Overdue For American Stew

Americans are not stupid. Despite what some people believe, Americans are not “muppets” who just hang around the mall, waiting to be told how to look, what to wear, what to say, what to buy; hapless victims of whatever force du jour spends the most money to get their attention. And, by in large, Americans know what is wrong with this country.

Despite what the 24/7-info-tainment-news juggernaut might suggest, most Americans really just want to get on with their lives, and laugh and love and hear their baby’s first spoken word and eat a hot dog at the baseball (here, you may substitute your favorite sport and favorite choice of junk food) game.

But Americans are also a hearty lot. They feel comfortable at the helm of their lives and personal destiny. They prefer to be self sufficient, to get ahead of their bills, and hopefully, to eventually retire knowing that they gave the kids a good start in life.

No American parent wants her children to know eviction notices, bill collectors, pink slips, bankrupting illness, or even the challenge of how to put food on the table or gas up the car to get to work.

Americans know (as most have experienced first hand) that the challenges faced by their own family are both microcosmic and symptomatic of the challenges that our nation faces as a whole.

Yet Americans have all kinds of great ideas about how to meet these challenges. Historically, we once took those ideas and sent them to Washington via our elected officials, where they were chopped and mashed and mixed and stirred and salted and cooked over a medium heat for hours, if not weeks, by way too many cooks, into a hearty stew of sorts. The final product usually ended up tasting roughly like a composite of many easily recognizable American-made recipes for making things better on the whole for everybody. And it was good.

As I may have mentioned, Americans are not stupid. Hungry, maybe, but not stupid. They have noticed that both their own family affairs and national matters once under their general control (or controlled through their elected representatives), are falling more and more outside their control and into the hands of a very few whose agenda does not require or desire input from American families at all.

Americans notice that it now takes both adults in the household working outside the home to buy the same goods and services that their parents had provided with only one adult working outside the home.

Americans notice that there is no longer mutual loyalty between employer and employee. Gone are the days when it was possible for an individual to work 35 hard years for the same company and retire with a decent pension and health benefits.

Americans now are very aware of insecurity in the jobs market that has not been seen since the 1920’s.

American parents do not enjoy seeing their children, with a mortgage’s worth of educational debt, being reduced to a band of gypsies, having to constantly pick up stakes, and move from one at-will-contract-piece-work-temp-job to another.

Many American empty nests have returned to full houses. American parents know their kids are not lazy or losers as some pundits have said, just overwhelmed by events far beyond their control. They played by the rules and somebody moved the goal posts to Mumbai.

And all Americans know that the cooks in Washington have added an “r” to their job description and are indeed cooking something, but not a dish made from the ideas of Americans, or designed to help Americans fulfill the promises made to themselves or to their children. And we can’t help but notice that the brew stinks to high heaven of graft, nepotism, and general corruption.

Who are they cooking for? Here, American opinions differ. Some believe that they are simply cooking up meth for hegemonic corporate wealth, while others believe that they are serving up king’s dishes only to the monolithic master that is big government. But what is the bottom line to my gastronomical analogy?

Simply put, Americans don’t give a damn who these criminal cookers are cooking for, but these c[r]ooks need to start cooking stew for Americans again. Americans are sick and tired of handing over kitchen privileges to smooth talking chefs de cuisine who  promise a fancy meal but deliver an empty belly.

Americans need roads without sinkholes and bridges that bridge and schools that actually train our kids to compete in a global market. Yes, we ARE smart enough to know that the world is spinning faster and we are falling behind.

Americans need water that is safe to drink and air that is fit to breath and food that is actually food and not some agribusiness lab experiment designed to enhance corporate profits by use of chemically-laced garbage.

Americans really, really don’t need to be told what they must do in their back yards, whom they must love, and which God, if any, they must believe in. Not by the government, not by the corporations, not by the churches. You work for us, your highnesses. You want our vote? You want our business? You want our devotion? Okay, start earning it again. We are done carrying your water for you.

Stop giving away the farm and start dancing with the date that brung ya  (and we don’t mean the tramp who did you on the sly in the parking lot) or you are in for a real American-style rude awakening, complete with the proverbial tar and feathers and a very real one-way trip outta town.

Americans know full well that this next election will have both sides clambering to spend more than two billion dollars to try and make us behave like lemmings at the cliff, and we know that the dubious wisdom of most of those billion-dollar-bumper-sticker-bromides will not be fit to line a litter box.

And Americans are smart enough to know who is paying for all the swill slung our way and what tastier, more filling, American dishes could be baked with all that dough. Because, as I said, Americans are not stupid, just hungry.

