for many expenses incurred in supporting the same overseas investments. This can produce a negative U.S. corporate income tax—that is, a net government subsidy—for overseas operations. In addition to causing the federal government to lose tax revenue, this structure gives multinationals a significant incentive to shift economic activity—as well as their reported profits—overseas.

The argument for repatriation is that this would bring back billions of dollars to the US, which would then be virtuously employed to create jobs. Sure it would. We’ve been there and done that under a 2004 Bush Administration plan.

As CBPP points out,

“The evidence shows that firms mostly used the repatriated earnings not to invest in U.S. jobs or growth but for purposes that Congress sought to prohibit, such as repurchasing their own stock and paying bigger dividends to their shareholders. Moreover, many firms actually laid off large numbers of U.S. workers even as they reaped multi-billion-dollar benefits from the tax holiday and passed them on to shareholders.” Many economists and scholars believe that if corporations get their way and get another repatriation holiday, history will repeat itself—and once again the corporations and their shareholders, not American workers, families, and children, will be the only winners.”

In this morning’s NY Times  column Paul Krugman puts it all in perspective. (Italics are mine.

 It’s worth stepping back to look at the larger picture, namely the abject failure of an economic doctrine — a doctrine that has inflicted huge damage both in Europe and in the United States.

The doctrine in question amounts to the assertion that, in the aftermath of a financial crisis, banks must be bailed out but the general public must pay the price. So a crisis brought on by deregulation becomes a reason to move even further to the right; a time of mass unemployment, instead of spurring public efforts to create jobs, becomes an era of austerity, in which government spending and social programs are slashed.

This doctrine was sold both with claims that there was no alternative — that both bailouts and spending cuts were necessary to satisfy financial markets — and with claims that fiscal austerity would actually create jobs. The idea was that spending cuts would make consumers and businesses more confident. And this confidence would supposedly stimulate private spending, more than offsetting the depressing effects of government cutbacks.

You all know how successful that has been. The banks are hoarding money that might be leant to business start-ups and the jobless are still jobless. Nothing has trickled down.

Now the results are in and the picture isn’t pretty. Greece has been pushed by its austerity measures into an ever-deepening slump — and that slump, not lack of effort on the part of the Greek government, was the reason a classified report to European leaders concluded last week that the existing program there was unworkable. Britain’s economy has stalled under the impact of austerity, and confidence from both businesses and consumers has slumped, not soared.

 

Pow! Take that, Confidence Fairy!

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