'Tawney Republicans' and the Anti-FHD Con

Nice.

Linda Stewart, the only OC mayoral candidate with the character to refrain from having a litmus test piss all over the Hometown Democracy initiative (and punished accordingly in the campaign contributions department), narrowly edges out uber-asshole Matthew Falconer in this Orlando Biz Journal online straw poll.

Pleasant too to see nominal 'democrat,' and CoC endorsee Bill Segal coming in dead last.

For shits and giggles, I looked up Teresa Jacobs' campaign website, and found this spiel on the FHD/Amendment 4 issue [emph mine]:

"...Our Founding Fathers were very wise when they created this great experiment we call America as a Constitutional, representative democracy. I believe the problem today is not our representative democracy. I believe the problem is our representatives..."

First, then, the ordering up of some powdered-wig and knee-socks patriot-porn ("The Founding Fathers") for papering over how top-to-bottom fucked-over have been Ye Shyte-Oute-of-Lucke "Constituents" of this Reagan-Revolutionary "great experiment" in letting growth and development run roughshod over the public interest for a generation (and more), and indeed even pretending that such construction-trades heavy growth provided an in-any-way sustainable proxy for a bona fide economic base--a jenga-like exercise, this, in reckless, regressive, anti-conservative (were the term to retain any of its original, Burkean meaning), aggressively malfeasant governance.

This ripoff fever dream of Sunbelt-suburban conservatives generally, and Florida conservatives in particular, was always destined to end in the bitter tears of statewide economic disaster, but it happened to have done so as a shrapnel-bit of the global clusterfuck that was/remains the Global-Finance/$8 trillion US Housing Bubble collapse of 2008. A disaster-within-a-disaster, it now ensures the lucky endowment to Florida's "Constituents" a worst-hit, last-to-recover status in this national Fail-a-thon, which I always thought was best described as the "Great Collapse," but which seems to be more commonly now referred to as the "Great Recession".

Call it "George Washington's pendulous balls," it's still an epic, quite possibly irredeemable failure of leadership and free enterprise dogma, one that any fair assessment of reality should cast the Teresa Jacobses of the political-economic sphere deeeep into the outer fringes of the electoral wilderness.

Jacobs' little FHD/Amendment 4 spiel concludes:

"...if we treat the symptoms rather than the source of the problem, things are likely to get worse, not better...There is already talk of legislatively gutting the comprehensive planning process if Amendment 4 passes."

First, the symptom/disease confusion is a nifty way of lumping together growthism's victims (outside-the-loop 'mere citizens') with the perps (insider, political donor-class growth machiners) in a nice little package called "representative democracy". The institutions are blameless and awesome, dontcha know (after all, the Founding Fathers pulled these, fully formed out of their beautiful slavocratic minds). No no no, little buddies, it's a curious plague of bad-apple individuals that are to blame here. And maybe too the childlike stupidity of voters, who err in voting the wrong types into office...except of course when they vote for someone like Teresa Jacobs, that is, who's inexplicably different and Founderish and right.

Yeah.

The internets tell me today, March 6, is the anniversary of the infamous Dredd Scott ruling. Not to minimize the grave horrors of our republic's Original Sin, but if we're going to invoke "Founding Fathers" in a debate about growth and the (non-)failures of representative democracy, consider how the Dredd money-quote, courtesy of the even-now-writhing-in-hell Chief Justice Roger Tawney, speaks not a little to the arrogance and implicit inferriority-assignation of the growth mis-management history of Florida, and the corresponding disconnect between voters and self-serving, self-flattering elites:

It is difficult at this day to realize the state of public opinion in relation to that unfortunate race [blacks], which prevailed in the civilized and enlightened portions of the world at the time of the Declaration of Independence, and when the Constitution of the United States was framed and adopted....

They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect..."