Americans are definitely long overdue for their stew and expect it now. They deserve it. They worked and sweated and voted and paid taxes and fought and died for that stew. They don’t want caviar, and they don’t want pink slime either. Just a decent stew will do.

J. Brandeis Sperandeo

Oh Crap, I Might Be A Progressive!

The way you hear some Republican politicians talking, you would think that Progressives envision the United States of America as some kind of potential atheistic, socialist utopia, where the universal values of freedom, liberty, drive, self-reliance, personal responsibility, and accountability, are all sacrificed on the altar of a “one size fits all”  Castro-colored jumpsuit of big-brother-type surveillance, intrusion, and enforced mediocrity, with the nation’s populace cowering in fear, like District 12 in the Hunger Games.

I would like to use the epithet recently used by Rick Santorum in response to this drivel, but my Google P.C. filter would probably delete the whole post, so I will just say that nothing could be farther from the truth.

Progressives tend to get lumped in with a few nut jobs on the extreme left who rant and rave and kvetch about everything and everybody and see conspiracies behind every door. The emptiest vessels make the loudest noise. These are not Progressives. These are idiots, just like the loudmouth idiots on the extreme right.

But, I am warning you right now, if you read below, you might discover that you are secretly a Progressive too. You won't have to tell your friends about it or change your status on Facebook but…

Almost every Progressive likes money and vacations in Aruba as much as the members of the Chamber of Commerce do and is willing to work his or her butt off to earn it. Progressives are all about reaping the rewards that come from personal responsibility, entrepreneurial drive, self-reliance, and motivation. Do any of you know a Progressive who actually lives on a commune? Didn't think so.

But, as with anyone else who starts their own business, getting a tax incentive for hiring vets and/or covering employees' health insurance would be nice.

A streamlined process of patents and paperwork would be nice.

Acquiring investors without a mountain of red tape would be nice.

Being able to truck products by way of an interstate highway system of decent roads and bridges would be nice.

(Readers inner dialogue)

 I feel the same way? Uh, oh. What’s happening to me! I look the same, but...

All Progressives want their kids to work hard and compete successfully for a big old slice of that global economic pie in the 21^st century.

And so, they want our public schools retooled, upgraded, and modernized, not dumbed down, outsourced, and de-funded.

Progressives want a government that is smart enough, not just to let economic events play out into a catastrophe and then sell off the pieces to the highest bidder, but a government that can anticipate those events, prevent what is preventable, and better prepare us for other circumstances beyond their immediate control.

Progressives believe in jobs, jobs, JOBS! Not in China, or Mexico, or India, or Brazil, but American jobs, right here in our own country, and they think that it is pretty dodgy that the same folks who shipped all those jobs overseas are the ones who are about to spend $1/2 billion supporting the anti-progressive candidates in the next election.

(Reader’s inner dialogue)

Oh, wait! Weren't jobs supposed to be created by letting the rich conservatives trickle em down to us? Oh right, that never worked. Oh crap, I really might be a Progressive! My Dad will be so disappointed...

Every Progressive loves their “Freedoms” just as much as Sarah Palin.

Progressives want to live, work, and love, without some government politician spying on/in the doctor’s office, forcing probes (TV monitors included) inside the private parts of women and children.

Like anyone else, they don’t want some billionaire politician-buyer telling them to hold an aspirin between their knees and then publicly branding them whores and  prostitutes, if they elect to go aspirin-free. The 16^th century has come and gone. Pleasantville was just a movie, not a blueprint. When you think of Progressives, think, uh, progress...

Like anyone else, Progressives want their personal business to be their personal business, not their boss’ business.

Progressives want to worship their own personal God, or not, without some government politician forcing some state-sanctioned religion down their throats. 

Like anyone else, Progressives don’t want some politician telling them how they must dress while walking down the street or whom they can love or hate or ignore. That's called liberty. It's an American invention.

Just like anyone else, Progressives would prefer to walk down the street in their own neighborhood to get some candy and a soda without getting arrested by the police or shot by an HOA toady.

Most older Progressives (just like in the Tea Party) want the politicians in government to keep their damned dirty ape-paws off of Medicare and Social Security. Entitlement? You bet they are entitled! They worked all of their lives for it and, by God, they've earned it! 

(Reader’s inner dialogue)

Hey, I’m all about not getting trod on by the government and I don’t like the idea of getting cheated out of what I paid for, or shot over my new JZ hoodie and a bag of Skittles.  Oh, gosh, I just know my friends will start to notice the change!..

