Guilt free about the Market

Some people seem to have guilt feelings about the Wall Street collapse. They want Obama to win but are unnerved by a strange temptation to rejoice in the stock market collapse and may even fear a come-back.

No need to hope feel guilty about the Wall Street collapse helping Obama. The genie is out of bottle on Wall Street and Obama's economic plan is such a workable mix of the old "New" Deal and "New" New Deal to carry the day. A rebound of the stock market won't make those who have already lost 30-40% of their 401Ks feel so good as to reach for the old Republican snake oil.

McCain is apparently having trouble articulating a new economic "reform" proposal. Rumors were it was to be a cut in capital gains taxes. That's wonderful for anyone still sitting on unrealized capital gains. But since most of us have seen our savings vanish in the past year, we won't have much new investment dollars saved to benefit from future capital gains on new investment. The lesson of the past 48 hours is that the only source for new investment is the government in one guise or another..

The genius of FDR was not that he was a genius, it was in the people he picked for advise and in the programs he chose from their advice. It’s may be a lost fact of history, but the man who turned the “new” SEC from a bureaucratic lightweight into the engine of prosperity it became was one of his closest advisors: Wall Street raider and reputed bootlegger Joseph Kennedy. You may remember is sons. Joe K. broke with FDR over WWII and was loathe to take on Hitler, but has head of the SEC, he was brilliant.

In Obama we have a man he is bright enough to pick good advisors and bright enough to choose among the options. He will be nobody’s stooge.

I believe that the obvious practicality of Obama's plan will carry the day. People know we need reinvestment in infrastructure. People will see the common sense ion rewarding companies that invest in US jobs. Cash strapped citizens who need an infusion from their IRA's will may very well see their homes and future's saved by the chance to tap into their retirement accounts without penalty (before retirement age).

Finally, there is one part of the Obama story that I am sure resonates with a majority of Americans: His mother's struggle with the HMO while she was dying of cancer.

McCain's prescription of deregulation to let the free market work its wonders on the health care system, just won't fly. His only answer will be to state that he really means some regulation (like pre-existing conditions). But that's regulation and will defeat his whole proposal. That we need a national system meeting national standards, is the future.

We have seen the future and it is Obama. (We hope.)

The bailout: Getting even with Mommy and Daddy

I have always thought that so much of the vitriol I see in life is an adolescent working out of unresolved problems with one's parents. The blogspere and particularly the reaction to the failed bailout is an example. The invective for those attempting to sort through the financial mess created by the neocons and their George Bush puppet is truly astounding.

As many have pointed out somewhat soberly, the real issue here is availability of credit in a wide variety of circumstances. Among the items that will be seriously impacted are not only home loans, but student loans, appliance loans (like refrigerators) and auto loans. "Good," some of are oedipally challenged exclaim. I don't need a new car or refrigerator and (a) I dropped of of college because some geeky professors never saw my brilliance or (b) I got my student loans, up yours.

Then there is the small question of the real pay-day loans. The ones by small businesses need to make pay roll. Bye-bye pay checks. Too freaking bad, you say.

Then again, the stock market lost more value Monday then the total cost of the bailout. If you don't have an IRA or a 401K retirement account, who cares?

We are told by scripture that we are brother's keeper. Those who selfishly pursue ideological or political goals now and sink this economy into a recession cum depression, don't care about their brother or the their sister. (My God, am I being judgmental?)

I did not experience the depression although my family was steeped in its lore as I grew-up. For those relishing in the defeat of their parents (be it McCain or Pelosi) I suggest a crash course on what the depression was really about. Here's some suggestions for your viewing: "O Brother Where art Thou," "Grapes of Wrath," “Sullivan's Travels,” “Night of the Hunter,” and "Sea Biscuit." They are all entertaining but in the background is a picture of what a Depression era America is like. Forget the horse race in Sea Biscuit and concentrate on what happened to the jockey's family.

Is the bailout package the very best of solutions? Hardly. But it’s a step forward. I am reminded of the old Vietnam slogan: When your up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember you were there to drain the swamp.

As for the movies, I am sure there are better choices, these are off the top of my head. Here's my message: stop getting even with your parents and grow-up. We are facing problems that the big kids have to solve.

Is Christ Weeping

The following is adopted from a salon.com comment which was an "Editor's Choice"

I was baptized a Roman Catholic and I remain Catholic to my core, although the Vatican might argue about the Roman part.To me there is only one Christian message and one Christian commandment: Love.