We finally managed to un-slouch our standards of 'civility and enlightenment' beyond the point where human beings were openly and legally

"bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it",

But it's a damned fool who can't recognize this toxic, predatory combination--this 'keeping inferiors in their place,' while 'turning a buck on the deal if you can! ' stuff--doesn't persist in the politics of "two Americas," as the lamentable John Edwards used to call it. It persists in just the sort of arrogance of these anti-FHD politicos, these failed-up-to-their-eyeballs muckety-mucks telling people the sky will fall, and the glory of the Founding Fathers be sullied, if local voters are given this small, proscribed taste of a more participatory democracy.

Hank Fishkind is an asshole, and other obvious gleanings.

From Aaron Deslatte's Feb 28th piece in the Sentinel posing the comical question of whether the disastrous incoming state legislature session can create jobs (hint: they're not really trying to):

" 'They [tax cuts/credits] don't create a lot of jobs, and they don't create them quickly. But they're a step in the right direction,' said Orlando economist Hank Fishkind."

What Hank the biz community whisperer is saying, is that while the Hooverdopolos legislature's welfare-to-the-donor-class has, literally, nothing to do with the crisis, it's a 'step in the right direction' in the same sense that Nero's fiddling while Rome burned was a helpful contribution:

it's a horrible failure of leadership, morally grotesque, and stupid...but hey! Who doesn't like a fiddle tune?

This and this are among the things they'll never talk about--not honestly--but which have the refreshing virtue of speaking to the crisis at hand.

"Study says 5 million foreclosures imminent"

http://www.upi.com/Business_News/2010/02/16/Study-says-5-million-foreclosures-imminent/UPI-78201266333128

"A research firm estimated the number of U.S. homes headed for foreclosure would be enough to stock the housing market with a 10-month supply of unsold homes..."

But these vary of course, market to market. Some localities are more well-and-truly fucked than others:

"...The study called these homes [not yet in foreclusure, but significantly behind schedule on mortgage payments] the "shadow inventory" of homes, which would take 10 months to sell at the current rate of sales on a national average.

At the current rate of sales in Orlando, Fla., the homes would take 27 months to sell. It would take 24 months to sell these homes in Miami and 18 months to deplete the stock at the current sales rate in Las Vegas."

Nice.

If it's FHA Socialism, What's with All the Foreclosures?

read this on Mike Synan's blog today, and ended up belching up a response far in excess of the comment section limits:

"Oh how we all laughed at the naievety [of an unsophisticated Obama supporter in the wake of the o8 election expressing a feeling that she's now got a President who seems to actually give a shit about the problems of average people...the you tube clip is classily titled "Obama is going to pay for my gas and mortgage!!!!"], but almost a year later what's happened? Looks like President Obama is going to pay a lot of morgtages. It's not something that's going away either. According to FHA guidelines, the program will run at least through 2011. Ever met a prgram the government started and then wanted to get rid of?

People obviously made fun of this woman for saying Obama would pay for her gas, but is that so far fetched? The home heating oil assistance program has been in effect for a long time now. Heck, we even allow Hugo Chavez to pay for our heating oil! It may seem like a stupid thing then and now, but President Obama is paying people's mortgages. Will he pay for our gas too at some point?"

Synan's not usually so out on the ragged wingnutty edge. Must've been driven a little off-rocker by Obama's having won the Nobel Peace Prize (Atrios; "Henry Kissinger Peace Prize") this morning.

The woman in the YouTube clip said no such thing, naturally. Her exact words were, "I won't have to worry about putting gas in my car, about paying my mortgage...if I help him [get elected] he's going to help me". I read that as an off the cuff way of saying Obama isn't driven by the Bushie "Fuck You Buddy, I've Got Mine" right wing school of governance and political economics. My reply was as follows, and in my Walter Mitty delusion, it would've brought my fellow commenters to tears, would've brought them to Michael Moore's 1950s pro-union Jesus (no time to pretty up the links just now):

I missed the memo that local homeowners had woken up on socialist easy-street. Wonder if the google will back up that story.