Most Progressives are plenty conservative.

The government is supposed to collects taxes. Then they are supposed to spend that money on what Americans need, in a fiscally prudent, conservative way, without having to be babysat by their constituents who elected politicians specifically so that they could get on with their own lives without feeling like they just got fleeced. We generated a budget surplus under Bill Clinton, you know. We can do it again. The Congressional Paul Ryan Plan would add $5.4 trillion to the national  debt over the next decade. 

Progressives also think that we should conserve $4 billion of our tax dollars that Congress is currently giving away to the richest corporations on earth and spend the money instead on fixing roads and bridges and schools. No more bridges to nowhere. No more pet projects for political donors. No more pork. Period.

Progressives would have preferred to have conserved the trillions of our tax dollars that were blown by some politicians in government on wars based on made up reasons. As only one example, the administration under  President Bush/Cheney literally lost $8-billion in cash in Iraq. Eight giant pallets worth. Filled a whole C-130. Gone. Can’t find it. Oops!

Much more importantly, every Progressive thinks that we should conserve the precious lives of our sons and daughters instead of giving the government an automatic green light to make our kids fight and die overseas in wars based on made up reasons. We had a Progressive president during WWII, but we had a real reason for that war.

Progressives believe that it’s the government’s friggin job to conserve the quality of our air, food, and water, so that all of our kids and grandkids have a livable world in the future, even if it costs a little more to keep it that way. They feel it’s worth it but wonder why some corporations don't feel the same way.

Most Progressives also take personal responsibility by steadfastly adhering to the laws of the land, remaining fully accountable, even when it hurts, but wonder why some politicians let those big “corporations are people, my friend” do everything to avoid any responsibility at all.

Progressives believe that it is NOT okay to allow for billionaires to buy their own personal politicians and Supreme Court Justices. Just ain’t American. Period.

(Reader’s inner dialogue)

That does it, Brandeis! You have ruined me for life!

Sorry.

Seriously, this is not an exhaustive list, but, if you are reading any of the above and saying to yourself, “hey, even though I’m a Republican or Libertarian, or Independent, or just plain Unaffiliated, I agree with a whole lot of that stuff,” don’t be alarmed. You were probably a Progressive all along. No one will notice if you just quietly use your head, listen to your heart, tune out all that fear and smear garbage, and vote your conscience.

J. Brandeis Sperandeo

Why I Joined The Obama Campaign

It wasn’t just the half-rabid, race-bating, gun-toting, union-bashing, Jesus-trashing, anti-Semitic, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic, right wing conspiracy theorists that are flooding the blogosphere with fear, vitriol, and just plain hate.

It wasn’t just the truly out-of-this-world zany, scary, shameful, side show, Houdini-like contortions of attention-starved, money-hungry, morally challenged clowns in the circus that calls itself the GOP presidential race.

It wasn’t just the Citizens United case, which has already allowed an unending barrage of secret corporately funded GOP campaign propaganda to virtually drown out the voices of reason or political compromise otherwise necessary for the betterment of the American people.

It wasn’t just the efforts of state and local corporate-backed GOP politicians to disenfranchise millions of young, old, poor, sick, and minority voters, strip women of the right to choose what happens to their own bodies, prevent gays and lesbians from having open legal relationships, and  impose a political theocracy on an otherwise secular society.

It wasn’t just the millions of Americans who have no jobs, no health insurance, and no hope for the future because of a corporate economic strategy that has all but sacrificed them on the altars of vulture capitalism and currency manipulation.

It wasn’t any or even all of the above together that got me off my rump to join the President’s 2012, re-election campaign. I was pushed over the edge by a single article in last Sunday’s New York Times. (February 12, 2012, Page 1, Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It.)

You can read it for yourself, but I will give you the gist:  in the last ten years, about twice as many proud, really hard working, formerly self-reliant, independent Americans have been forced to tap into government assistance to pay their bills, feed their families, or see to grandma’s operations.

Government programs are now paying out about $7,000 for every man, woman, and child in this country. These are not welfare payments. These are payments, subsidies, and tax breaks, for working or retired Americans who had this help coming to them in one legitimate way or another.

The idea that they both need and must take this money goes against the traditional values of the people interviewed and, I believe, the values of most working Americans reduced to accepting government help. And it must also stick in their collective craw that taking this money under present conditions will saddle their kids with a mountain of future debt.

But instead of demanding to know how the division of wealth got so skewed in the last ten years (that wealthy income earners scammed a 257% raise while the working class got a 17% pay cut), and which political party might better work to put them on a level playing field again, most of those interviewed seemed resolved to simply start living without the assistance and somehow try to forge ahead on their own.

