Another socialist blog

They weren’t bluffing then they said they would fire on American invaders, and Thursday the Pakistani military did just that.  There was a short fire fight between Pakistani and American ground forces after the Pakistanis fired at a U.S. helicopter.

The U.S. claims it was on the Afghan side of the border, but didn’t comment on the obvious issue, which is that American ground troops and aircraft routinely operate inside Pakistan without the consent of the Pakistanis.  Which is a nice way of saying, the U.S. invaded Pakistan, committed an overt act of war against a country that—Americans are told, anyway—is one of our most important allies.

We all know we’re about to be robbed blind, that’s a given.  People who work for the rich are in power, and the rich are definitely going to land on their feet, no matter what it costs you and me, no matter the rhetorical gymnastics they have to use to call it something other than robbery.  Republicans and Democrats will do what the bankers tell them to.

But it could be different. Imagine for a moment that American voters suddenly got fed up and elected a socialist government.  Imagine the financial system, deregulated and over-leveraged and full of worthless housing loans, had managed to limp along until it was dumped on the new socialist Congress and the new socialist President.  Would socialists really have any different idea of how to solve the problem that confronts Congress today?

You bet we would.  An economic program that was all about meeting the needs of people, rather than creating corporate profit, would look completely different, even while cleaning up the mess left behind by the discredited capitalists.

I think a socialist government would start refinancing homes right now.  Not investment properties, just homesteads, and just for people who can actually pay a mortgage.  Of course the new mortgages would have very low interest, so people who are doomed by their current usurious loans would stand a reasonable chance of getting out from under.  And we wouldn’t pay the existing loan off at its face value, either:  predatory lenders would be forced to accept a large discount on their portfolio.

The victims of predatory lending would be made whole in this bottom-up approach—the ones who still have homes, anyway.  The people who bought mortgage-backed securities will lose some money, and the ones who bought the worst of them (with the most sub-prime loans at the worst terms) will lose the most money.  The people will end up making (low) interest on their investment, which would be secured by real estate.

Contrast this to the Bush administration top-down approach, in which we save the very people who created the mess, by buying up securities known to be worthless, and people paying impossible interest rates will still lose their homes.

There’s more to it, of course.  The people who victimized borrowers in the first place, and the people who sold loans they knew were crap, need to go to prison and pay big fines.  By “big fines” I mean they can’t come out of prison rich.  In the longer term, corporations would no longer be considered persons, and businesses would be mostly worker and community owned rather than worker- and community-victimizing.

But this government won’t do that.  Next year, when you hear Congress talking about how there isn’t enough money to fund basic human services, remember how they tossed a trillion bucks of your money to a bunch of crooks.

John McCain stood there Monday morning and said “The fundamentals of our economy are strong.“  I think he meant it.  For rich capitalists, there’s really just one fundamental rule:  government exists to protect the property of the rich.  And if we’ve seen anything in the last couple of weeks it’s that our government will go to any lengths to bail out rich people in trouble.

All that stuff about personal responsibility that you may have heard from conservatives over the last decade or so?  That just applies to you and me, not to rich people.  If I start a small business and it tanks because I took risks, I’m personally responsible for the losses.  But if a rich guy builds a great whacking huge business built on speculation and predatory lending, not to mention other people’s money, and it tanks because the victims got squeezed too hard, he’s not going to be personally responsible—the government is going to buy up the bad debt and leave him with the assets.  Because his business is too big to fail.  Because government policy actively colluded in making his business that big.

As sure as the sun is going to come up on Monday morning, the people who got rich creating this mortgage crisis are still going to be rich after it’s over.  And just like after the savings and loan debacle, you are going to be left holding the bag.  And then the rich will argue that the thing they need to rebuild the economy—the economy they wrecked, and are still somehow in charge of—is smaller government and lower taxes.

You may want to rethink that.

• Here’s the story of a guy who got dragged out of Yankee Stadium by the police, for the crime of attempting to use the rest room during the singing of God Bless America.  The Yankees are certainly free to lead fands in a nationalistic religious song, but when the police enforce mandatory nationalistic/religious song time, something’s gone badly wrong with the whole liberty thing.
• An Oregon man had his camera seized and was given a ticket for photographing police officers who were on the job.
• Here’s a woman who was ordered by the Sheboygan, WI city attorney to remove from her Web site a link to the city’s police department, and launched a criminal investigation into her because of the link.  Apparently even publicizing the URL of a city department is more daylight than they can stand.  Here’s the criminal link.
• Government tracking of your movements, already the norm in the U.K., may soon be a reality in the U.S.  The leading vendor of traffic enforcement cameras proposes to use the existing cameras to create a national vehicle tracking system to see where you’ve been.  Don’t bother asking if they’ve got a warrant.

U.S. officials have finally admitted to a raid inside Pakistan that reportedly killed at least 15 civilians.  The official line in Washington is that Pakistan is “cooperating” with the U.S. in its expanded war along the Afghan border.

The Pakistanis are apparently not so fond of doublespeak.  They are calling the invasion, an invasion, and a massacre of civilians, a massacre.  Pakistani troops have been given orders to fire on U.S. soldiers the next time they invade.  If that happens, it will make it harder for the Bush administration to claim it respects the sovereignty of other nations. (What, us, imperialist?) Hope they’ve got plenty of smoke and mirrors in stock.

I’ve actually heard people referring to the 11th of September as Patriot Day.  It’s not a bad idea to think about patriotism, think about it hard, on September 11th.  But I think that hard, critical thought is antithetical to what those folks had in mind.  Branding the day “Patriot Day” suggests a particular sort of remembrance, with flags rather than protest signs.  The Bush administration is still selling their version of history, in which the world hates us not because of our foreign policy, but because of our freedom.

I’m no Libertarian, but the Cato Institute has a fine idea of what to do instead on September 11th:  let’s talk about whether we’ve become a police state in which police routinely kick down your door without knocking.  The featured speaker was Cheye Calvo, mayor of Berwyn Heights, MD.  Police on a drug raid kicked in his door, shot his dogs to death, held him and his family at gunpoint…and cleared him of any wrongdoing.  What could be more patriotic than talking and thinking about the relationship between the government and the people, and siding with the people?

Douglas Rushkoff wrote an excellent essay on the Republican National Convention, which may be why his site was under a denial of service attack for a while.

What is it they hate? Guiliani and Palin both made it pretty clear: community organizing. Community organizing is energized from below. From the periphery. It is the direction and facilitation of mass energy towards productive and cooperative ends. It is about replacing conflict with collaboration. It is the opposite of war; it is peace.

Last night, the Republican Convention made it clear they prefer war. They see the world as a dangerous and terrible place. Like the fascist leaders satirized in Starship Troopers, they say they believe it is better to be on the offensive, taking the war to the people who might wish us harm than playing defense. It is better to be an international aggressor - a bulldog with lipstick - than led by the misguided notion that attacking people itself makes the world a more dangerous place.

In their attack on community organizing - a word combination they pretended they didn’t know what it meant - Giuliani and Palin revealed their refusal to acknowledge the kinds of bottom-up processes through which our society was built, and through which local communities can begin to assert some authority over their schools, environments, and economies. Without organized communities, you don’t get the reduction in centralized government the Republicans pretend to be arguing for. In their view, community organizing as, at best, equivalent to disruptive and unpredictable Al Qaeda activity.

I recommend you read the whole piece. It’s not long, and it cuts through several years of Republican bullshit, to the core of what they believe.