Bizjournals.com just today says "Orlando-area mortgage delinquency and foreclosure rates doubled in August compared with the previous year" Hmm.

Just over 10% of area homes are formally in foreclosure. And just shy of 1 in 5 area mortgages are more than 90 days delinquent. Sounds like an awful lot of folks are missing this socialist gravy train.

http://orlando.bizjournals.com/orlando/stories/2009/10/05/daily54.html

A local public affairs radio program from late August {http://www.wmfe.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=9733&news_iv_ctrl=1441} had on First Florida Home Loans President Grant Simon and a bankruptcy atty from the OC Legal Aid Society. Lemme tell you, they sure didn't paint a rosy picture on this hilarious topic of local foreclosures, and said nothing about any FHA money trees.

An excerpt that goes right to the heart of the silly suggestion that some army of O-town welfare queens are laughing all the way to the FHA:

"I've got to tell you, the loan modification process is not an easy process, and many times within my sphere of influence, and with some friends and acquaintances...they'll bring their paperwork in to me and I'll review it for them and quite frankly it takes me a little bit of time to wade through the paperwork and say 'this is what you're really being offered'...".

That's the President of a realty & mortgage company speaking right there. Not Hugo Chavez. Or Hitler.

Add to that a BusinessWeek article from TODAY making the following point:

"the nation’s housing market [has for a year] becom[e] ever more dependent on the Federal Housing Administration and yet some of the same scoundrels who made risky subprime loans [have since moved to] originating new loans, this time with the federal government’s backing." This has meant that, according to a similar story in yesterday's LA Times, "The percentage of FHA loans that are delinquent or in foreclosure climbed to nearly 8% at the end of June, from about 5.5% in early 2006". Both articles say this is leading the Agency to ratchet up lending criteria, even as a bailout or new-wave housing market collapse (take your pick) looms in the near future.

Ratcheted up loan criteria will put the FHA back in black, but it also means struggling housing markets like Orlando's get a fresh kick in the crotch.

We're looking here at the wreckage of working people suckered into crazy balloon mortgages by predatory lenders...lenders who themselves were meeting a Greenspan-created demand of institutional investors...who we should never forget were and are the ones having ACTUALLY gotten their chestnuts pulled out of the fire by gummint bailouts. The little people with the mortgages were gullible, but were also goaded by bad 'expert' advice.

We're also looking by now at the wreckage of fiscally conservative people of modest means losing everything to a burst housing bubble's knock-on effects: a hobbled consumer economy and labor market...with Florida's famously inadequate tax structure as an added anchor. All the while unemployment points toward depression-era levels, and the Sentinel runs stories about a state budget "in shambles" and a new round of savage cuts on tap, even as welfare, food stamp, medicaid and prison rolls are at all-time highs. I'm not seeing any giggling lucky duckies here.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/politics/orl-state-budget-woes-100709,0,3776024.story

The mortgage broker/realtor Grant Simon mentioned above takes the view that none of this local foreclosure bleeding will stop until the unemployment crisis turns around...but here's the worst of the worst:

Lots of smart, market-savvy people are saying that were looking at a 'new normal'. That, in the words of a WSJ article from monday, "It Will Be Years Before Lost Jobs Return -- and Many Never Will". {http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125470053662262957.html} Economic development expert Richard Florida has made this same point, with sunbelt cities like our own particularly in mind.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200903/meltdown-geography

Struggling homeowners of ALL political stripes are more likely to fall into the waiting (& radio advertising) arms of "foreclosure rescue" sharks than will ever successfully negotiate a hard-to-qualify-for FHA maze. Attorney General McCollum's office describes these as "unscrupulous companies...taking advantage of the desperate situation our state’s homeowners are facing. These companies promise they can help save homes, then take outrageous up-front fees...often keep the fees, take no additional action, and let the homes fall into foreclosure."

http://myfloridalegal.com/mortgagefraud

Sure, Synan. This all sounds like a complete laugh riot. Especially the part about upside down mortgage-holders living on easy street.