These people appeared far from foolish, yet they were poised like lemmings on a cliff,  ready to dive off into oblivion in support of the same folks who put them in the position of having to beg for help in the first place.

In what more resembles an uber-stoic scenario of the Samurai, they appear to be blaming themselves for a mess that may have happened on their watch but was clearly not their fault and to stand ready to fall on the sword for multi-national corporations and their surrogates in the GOP elite; better to die a poor, but honorable, death.

But I can’t just sit back and let these Americans take a fall without a fight. If they can't or won't fight for themselves, I can and will. This is still America. In this country, we look after our own. I already did my part once, but I guess it’s time to ante up again. And so I’ll make phone calls and knock on doors and talk to whoever will listen to me. 

President Obama is not perfect, but he genuinely cares about and is working hard for all Americans, including the same hard-working Americans who compelled me to join his campaign. The other side only cares about how to line their own pockets with cash, and you ought to know that full well by now.

Maybe you need another reason(s) to finally say “I am an American too, and I just reached my limit.” You know you have many from which to choose. I already have mine.

J. Brandeis Sperandeo

p.s. To all of you, who get angry with me when I phone you during your favorite prime time T.V. show, please blame my wife.  She ordered the Sunday Times for me!


The New York Times reported that "safety net" eligibility incomes for government assistance rose from < $26,997 in 1975, to < $49, 317, in 2010. Per capita income for the county containing the people interviewed had declined 13% in the last ten years. 


The Times also reported that an average of all national income has declined at only about 3% over this same period, but I believe that the figures I cited in the body of my piece are accurate, as they reflect changes in upper class income v. working class income.

Just Business Or Just Bulls#!t?

When does just business become just bulls#!t? The examples listed below should come as no great news, but my take on who exactly is to blame might just surprise you.

When I was a kid watching the Andy Griffith Show, the grocery merchant who raised prices on his produce just before putting them on sale was held up as an object of scorn and ridicule. Today, this  money for nothin paradigm is standard. We consumers not only allow it, we continually reward it. 

I would argue that we have allowed profit to mutate, like a 1950’s uranium-fueled monster, from the prime motivation of business to its sole be-all/end-all, and have given them a green light to use the most heinous and despicable of means to achieve that end. Blatantly obvious? Well, I am not just talking about Hershey making the candy bar smaller before they raise the price.

As only one example, and solely in the name of profit, the marketing profiteers, or marketeers for short, have sexualized and brainwashed our young children to make them feel that they simply cannot do without various brands of fast food, designer clothes, makeup, and electronics.

Marketeers even have a catchy name for their targeted demographic: Tweens. Sound like a generation of innocent, cuddly stuffed animals? Not after Madison Avenue gets through with them.

Do 10-year-olds really need $120 shoes or the latest iphone? Yes they do, if they want to be cool and sexy enough to remain generally accepted in their circle of other cool and sexy 10-year-old friends. This message underlies the Tweens marketing strategy.

Just business? They are 10 years old for crying out loud! At what point do we acknowledge the pathology of the whole Toddlers and Tiaras syndrome and agree that it is not worth the profit to confuse and pollute the minds of kids who have yet to produce their first hormone just so marketeers can create a generation of children who begin and continue on a life-long quest of rampant consumption to avoid the unbearable loneliness of in-crowd ostracization?

And by “we”, I mean we parents who buy this stuff for our kids. If we stopped, the marketeers would stop peddling their stuff to our children. Marketeers may be acting amorally, but we are acting immorally, when we give up and give in to the entreaties of our already over-privileged offspring.

But it’s not just stuff that business folks are peddling to our kids. It is also junk, as in dope. Expensive, brain rewiring, addictive, suicide-inducing, psychotropic meds, once reserved exclusively for the severely mentally ill in state hospitals, are being hawked through every media outlet by the large pharmacorps, now course through the veins of one out of four Americans. Pharmadope is being handed out like candy to kids every time they get mad or sad  or get a bad math score.

Okay, most of us know that it does not exactly take a genius to complete an online Masters in psychology, team up with a greedy shrink, and make a bundle off of parental angst by selling pharmadope to our kids. But we let them.

After all, most parents are too busy being “sped-up” by their bosses to actually take the time and responsibility required to raise their own children. Instead of demanding that these pseudo-psychologist, charlatans actually learn more meaningful ways to counsel our sincerely troubled kids, and let the rest simply be mad or sad once in a while, we allow them to prescribe pharmadope which lops off the top 20% of their personalities.