Christ preached that all the prophesies and scripture were founded on love. A generation before Christ, Rabbi Hillel propounded the Golden Rule and stated that everything else is commentary.

As good hearted as many evangelicals are, there is an extreme with a political agenda that is anti-Christ and anti-Love. So much of the Extreme is based upon stilted, strained reading of scripture by 19th century zealots whose powers of reasoning and deduction were seriously defective. They were literally the false prophets in sheep's clothing the Bible warned us against.

The successful mega-church evangelicals with their opulent palaces contrast with Christ's praise of John the Baptist who dressed in animal hair and ate locusts and honey: "What did you go out to the desert to see, a man dressed in fine clothing?"

The concept that a heart-beat away from the presidency would be a person, like Palin, who believes that man walked with the dinosaurs is appalling. The denial of science by the Extremists is already having a dreadful impact on the education of the next generation of American scientists.

Christ wept when he foresaw the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. Perhaps, for the abuse of His name by the Extremists, He maybe weeping now.

Political Chess

Two bad decisions may decide the election: Obama picking Biden and McCain picking Palin. But they were bad decisions for very different reasons. One was a misreading of the political chess board; the other was a cynical, disastrous gambit.

Let’s take the Biden pick by Obama first. It was an unarguably a good pick on its own terms. No one is going to have a heart-attack because Joe Biden will be a heart beat from the Presidency. He is knowledgeable and he is prepared.

But Obama misread his position and was over confident. Maybe perhaps so were some of his supporters like moi (just had to stick in a little Miss Piggy French). It left McCain an opening and he took it by the “brilliant” move of picking a feisty woman who would both attract feminists and, perhaps, more importantly, energize his base.

The problem is that as we take a second look, Palin is perhaps the worse prepared choice for Vice-President in my (ergo modern) memory. For all her problems, Geraldine Ferraro was an experienced office holder at a national level. Some have talked down Harry Truman’s pick as VP by Roosevelt in 1944 (I was 7 years old) when he was forced to dump Henry Wallace who had gotten a little too far ahead of the curve. But Truman was an experienced Senator who had made headlines investigating war profiteering. Even Dan Quayle had national experience. Indeed, conspiracy theorists have ideas about just how deep his experience ran. There were connections between his Senate office and some of the Central American “freedom fighters” lionized by Reagan.

I was like many a bit perturbed by the seeming guile of the McCain campaign in choosing to let Palin make her debut on ABC in an interview with Charles Gibson who might have seemed a patsy type interviewer for her. Boy was I, and the McCain camp, wrong.

McCain had choices that were far better than the one he chose and who would have really put the Dems behind the eight ball. The two most intriguing were the traditional Tom Ridge who might have put both Pennsylvania and Ohio in the McCain column. The other, untraditional choice, was Joe Lieberman who, politically and personally, from my perspective, is a flawed vessel. But it would have been an enormous blow.

Obama’s most obvious choice was Hillary and although I wasn’t a fan of hers for the Presidency, as a resident of New York who has met her twice for at least a handshake and a minute of conversation, I can attest that this is one, smart hard-working lady who, but from my perspective, goes to often for the power guys and gals.

The irony is that the reason that Hillary was never seriously considered was the 800 pound gorilla Bill Clinton, who couldn’t be ignored. The calculation that he would add a wild card factor to the campaign by Obama and that Bill and Hillary could not stand vetting because of the Clinton Library stuff and the pardon scandals that involved Hillary’s brother was a reasonable one. In a sense, Obama studied the whole board and played Karpov. However, McCain threw caution to the win and tried a wild Kasparov gambit.

Obama’ studious study seemed to backfire by the initial thrust of McCain’s daring gambit. But, now the daring gambit may end-up like a lot of other daring gambits, as this writer so sadly knows: a blunder into checkmate.

I wonder how many moves are left?

The Party of Lincoln

Once there was a time when there was a Republican Party that called itself "The Party of Lincoln." They sang the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" at national conventions. Now, no more Lincoln.

Lincoln and his genius are the great enigma's of history. As Gary Wills as written, he literally redefined America at Gettysburg, re-establishing the egalitarian and populist ideals of the Declaration of Independence as the defining document of our the Republic. In one alternative history book, the Union loses Gettysburg, the South wins the war and Lincoln re-emerges as the founder of the American Socialist Party.

But even though he made his mark as a lawyer for the railroads, Lincoln was a populist. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates he argued for the rights of the individual over the rights of property. And, he advocated the right of people to revolt, if government ever trampled on their liberties.