Like Mundt said, "Brother is it Hot!"

I came across this CNN Asia news item earlier, courtesy of the 'dollars and sense' blog: "HR manager beaten to death by angry workers" And, this, from Alternet:

"Angry workers beat to death a human resources vice president after he laid off 42 employees at an auto-parts manufacturing company in southern India...four to five workers, belonging to a union not recognized by the company, barged into his office and beat him up with iron rods..."

Then, I came across this:

Why Jim Badasci 'Went Postal': How Bullying Bosses and Economic Devastation Are Behind America's Latest Workplace Shooting

"...Here's what happened last Tuesday: Jim Badasci, who'd worked at Fresno Equipment for 10 years, showed up Tuesday morning with a shotgun...the first thing he did was kill a fellow co-worker...Badasci, wearing a hunting vest filled with ammo, proceeded to "shoot the equipment" -- in this case, John Deere agricultural machinery...The really surprising part of the story is how four of the employees managed to stop Badasci from killing anyone else...Though few details have come out about how they managed to convince an armed killer to stop shooting...Rather than kill more fellow-workers, Badasci took his own life..."

"...Jim Badasci had been driven to desperation by a particular supervisor and the company's toleration of the supervisor's mistreatment...the supervisor had made his life hell, and unfortunately the company owners decided not to do anything about it, even though others had also complained."

The writer, Mark Ames, makes the following conclusion, which makes a lot of sense to me:

"Getting screwed over the way we have been these past 30 years is something new -- as are the workplace massacres, pitting employee against Company, which only started after the Reagan Revolution handed all power to the shareholders, and convinced the losers in that deal -- the 90 percent of Americans whose lives got worse in every measurable way since then -- that in fact it was in our own best interests to turn corporations into little Profit Gulags, where the inmates could be downsized at will, and mass-layoffs in the tens and hundreds of thousands became so common in good times and in bad that it proved Stalin's dictum about "one victim is a tragedy, a million victims is a statistic.""

Not sure how big-picture accurate it is to say that hardcore labor exploitation "only started" with the revanchists of Reagan Era "New Federalism," but i take the larger point for sure (the only correction being that the reality is even worse than Ames presents it...this is why reading Zinn's wonderful Peoples' History through to the end is a chore that devolves into such a leaden, soul-crushing slog).

And how much you wanna bet the Indian union inthe CNN story went unrecognized because it actually sought to do what unions are for--that is, make the kind of cut-the-shit shopfloor-democratic demands that stand up to illegitimate power at the scale of our daily lives. This, as the saying goes, is what democracy looks like. And the violent turns these stories take just manifest MLK's word of caution that "those who make peaceful reform impossible will make violent revolution inevitable". Not rocket surgery. Another relevant quote: "Power concedes nothing without a struggle. It never did and it never will" (Frederick Douglass). The upper limits and general nature of these struggles are determined in the end not by the changemakers, but by the controllers of a challenged and untenable 'world as it is'.

Tempted to cite the tongue-in-cheek fumbling militancy of "El Duderino"--"this aggression will not stand, man" (or probably better yet, something from the Coen brothers' Barton Fink)--but of course this is serious and tragic stuff. Plus, there are times when falling back on dark humor, the "tragicomic" kind with with failure and futility always-already-embedded into its hostile rebellion...just fails to satisfy.

CommonDreams.org ran an article titled

"World Consumption Plunges Planet Into 'Ecological Debt', Says Leading Thinktank

Consumption exceeds Earth's annual 'biocapacity' today amid warnings of dependence on overseas food and energy"

It made me think of how Michael Moore's new movie apparently dares to ask 'why is capitalism so great again?'. It made me think how I can't help but agree with that questioning, and how weak the pro-market reply seems to actually be.