And how do we respond to the scurvy antics of the oligopolists in the service industry? We just bend over and take it--that is how we respond.

The other day, our cable provider, without spending a dime and without a moment’s notice, deleted the classic movie channel that we had been getting from day one as part of our expanded basic service package. But first, they surreptitiously changed the name of our expanded service to basic starter service and then tried to tell us that the movie company forced them to put the channel in an upgraded package. Cable wanted $18/month to put back what they had just deleted. The movie company told me that this was not true at all.

This nasty news came as the final insult to injury as it appeared right on the heels of a 4.3% general price hike and numerous other increases for the same old service. They also informed me that the HDTV I was conned into buying was actually just a big flat-screen TV unless we paid them an extra $9/month for the upgraded HD service.

If I had bundled last year like all the big companies and my children had been telling me to, I’d be out some serious change today, and my only alternative would have been to rip out my entire connection to the outside world and start over. Those who bundled are now tightly bundled up in a straitjacket, and don’t tell me that this is not exactly how those cable folks planned it. We let it happen. Just business? At least they provide a real service in exchange for our hard-earned cash. 

When we think about the banking industry, we think of the old traditional bankers who took our money, put it together with other people’s money, lent it out to rich buddies, and made a profit on it. Nothing to complain about, because we got a toaster and some decent interest on our savings, right?

But bankers in the 21^st century lent out billions to families in adjustable rate mortgages, for amounts that exceeded the actual value of their homes, when they knew that said families could never pay back the money once the interest payments ballooned at the end of five years or so. Bad business? Not for 21^st Century Bankers. They made out like, uh, bandits.

21^st Century Bankers first made a lot of money charging a bunch of  origination fees etc. to the borrowers and made more money on the repayments until the balloons came due and the families were evicted from their under-water homes out into the streets.

21^st Century Bankers then bundled up thousands of these worthless loans, (and privately called them toxic securities, because nobody in their right mind would feel secure about touching them) and lied about their worth to their own rich buddy customers. 21^st Century  Bankers then unloaded these insecure securities for billions more than what they were worth, which was nothing.

21^st Century Bankers then lied to the insurance companies about the huge multiple meltdowns of yellow cake and took out big old insurance policies against their potential loss in value. So when the giant radioactive ants began to terrorize Wall Street, 21^st Century Bankers raked in even more billions from the insurance companies.

Then, 21^st Century Bankers lied to the U.S. Congress about their little diabolical scheme to flood the world with their toxic tailings.

If all this seems like it should be against the law, it is. The SEC got really mad at 21^st Century Bankers but only levied civil fines at a rate of pennies on the dollar on what banks got by committing the fraud. This allowed 21^st Century Bankers to keep tens of billions in illegally obtained cash on which they paid not a dime in taxes.

The rest of us were told that we had to bail out the 21^st Century Bankers and insurance companies, and we grumbled a bit and then just sat back while they put most of that unlawfully obtained money for nothin in off-shore accounts and used the rest to literally buy politicians just in time for the next round of swindling. Not surprised yet? Not thoroughly disgusted?

Well, it might surprise/disgust you to know that the current frontrunner in the Tea/GOP presidential race is a multi-millionaire who was born into millions, but made $200-$250 more millions by running a chop shop on companies that once had real people working inside.

Mitt Romney is proud to be a corporate raider. Corporate raiders don’t help a company to make a better widget. Their only goal is to increase profits for a tiny number of wealthy stockholders. Corporate raiders typically walk in the building, fire as many employees as possible, outsource those same jobs to semi-slave laborers overseas, and then automate the rest of the operation. Just business?

If Mitt and his corporate raiders can make more money by throwing the company into bankruptcy, no problemo. And, if an entire American small town community is destroyed by the mass firings, so be it. Mitt Romney made millions by bankrupting one in five of the companies he got a hold of, and that’s not counting the companies he merely shipped overseas.

Mitt Romney just told the press that he likes firing people, even though he claims he almost got fired once (lie), and also claims that he is currently unemployed (truth). He is still collecting millions in profits off of all the working folks he previously fired, and liked it.

Willard Mitt Romney began life with a silver spoon crammed firmly up his…well, those who say he looks like he is sporting a ram-rod may have a point--a ram rod made of precious metal.

Mitt Romney has said that he would have preferred applying his chop-shop strategy to the Big-Three auto makers and letting every family home go into foreclosure, so they could be bought up by a tiny number of rich investors. But he really, really supported bailing out the banks and the insurance companies and would do it again. Seriously, again. Just business?

