The Emerging "Coffee Party" Movement & coincidental convergence - 1 views
started by Frederick Smith on 03 Mar 10
started by Frederick Smith on 03 Mar 10
started by Frederick Smith on 03 Mar 10
started by Frederick Smith on 03 Mar 10
and converse civilly about America's ABCs" (Incomplete write-up-2/14/10)
A. Our Government is Paralyzed
Americans Break for Coffee poses an alternative to the Tea Party movement. It reaffirms the Founders' assertion that American government was intended to "form a more perfect union," despite competing interests and beliefs about the shape of that union.(1)
Our system of checks and balances was intended to avoid tyrannical rule and to protect the rights of minorities, and at the same time to ensure that lawful majority rule ultimately prevailed (in a republican legislature representing all citizens, and elected according to constitutional protocols). Although the Founders were conservatives who did not mind slowing down the legislative process, they certainly did not intend to set up a process in which a determined minority could prevent new legislation that did not have unanimous consent.
(1) Today there is justifiable anger among voters that the legislative process is not working the way it is supposed to work. In an unprecedented way, the minority party appears determined to use every available parliamentary maneuver to prevent the lawfully elected majority to claim any success in implementing the platform which it presented to the voters in the last elections.
The Senate filibuster - a internal parliamentary rule allowing indefinite prolongation of debate, and thus veto power to 40% of senators - was used infrequently until recently. During the last 2 years of George W. Bush's presidency, from 2006-2008, minority Democrats "threatened or used filibusters on a wide variety of issues, including legislation affecting campaign finance, abortion, war spending, the Patriot Act, and the nominations of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court and Dirk Kempthorne as Interior Secretary"
However, continues David Lightman of McClatchy Newspapers, 'Republicans appear to be taking the filibuster to a new level. They've filibustered 15 nominees to mid-level jobs that formerly got routine approval,' even though all but one were ultimately confirmed. ' "Being unable to stop filibusters can make the party in power look ineffective,' said Julian Zelizer , a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, who's written extensively on the filibuster. 'The Republican goal now is to make Obama look like an ineffective leader.' " (2)
(2) Many are also justifiably concerned about the excessive influence of corporations and wealthy private interests on government, as compared to the influence of individual citizens. Saving financiers on Wall Street has seemed to take precedence over saving the jobs and homes of Main Street voters - even if saving the world financial system was a rational precondition for avoiding another Great Depression. The Supreme Court has used this occasion to overturn past congressional legislation and has ruled that corporations' entitlement to "free speech" allows them to spend as many dollars from their coffers as they want to bankroll political parties and movements - even if that money overwhelms the amount of money that individual voters may be able or willing to spend to make their candidates' ideas known within "the public square."
B. China and Europe Are Pulling Ahead of America, As We Dither on Huge Challenges
Former Republican Commerce Secretary Peter G. Peterson summed it up: "Our country faces structural challenges that are undeniable but, politically speaking, untouchable." (3) If we continue to delay in meeting them, these problems will only grow in their scope and in the cost to fix them.
Democrats, Republicans and Independents should be able to agree with Peterson when he cites 2 "elephants in the room":
* A burden of growing, unfunded Federal liabilities - especially related to Medicare and Social Security -"could destroy the quality of life of future generations."(3)
(Yes, there is a "Social Security Trust Fund," but it constantly leaks into payment of the Federal government's general expenses. One presidential candidate in 2000 did recommend putting then-existing government surpluses into a "Social Security lock box" that could not be raided; but he was just ridiculed for the way he said "lock-box." [4] )
* A nationally low savings rate [and excessive consumption of imported goods] makes us "dangerously dependent on foreign lenders."
If these lenders pull the plug on lending, they could "trigger a true crisis: a plummeting dollar, soaring interest rates, and runaway inflation." (3)
I'm sure we could agree on other marauding mammoths that threaten our children's future:
* China and Europe are ahead of us in "green technology" using solar and wind and "clean coal" power as alternatives to fossil fuels like oil. (5)
Our own oil supplies are limited. We have lots of coal, but have done little to minimize the environmental impact of mining and burning it. Our dependence on oil from politically unstable, often hostile foreign countries makes us very vulnerable to disruptions caused by enemy violence or natural disaster. (It also adds further to our foreign debt, so long as imports exceed exports.)
* Our leading Wall Street bankers and financiers have developed a habit of looking for short-term personal profit instead of the national good.