A bottom-line observation I find every day more difficult to disagree with: "Ecological devastation, resulting from the insatiable need to increase profits, is not an accidental feature of capitalism: it is built into the system’s DNA and cannot be reformed away" The authors (the one I'm most familiar with is an academic who, by his own admission, got creamed by Nader in the Green Party primary of 2000) go on to clarify: "the capitalist economic system cannot tolerate limits on growth; its constant need to expand will subvert any limits that might be imposed in the name of “sustainable development.” Thus the inherently unstable capitalist system cannot regulate its own activity, much less overcome the crises caused by its chaotic and parasitical growth, because to do so would require setting [untenable, unacceptable] limits upon accumulation..." The above is from the so-called "Belem Ecosocialist Declaration", distributed at the World Social Forum in Belem, Brazil, in January this year. I'm an avid reader of (the non-technical literature of) Dean Baker, Paul Krugman, and Joseph Stiglitz, even Jeffery Sachs up to a point, but somewhere along the line it becomes pretty clear that these guys and their visions of reforming the market system from within--particularly given the speed and depth of what needs doing such that industrial society can be brought into some kind of accord with the finite renewable limits of the natural world--just aren't speaking to the power-relations of the world as it is. The failure of democracy + capitalism to meet this front-and-center challenge is both a tragedy in itself, but also a compelling proof that the 'hypercapitalism' of our age and its "magic of the marketplace" have been

(a) a very thoroughly-conducted and global experiment for demonstrating what free markets can offer humanity, and

(b) this experiment, while having lots to say for itself, and being a really energetic, neat and elegant system, what with the self-regulating price equilibration, financing of all sorts of projects, lightning quick movement of funds from one end of the globe to the other, is in fact a failed experiment. It is, in its essence, a 'parasitical' system that leads to steep social pyramids and ghastly exploitations. There are over 20 million slaves living in the world today. Over 50 million children btw 5 and 11 yrs old who work all day rather than playing and being educated. A non-trivial percentage of these children are sex workers. Ecology aside, this is unacceptable. Intolerable. But the natural world is not a thing to be put 'aside' of course, as the 'ecological debt' article makes clear.

It's also clear, it seems to me at least, that nothing will change. Not until (and even then it's no sure bet) climate change begins to undeniably manifest it's truly mass-murderous and globally destabilizing potential. This might still not be enough to turn the heads that matter (ask a person from Darfur how much difference it makes that the world is made to recognizes a an appallingly high and rising pile of corpses). Assume it would matter. By then we'll be well into irreversible cascades of ecosystemic imbalance, which recent evidence suggests (see George Monbiot's recent column in the Guardian, "Not Even Wrong") may very possibly mark a dystopian moment well beyond the point of no return. What a stupid, stupid system, then, to find 'ourselves' (the 'royal we' as they say) so enthralled with. you don't hear the Thatcherite slogan TINA much anymore ("there is no alternative"), but that's because it's unnecessary to bother to say aloud. It's understood.

Obama and his party of the American left (insert rimshot here)

• can't (or won't) manage to cap credit card interest rates...at 30 fucking persent;
• they can't/won't legislate a profit-free single payer health insurance system, even as thousands die every day for lack of such a thing;
• they can't/won't effectively cap CEO salaries,
• or legally (re)open the labor market to any reasonable chance for widespread labor-union regeneration;
• won't staunch a foreclosure crisis with "right to rent" legislation (see Dean Baker), and
• won't address a campaign financing system that cripples our democracy (reforms which the president once upon a time championed as a candidate, then dropped like a bad habit).

And they won't move us to a green economy, nor into any ecologically "stable state" economy, even in a rare historical moment where a massive public-sector mobilization--a green New Deal--is not only a possibility, but

(a)would offer desperately needed work to a nation on it's knees with underutilized capacity and joblessness,

(b) would offer a glowing example to the rest of the world in a moment of existential ecological threat not a little spearheaded by ourselves and our Anglo antecedents, and

(c) would offer brand spanking new SUSTAINABLE public infrastructures on which to build generations-worth of follow-on prosperity.