Yes, Mitt is still raking in millions from the thousands of lives he destroyed and companies he shipped to China or Mexico or India or Brazil and he just tore down one of his four, $12 million homes because it wasn’t big enough for himself and Mrs. Romney. He has already set aside at least $100 million in trust, just for his kids. Not to worry, he has $100-200 million left to play with.

And Mitt Romney may be the next president of the United States, if we let him.

The point of all this is not to whine about what bastards business people have become, but rather what idiots and wimps we have become to let them lead us all like lemmings off whatever cliff-du-jour is making them money.

Until we are prepared to cramp our style, take a stand, just say no, or  just be really un-cool, unsexy, and un-complacent, then we deserve getting the business and have no right to complain about it all being bulls#!t.

It can be done.

J. Brandeis Sperandeo

Some Experience Required?

In my youth, I was very fortunate to have had my college education and most of my bills paid for by my parents. And so, sitting in my subsidized existence, I would philosophize at lightning speed and convince myself that my ideas were truly original, and that I would some day be canonized, once my brilliance fully illuminated the beshadowed lives of those dull-witted old farts whom I was convinced only feigned wisdom. I also felt that they did so at my expense. 

Yet it seemed that my delusions of eventual intellectual immortality were constantly interrupted by a nagging feeling in the back of my great brain that I really had no earthly idea what I was talking about at all, and that my life led thus far was no more profound than a russet potato.

Then I got my first job in the real world where I now believe the bulk of my education actually began. I got to work with a band of truly decent caring folks who had barely finished high school, yet this educated idiot learned way more from them than from all my years in cloistered academia. In my first real job, I got to swim with sharks, get chased by a bear, perform my own music in front of thousands, step into North Korean territory, and most importantly, learn the meaning of true friendship.

And during law school, when my wife and I went hungry so that our first child could eat, I learned even more. In fact, I got to spend an entire generation happily and sometimes not so happily putting the needs of my wife and children ahead of my own self-gratification. I have no regrets. I learned how to love someone besides myself and still got to keep every precious experience.

And when I got to spend 22 years fighting tooth and nail with nothing more than my wits to give a second chance to thousands of poor souls who would otherwise have been crushed flat by a monolithic, heartless, politically motivated criminal justice system, I learned even more.  I got to keep those experiences as well.

And now, at 55 years of age, I get to start putting what little I have learned heretofore into some kind of perspective, a big picture, that I feel so fortunate to be able to begin painting, albeit by numbers, because as I have also come to learn, there is no truly original or profound work under the sun that I, as a human being, can up with. I can only mix from known colors as my mind’s eye sees fit. And those colors on my pallet come from an ocean of  real-world life-long learning in which I, for whatever set of reasons, have been somewhat successfully dog-paddling.

And for those of you who are on the beach, but have yet to take off your shoes and get your feet wet, please be advised that you have nothing to lose, but the pasty-white pallor that tells everyone a good  swim and a little sunshine wouldn't hurt you a bit!

J. Brandeis Sperandeo

U.S. Manufacturing: A Matter Of National Security

Forget about liberal v. conservative, Progressive v. Tea Party.  Bringing back manufacturing to U.S. soil is a matter of national security, and I’ll tell you why.

Let’s start with an A.P. article on P.7B of today’s Denver Post about how China just raised their tariffs again on imports of all U.S.  larger cars and SUV vehicles. They did this in retaliation for the U.S. warming of economic and strategic relations with other parts of Asia, Australia, and the E.U.

For those of you who keep up with this sort of thing, you know that China has already imposed a 25% tariff on all goods entering their country, while enjoying a 2.5% tariff on all goods they exported to the U.S. No, the decimal point is not a typo.

The idea behind the U.S. strengthening economic ties with other parts of Asia and the E.U. (sans China) is that, together, we may be able to offset China’s increasingly enormous economic clout and voracious appetite for world political domination.

Former National Security advisor Zbigniew Brezinski strongly advocates such an alliance, not only on economic grounds, but in order to help broker an equitable reconciliation of China with India, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, so they don’t end up going to war with each other and start WWIII.

So that this alliance may stand on its own and stand up to China, the strategy necessitates that we are able to supply our trading partners with valuable goods and technology over the next couple of decades, independently of China’s influence.

Mr. Brezinski has the right idea, but according to Peter Navarro and Greg Autry, authors of a book called Death By China, we may no longer have the manufacturing capacity to get the job done, because U.S. manufacturers have shipped their factories overseas, mainly to China.