Unlike Lincoln, Obama won his Senatorial campaign in Illinois. His is also a studied intelligence. He has been gifted with an education at the finest educational institutions in America, among the very best in the world. He was a fatherless child, Lincoln a motherless one who, according to legend, whittled the feet for his mother’s casket.

The contrast between McCain and Obama personally, could not be greater.

On can not presume to call Obama a new Lincoln, Roosevelt or Kennedy. But more than any Presidential candidate since Kennedy, he embodies the very best of what we have to offer ourselves, and the world.

He is a risk, a risk of enormous disappointment if he fails. But, he has the intellect and the savvy that could lead us out of our current multiple crises.

The issue in this campaign will be whether America has the courage to follow the candidate of the real “Party of Lincoln.”

Obama and Patriotism

Once I heard someone say that the truly great democratic leader is one who dreams a great dream for us. As one whose first presidential vote was for Jack Kennedy, and whose last presidential vote maybe for Barack Obama, I have been gratified, at times stunned, by Obama’s eloquence. Is he a perfect vessel for social justice? Was Lincoln?

One of the incidents involving Lincoln's nomination in 1860 was his message to his supporters at the Republican convention that they not trade promises for convention votes and that he would not be bound by their promises. They ignored his message. After he was nominated and elected, he somehow kept every deal they had made. He was a lawyer for the railroads who was an authentic populist, who mocked those who believed the property rights were equal to human rights.

As Obama does a gandy dance* around some of the difficult issues that have been used by the right to push back the clock, not beyond the two Roosevelts, but beyond Lincoln, we might just cut him some slack. A littler obfuscation on gun control, for example, may be painful to some of us, but it might be appropriate, although the NRA, apparently, hasn't been fooled. A little distancing from Wes Clark’s blunt, but accurate, assessment of John McCain's service career, isn't the same as drinking cool aid.

Ironically, during the 1960 campaign, my eldest brother, an Air Force officer, complained about Kennedy's war record. "The only thing he did is get his PT Boat run over by a Jap destroyer." **

This is not the first time in this campaign that Obama has shown amazing insight and grace with his analysis of a complex problem. His first speech on race, when he tried to explain Rev. Wright's anger is, and will be, a classic. Rev. Wright repaid him by a self-absorbed display of petulance that nearly destroyed Obama's campaign.

I expect that some of the response to Obama’s message on patriotism will reflect the same destructive anger that marks Rev. Wright and so much of the Vietnam protest. Those protestors who burned the American flag may have actually prolonged the war and insured the birth of the Nixon-Reagan-Bush era.

Obama chooses not to burn the flag, but to wave it. God bless America, the beautiful.

*Gandy dancer refers to the footwork of railroad workers placing and resetting ties on the rail road.

** See http:/www.johnklotz.com/billy.htm for more about my family and WWII.

Is Obama channeling JFK?

A dream died on November 22, 1963.

To many Americans, who are old enough to remember, John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas was the principal reason for a long American nightmare of which Bush II is simply the culmination. Ted Sorenson, the other night, stated that the 1961 Inaugural address was only Kennedy's second best speech. The best was, in Sorenson's opinion (and mine, his June 1963 American University speech at which he chartered a course to end the cold war. That he had plans to withdraw from Vietnam after the 1964 election is a matter of public record now. All that ended in Dallas.

I have always felt that second biggest casualty at Dallas was Khrushchev. The Cuban Missile crisis had scared them both and Khrushchev had staked his won career on his new relationship to JFK. His leadership survived for several months but eventually was ousted.

Maybe Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone nut gunman. To some, his cloudy intelligence background and the incredible convenience of JFK's death to those who were looking to profit from the Vietnam War is more than a convenience.

If anybody is interested, I wrote an op-ed piece on the media and the environment using Kennedy's speech American University as a starting point. http://www.johnklotz.com/new-jfk.htm

I wrote an op-ed piece for Newsday (which made the WP wire) in November 1993 which discussed the media and the assassination. http://www.johnklotz.com/new-jfk.htm

In any event, you can graph the dissolution of the Americans trust in government has beginning it sharp climb to the time when the public discovered that LBJ’s peace campaign of 1964 was a con job.

I don't know if Obama has Kennedy’s Irish political smarts and I don’t think he has quite obtained JFK's eloquence [maybe he needs a Sorenson], but he's getting there. And beyond political smarts, he has the intellectual capacity to be a truly great President. He will bear the heavy burden of enhanced expectations.

But, after a years of pessimism about the future, and years of second rate intellects occupying the White House, I am suddenly optimistic about the future. I have seen the future and it's Barack.

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