From a certain point of view, one can see the difficulties faced by the President and his Congress. Beset by Blue Dogs, an inherently conservative and incrementalist Constitution, a volatile undercurrent of demagogued, angry and well-armed rightist populism, a very unhelpful media environment, and a very well-institutionalized corporate sector long accustomed to calling the shots whenever push comes to shove. I'm sure there's more--complications of federalism, a reactionary-dominated Supreme Court--but that's a pretty good start. On the other hand, this is a guy--and an insurgent party--who came to power with promises of reform and changemaking. I recently heard it said that Obama himself has been known to quote Frederick Douglass' dictum that 'power concedes nothing without a fight'...recognizing the need for a fight, then, one can only be bitterly disappointed that the blue team isn't bringing--it's impossible to imagine it's being brought by this crowd, in fact--to this fight the paradigm-shifting best, most compelling and most transformative agenda possible. So long as the market and it's corporations remain in the saddle, and so long as market thinking works a kind of 'fascism reigning in the heads' (Foucalt) of even (or especially) our most self-consciously 'progressive' elites, we're up shit's creek without a paddle. With a seriously wicked storm blowing in, to boot.

Here's a transcript offered by John Nichols on his Nation Magazine "Beat" blog, in a post that applauds Leno and Moore for a bit of what Cornell West (by way of Socrates) likes to call the fearless speech of "paideia":

LENO: Now is reform possible? Is reform possible?

MOORE: Well, I, I don't, you know, a hundred years ago when there was child labor, they said, you know, 'Can we reform child labor? Can we just regulate it, like if the factories were safer and the kids go to school, we can still have 12-year-olds working in the factory, right?

LENO: Right.

MOORE: No, not right. It's wrong. Some things are just wrong. And this capitalist economic system that we have, it might have been right at one point, it's not right now. And I don't think we're ever gonna put the genie back in the bottle. So we need to come up with something new to replace it. And I'm not talking about... This isn't a debate between capitalism versus socialism.

LENO: Right.

MOORE: I'm actually suggesting go back to our roots of this country, democracy. What if we had an economy that you and I had a say in? Right now, we all don't have much of a say in this economy. What if we applied our democratic principles and said, 'We, the people, have a right to determine how this economy is run.' I think we'd be in much better shape than what we're going through right now.

Juxtapose with the following:

"During arguments in a campaign-finance case, the court's majority conservatives seemed persuaded that corporations have broad First Amendment rights and that recent precedents upholding limits on corporate political spending should be overruled.

SONIA SOTOMAYOR

But Justice Sotomayor [in her very first appearance on the Court] suggested the majority might have it all wrong -- and that instead the court should reconsider the 19th century rulings that first afforded corporations the same rights flesh-and-blood people have.

Judges "created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons," she said. "There could be an argument made that that was the court's error to start with...[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics.""

Important and connected points, neither of which one would be well-advised to hold their breath over the witness of meaningful action upon.

UPDATE:

Then, the excellent Chris Hedges cuts right to the sobering chase:

"But the game is up.

The utopian dreams of globalization have been exposed as a sham...The absurd idea that the marketplace alone should determine economic and political constructs caused the crisis...It left the world’s poor worse off and the United States with the largest deficits in human history. Globalization has become an excuse to ignore the mess. It has left a mediocre elite desperately trying to save a system that cannot be saved and, more important, trying to save itself. “Speculation,” then-President Jacques Chirac of France once warned, “is the AIDS of our economies.” We have reached the terminal stage."

Quoting labor organizer Larry Holmes, Hedges continues,

"The economic crisis is a structural crisis. The recovery is only a recovery for Wall Street. It can’t be sustained, and Obama will be blamed for it. He is doing everything Wall Street demands. But this will be a dead end."

Bummer. And man, but it carries a plausibility that's hard to see the fallacies of. I don't see them.