According to Navarro and Autry, the book “documents the myriad ways that a powerful, wealthy, and corrupt Chinese Communist Party emboldened by a growing nationalistic frenzy is becoming the biggest threat to global peace, prosperity, and health since Nazi Germany.

From currency manipulation and abusive trade policies, to slave labor and deadly consumer products, China’s ruthless rulers threaten the livelihood of the citizens of every developed nation.

These thugs have created a frightening amoral society ruled by a constant fear hidden to outsiders and bought off with the ill gotten profits of a myopic quest for economic advantage at any cost – social, environmental, or civil rights concerns be damned.

Worse, as with everything else, China is scaling and exporting the model around this world, threatening their neighbors and exploiting developing nations across the globe with a new imperialism.

While America worries that Al-Qaeda or Iran may get their hands on a weapon of mass destruction, China is using our Wal-Mart dollars to build them by the score; filling brand new nuclear submarines with missiles aimed at our heartland and building stealth planes designed to obliterate our friends in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan.”

Assuming that these guys are correct, and I believe that they are, how are we supposed to strengthen our economic ties with Asia and the E.U. to go up against the monolithic power of China, when we either make our goods in China or buy all our parts from China?

Think about that for a moment, and then think about how our U.S. multinational corporations have beat feet for the Orient to make a buck and left us vulnerable to a threat that makes Al Qaida look like the cast from The Breakfast Club.

If we don’t bring manufacturing back to our shores very soon, and I mean yesterday, our children can kiss what is left of the American dream goodbye.

A meaningful response to this very real threat should transcend every domestic political ideology. Both sides of the aisle and the middle should be immediately changing tax, trade, and banking policies to incentivize the return of U.S. manufacturing to our shores and to disincentivize outsourcing to countries that refuse to support a fair and balanced trade policy.

We can sit a listen to the Cheney family telling us how in danger we are by getting our troops out of Iraq, like we really have anything to fear from Iraq alone, or even Iraq and Iran together, except that Haliburton's loss of military contracts may reflect negatively on their quarterly dividends. But, since Iran is currently good buddies with China, that particular alliance is something about which we should be very concerned.

Please then, let us pause for a moment from our incessant arguments about what is  morally a better domestic policy for the U.S. and concentrate together about how to meet what I firmly believe is nothing less than an existential threat to this country.

J. Brandeis Sperandeo

It’s A Small World After All: Why Incomes Have Gone Down In Colorado

The U.S. Census Bureau just announced that the adjusted median income in Colorado went down 9% during the years 1999-2010. A friend asked me why. I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I do read a bit, and I think there are lots of factors that contributed to the income decline and are probably inter-related.

I will list what I can remember. I would suggest that you use my ideas as a template for further research on your own or discard them as you choose. Those of you who read my posts regularly know that my political leanings are somewhat left-of-center. There may therefore be factors that I have missed, dismissed, or have discounted, due to my tree-hugging bent of mind:

1. Trade imbalance with China. They pay a 2.5% tariff on everything they ship to the U.S., but we pay 25% (please note the decimal placement) on everything we ship to them so…

2. Large corporations ship their manufacturing plants to China or Brazil, or India, etc. Why should a tractor company selling tractors to China pay American wages and a 25% tariff, when they can buy really cheap subsidized Chinese steel, pay virtual slave-labor wages in China, and sell directly intra-China with no tariff?

Large corporate CEOs, in general, outsource labor and services to boost their bonuses and stock value for wealthy investors but…

3. Smaller companies with plants in the U.S., especially start-up companies, will not or cannot pay decent wages to U.S. workers, because they have to compete with both large corporations and a foreign trade policy that puts them at a double disadvantage, so you get paid less and…

You can say it’s the union’s fault or the greedy corps. Take your pick, but keep in mind that only about 7% of the U.S. workforce is represented by unions, while corporations currently have $2 trillion in the bank upon which they are just sitting. So you would think that the killing these major corporations are making would at least add to the U.S. government revenue stream but…

4. Our tax structure is designed to allow the wealthiest/corporations among us to pay taxes at lower rates than the secretaries who answer their phones. Between the general system of corporate loopholes/credits and the Bush tax cuts, Exxon/GE and at least the top 20 Fortune 500 companies got billions in subsidies from us, paid zero in taxes, and the median income folks got the bill.

You would also think that the big corporations would use all that extra cash to put some people to work, but you heard me right the first time. Corps have made more money than at any time in history and are sitting on $2,000,000,000,000 but refuse to invest it in hard capital like materials and labor “until they feel more secure.”

