The Mythologizing of the Secretary of the Treasury

1. There is no shortage of curiosities in the current Capital Holocaust.

2. But the one that most strikes me is the (what I judge to be conscious) effort to portray the Secretary of the Treasury as the key, if not sole, official of the Executive Branch, who will be granted extraordinary new powers. The current Secretary is Henry Paulson, and he certainly has been given the role of public front man for the Administration during this crisis.

3. Indeed, the legislation thus far passed, ineffectual though it has been, has specifically identified the Secretary of the Treasury as the beneficiary of the new and far-ranging powers contained therein.

4. Also conspicuous is the relative tangentiality of the current President of the United States to the public debate regarding the economic issues facing the Nation. This in stark contrast to his role in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

5. The Secretary of the Treasury is appointed by and serves at the discretion of the President of the United States. Any and all powers and authorities of the Secretary vest in Article II of the Constitution, the Article establishing the office and powers of the President of the United States.

6. Yet the media, mainstream and otherwise, insists on reporting the latest events in terms of the powers being granted, by the Legislative Branch, as powers of the Secretary of the Treasury, a position whose power stems from and only from the powers of the President of the United States.

7. Is this merely a semantic quibble? I don't think so.

8. We are witnessing an abdication and creation of power by the Legislative to the Executive Branch of government, with no debate or discussion, only with the obfuscation of substituting the position of "Secretary of the Treasury" for "President of the United States" in the new legislation.

9. In other words, we are witnessing an exponential, stealth explosion in the power of the President, irrespective of party or person. This is being perpetrated by members of both parties in the Legislative Branch in concert with the current regime in control of the Executive Branch. This is as non-partisan an issue as can be constructed.

10. The grotesque dishonesty and blatant contempt for the citizenry inherent in these actions of both political parties and 2 of the 3 Branches of our federal government will been seen as a quantum leap in the de-legitimazation in the eyes of the citizenry of our government.

[The paragraphs in this article are numbered for ease of reference only.]

Kapital Kollapse

Alan Greenspan calls the current financial crises a "once in a century" event.

Lehman Brothers, a 158-year-old Wall Street investment bank that cannot be sold without the USG supplying the money, will declare bankruptcy tonight (Sunday.) And, by the way, the Lehman CEO was paid a $22 million performance bonus in March 2008, just as Bear Stearns was being bailed out with US taxpayer funds.

To avert another collapse, Bank of America is about to announce that it will buy Merrill Lynch, presumably without USG-supplied funds.

This transpires with narry a peek from either of the presidential candidates, with zero public input, with no Congressional hearings---nothing except the ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs (Treasury Sec. Paulson) and my namesake at the Fed allocating $100's of Billions of public funds to private pockets.

As Capitalism Stumbles Economically, It Furthers Its Grip on the Election Process

I have written before on the subject of Capitalism currently undergoing its first major "face-lift" since the Great Depression of the 1930s. If that subject interests you, feel feel to browse through my blog archives.

Capitalism--although the ideologues who defend it despite its obvious short-comings like to call it "Market" economies--is the economic system under which the United States operates.

Representative Democracy is the political system of the country.

Having observed rather closely this season's presidential contest, primary and general, I cannot help reach the conclusion that, just like the economy, the political system as outlined by the Founders of the Nation is beginning to give off that stench associated with antiquated ideas, designed in much simpler, much less ramified times.

The political election system, designed in the 18th Century by brilliant men who managed simultaneously to be both gloriously idealistic and ruthlessly pragmatic, is groaning and squeaking under the relentless, hegemonic stress applied to EVERYTHING by the capitalist business model as the ideal vehicle for achieving goals. The goals (the Content)are nearly irrelevant; it's the Form of achieving those goals that has attained primacy.

Thus we have Britney and Paris and Moses; we have the eerie truth that "staying on message" is vastly more important than the "message" itself. That people, like Clinton's Mark Penn, are considered geniuses by uttering remarks like, "small is the new big." Short, seemingly pithy, but actually vacuous, non-language has usurped the space that not long ago--maybe a couple of decades--was occupied by serious discussions between candidates on serious issues, discussions that forced the voting public to take a breath and think.

Perhaps back then the politicians were as contemptuous of the average Joe and Jane as they are now, and were only doing a better job of concealing it. But at least their words, their public discourse, indicated that they were addressing sentient beings. No more.

The contempt the overt mockery of the process, especially on the Republican side, but also exemplified by the Clinton Democratic primary campaign, is no longer kept in the closet or behind closed doors. The snide cynicism required of the advertising guy proves just as effective in electing a president as it does in selling Bud Lite. It's efficacious, damn it...and how does one argue with that brutal, unalterable fact?

The answer is one can't. If not playing by the rules that produce victories in the System means candidate A is almost surely going to lose, what is s/he to do? Commit suicide with honor?

Just as deregulating the oil futures trading market in 2006 transformed what was up until then a market almost exclusively inhabited by people actually in the oil business making rational decisions based on sound economic theory combined with real-world knowledge that produced the much needed price stability in perhaps the most economically important commodity in the world into a pit of wild, manipulative speculation, populated by individuals whose only connection to the oil business came when they visited the Exxon station once a week, akin to the stock market, resulting in the price of oil gyrating madly and having no grounding whatsoever to the fundamentals of the oil business; this fiasco can be corrected legislatively.

The transformation of the electoral process into a game dominated not by citizens devoting, on a part-time or seasonal basis, some of their time and skills to the activity to a system that has been "professionalized" and dominated by what are essentially advertising people [pollsters, strategists, whatever names they dream up to describe themselves are advertising people, nothing more, nothing less], with politicians as their specialized clientele is not something this writer thinks the Founders did or could have envisioned.

Solution? None.

This is not commodity trading we're talking about; this is Free Speech, political Free Speech. Though it's tempting as hell, legislating away Free (political) Speech is anathema to me. And without legislation the dynamic of the professionalization of the electoral process will continue, perhaps at some point eliminating the need for the candidate completely: the pollster will be not merely the pollster, s/he will be the Candidate as well.