They hired math-whizz specialists to develop and sell extremely risky financial instruments (like mortgage-backed derivatives), while disguising the house of cards they erected with investors' retirement funds. Much of the 2008 financial crisis might have been prevented if, a decade earlier, Republicans and Democrats hadn't repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, which was passed after the 1929 stock market crash precipitated the Great Depression and kept banks from speculating with, in Louis Brandeis's words, "other people's money." (6)
* We fiddle while we watch the crumbling of our infrastructure - highways and bridges; bus, train and air terminals; dams and water-supply and sewer systems.
At the same time our politicians refuse to invest in renovation that only governments can coordinate, citing the public's opposition to new taxes and "too much government."
* Speaking of travel innovation, China and Europe are ahead of us in developing high-speed long-distance rail service.
This would be one way to decongest (and reduce demand for more) highways and airports, reduce energy consumption, and create jobs.
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1. Preamble to the United States Constitution, 1787: "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
2. David Lightman, "Senate Republicans: Filibuster everything and win in November?" McClatchy Newspapers, 2/12/2010 - http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20100212/pl_mcclatchy/3425660.
3. Peter G. Peterson [Secretary of Commerce under President Richard M. Nixon], "How Business Can Rescue the U.S. Economy," Business Week, 11/5/09 - http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_46/b4155102865997.htm. Peterson doesn't just blame government or citizens. He is disturbed by the silence of business leaders, calling them "MIAs" in the battle to solve national problems (as New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman has described them). He calls for "a private-sector Marshall Plan to rescue our own economy-a vast effort in which business leaders, including CEOs and their boards, organize to be heard on the issues and not just lobby for favors. It's time to create a new nonpartisan organization, a public movement to which business leaders lend their names in order to speak out about our long-term structural problems and their potential solutions. "[We must] lead by example. That means any call to sacrifice begins with us. To take just one example: At a time when soaring health-care costs threaten U.S. competitiveness, do we fat cats really think we should get our Cadillac health benefits tax-free? It's time to get off our butts, cure ourselves of an aggravated case of short term-itis, and create a movement that makes it safe for our politicians to opt for the hard choices and unsafe for them to continue to do nothing-to deny the undeniable and pretend we can sustain the unsustainable. "
4. Don Luskin, "Social Security: There is No Trust Fund, Only IOU's, Capitalism Magazine, April 11, 2005 - http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4190.
5. Bob Herbert, " Watching China Run," The New York Times, 2/13/2010 - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/opinion/13herbert.html?scp=1&sq=china%20and%20green%20technology&st=Search. "Covering a conference on the importance of energy and infrastructure for the next American economy," Herbert reflects: "China has nothing comparable to the research, industrial and economic resources of the United States. Yet the Chinese are blowing us away in the technology race to the future. . . . What's at stake is the future of the American economy. The low-carbon era is coming. We can be dragged into that newer, greener world by leading countries like China; or we can take up the challenge and become the world's leader ourselves."
6. Melvin I. Urofsky, "The Value of Other People's Money, Op-Ed, The New York Times, 2/6/2009 - http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/opinion/07urofsky.html. "Some things never change. . . . In 1914 Louis D. Brandeis. Brandeis, a commercial lawyer and future Supreme Court justice, described a dangerous combination of avarice, lack of accountability and poor oversight in "Other People's Money, and How the Bankers Use It," one of the best-known exposés of the Progressive era. . . .
Our current crisis, after all, was in part fueled by bankers making big gambles with other people's cash. They bundled and sold sub-prime mortgages, took their profits, and then left others holding portfolios full of worthless, even toxic, paper. This was exactly the kind of behavior that Brandeis despised. He believed that it was one thing for an individual to put up capital in risky ventures, playing to win but prepared for failure. But he saw the bankers of his time dodging failure by manipulating the marketplace at the expense of smaller entrepreneurs and consumers.
For Brandeis, regulation was not supposed to be a restraint on innovation or the entrepreneurial spirit, but rather a check on unbridled greed. He believed in a free market, but one in which the government enforced rules of fair competition so that the most talented could succeed. Clear rules would help ensure that business was conducted fairly and openly."
7. Keith Bradsher, "China Sees Growth Engine in a Web of Fast Trains," The New York Times, 2/12/2010 - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/business/global/13rail.html?scp=1&sq=china,%20high%20speed%20trains&st=cse. "In China, 42 high-speed rail lines have opened or are set to open by 2012; the U.S. hopes to build its first high-speed line by 2014. . . . The Chinese bullet train, which has the world's fastest average speed, travels 664 miles" from coastal Guangzhouon to Wuhan, deep in the interior in a little more than three hours. Although this is the same distance from Boston to southern Virginia, the train takes less time than Amtrak's fastest train, the Acela, takes to go from Boston to New York. By comparison, the United States' first high-speed rail line will, by 2014, link only the 84 miles between Tampa and Orlando, Fla."