Again, we can argue why exactly it is that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is telling all of its members to hold off on capital investment until the next election. But please, let's not. At any rate, because of the loss in revenue to the government over the last 12 years…

5. Federal, state, and local government coffers have been cash-strapped, so they had to stop building and lay off workers who used to buy houses and cars and other stuff in Colorado.

When people can’t spend money, local businesses suffer and sales taxes go down too.  With less revenue, more government services are cut and workers are laid off, etc. This is what is known as a negative spiral. But let’s not forget about…

6. Healthcare costs which have spiraled upward astronomically, far outpacing inflation.  The health insurance/pharma industries have consistently made truly obscene profits and guess who is paying for their stockholder’s dividends? And then there are…

7. The two“off the books”wars of the 2000’s, now on the books that have to be paid for, uh again by us suckers in the median group. Of course, a biggie was...

8. The whole banks/hedge fund/Fanny/Freddy/lack of regulation that allowed Wall Street to bet/lose our money at the track, lie about it to Congress, and then make us cover their losses, just before they started charging us more in banking fees, services, and interest on credit cards and such (as our reward for bailing them out.) But the good news is…

9. The private sector has created 120,000 “new jobs” this year, (which is more jobs than during the entire W. administration). Unfortunately, most of these “new jobs” are replacements for the same jobs that were downsized/outsourced from last year. You know, the ones that used to be full-time salaried positions, with benefits? Corporations, uh, converted them to contract labor jobs.  

With contract labor, employers don’t have to pay payroll taxes, unemployment, family leave, disability, Workers Comp, pensions; and contract laborers can’t use this time toward Social Security retirement. And then there is always…

10.        Government sanctioned waste/fraud. Why do people making $500K a year get Medicare/Medicaid? Why do we allow the drug companies to take government subsidies and then mark up their pills 1000%? Why do we keep paying $5 billion a year to oil companies that have cleared record profits for the last 30 years? The richest corps in the world start with Exxon Mobil, as numero uno.

Why do we allow the FBI/DEA/CIA/NSA/TSA/DHS/DOD to have separate massively bloated budgets for doing the same job when they often operate in conflict with each others' missions and our national interest?

And then there is the military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about. As only one example, big-time military government contractor, Halliburton, “lost” $8 billion (in cash) of our tax money in Iraq. Literally lost huge planes (C-130’s) full of huge pallets full of heaps of money. Oops! And yet…

11.        Government did nothing to stop any of the above from happening. From Enron to Exxon, to Goldman Sachs, to BP, to Blackwater, to foreign trade policies, to tax shelters, instead of being able to count on our government to look out for the median income folks, we have a three-ringed circus playing two shows a day in the D.C. Beltway and we can’t even afford a ticket for a seat in the nose-bleed section.

Both sides are to blame, though it would appear that the vast majority of corporate-money-funded, anti-median-income-earner legislation and the filibustering of pro-worker bills seem to have come from the GOP side of the isle.

12.        The crisis in Europe does not help any either, because things like 401Ks suffer, especially when our financial institutions are allowed to play the foreign markets and lose your retirement savings. Moreover, our largest trading partner is the E.U. How are they going to buy our stuff, if they are broke?

Billionaire and Democratic politician/hedge fund manager, John Corsine, can’t find $1.2 billion that he blew, betting on foreign government securities in Greece and Italy. And the GOP wants to get rid of the new legislation that is designed to stop similar abuse in the future.

You may say, “What does all that national/international stuff have to do with my job in Colorado?” My view is that all politics may not be so local after all, and hopefully, I have given you an idea about how our welfare in Colorado is inextricably linked to national and international economics…

And that crap rolls downhill. This is the only version of “trickle down economics” that I can see working in Colorado and the U.S., and the whole process does not seem to inure to the benefit of median income-earners.

The only counties in Colorado that did well were the ones whose residents already had a butt-load of money. The rich got really richer, and the median folks and the working poor are now working two contract labor jobs for less pay, no job security, and no benefits.

That’s all I could think of off the top of my head. I am sure that there are more factors. I hope that this little primer gives you more or different ideas, which you are welcome to share with me (or argue that I am wrong) on this blog or in the social media.

J. Brandeis Sperandeo

P.S. It would be great if Congress would modify the payroll tax bill for 160 million Americans before the holiday recess. I know that we could all use the $1,500 in our paychecks next year and millionaires and billionaires would not miss the tiny increase in taxes (oh heavens, I said it! Taxes!) to pay for it.

Happy Holidays!

JBS