How ideologically based policies can hurt the advocates

 My column in the Sky Hi News Nov. 2, 2011

The problem I have with ideologically based theories is that true believers can carry them to ridiculous conclusions that eventually butt smack dab against expectations of ordinary people when their theory is put into practice.

The Tea Party mantra of small is beautiful, that government is the problem, that the states can always handle it better than the federal government, has some fatal flaws: The public still looks to the federal government anyway to help when the chips are down, and voters take it out on whomever is in power, even years later, for not having the ability or will to fix their problems .

The current GOP mantra is getting EPA and Wall Street regulations off the backs of business so jobs can be created. Rick Perry‘s jobs plan is exclusively to drill for oil and gas unshackled from government environmental regulations. That is music to Texans' ears, but just wait until the next BP-like oil spill destroys shrimpers' income and coats South Padre Island beaches in goopy oil. Watch the fingers point to the EPA and regulators then. Woe be unto a President Perry if he is in the White House.

Closer to home, Colorado's Jensen Farms' listeria-tainted cantaloupe disaster can be directly attributed to lax inspection, as reported in the Denver Post on Oct. 30. Because the Food and Drug Administration inspections are so underfunded, industry is supposed to regulate itself, hiring third parties to do inspections instead. Rarely, according to the Post, do the third party inspectors ever blow a whistle; their employers may not like it.

Many of our recent e coli and tainted meat scares can be traced to the lack of hard nosed, toe-the-regulation-line inspections. However, somehow the public assumes and expects the federal government to be doing its job regardless of whether taxpayers give them the wherewithal .

Who took the fall for the Katrina disaster? It was not the private sector. Federal failures were a major black eye for George W. Bush who looked incompetent in the face of the inability of the federal government to do what was expected of it.

Yet in September the GOP tried to hold the FEMA disaster fund hostage to budget battles in the wake of the Joplin tornado and a hurricane.

What if the GOP captures the White House, and both houses of Congress and repeals the Wall Street reform act? No one has challenged the GOP, including the Occupy Wall Streeters, with any vigor. It is partially because no one understands what the legislation does, but a few years from now, when consumers get suckered by lenders playing deceptive shell game marketing tricks, as they did leading to this last crisis, or one bank holds the whole economy hostage to their economic failure, whoever is in the White House will be blamed.

While focus has been on what reform did not do, the act did establish a consumer protection bureau and it tackled the “too big to fail issue.” Before the reform act was passed, when big banks that also had investment arms threatened collapse, the bailouts were the only way to keep them from bringing down the rest of the banking dominos and our entire economy to boot. Now there is a mechanism to wind down an investment bank without having to resort to a bailout. Repeal Wall Street reform will leave us again with one option to avoid taking down our economy: bailouts.

Wall Street Occupiers have more to learn from MLK

The dedication of the Martin Luther King memorial in Washington  took place  as another movement,  Occupy Wall Street, is in  infancy.  There are many lessons the new movement could learn from  King’s leadership  .   The civil rights movement was also fueled by anger with  unfairness and injustice , but its success  was the result of using the right technique to bring others outside the group along with them.  Occupy Wall Street has taken one of those lessons to heart and it will succeed in moving others to join them if they stay the course.  The   lesson is that peaceful, civil disobedience ultimately will be more successful than violent acts of defiance. There are other lessons yet to be learned.

Dr. King’s technique was inspired by  Mahatma Gandhi, who led India’s independence from the British Empire.   Using non violent protests and reacting peacefully  when authorities used physical violence against them gained them sympathy, respect, and support. 

 The alternative is  violence and our family has experienced some of it. My husband was born in the old Yugoslavia in 1933.  He saw first hand what happened when one group felt they had been poorly treated by the power structure in the midst of a world depression . Rage turned into   violence; parliament members were assassinated, and, when World War II came to the Balkans, so did civil war.  A dictatorship emerged, imposing  peace, but as soon as  strong man Tito died, the conflict resumed, climaxing in the bloody ethnic cleansing war of the Balkans in the 1990’s.  It is that life experience that had him  fearful that the US could experience the same expression of anger in violent riots and demonstrations. 

I grew up in an eastern Oklahoma town that had become the refuge for  many African Americans after race riots and KKK action in Tulsa in the 20’s and 30’s.  Oklahoma was the icon of poverty in that pre World War II period , choked with  dust storms, with masses of Okies immigrating to California. The African  Americans in that part of the world had learned that violence got them nothing but more poverty and even more institutionalized separation that was not equal.  It was MLK that showed them another way out of that wilderness, and how to use the democratic system and court decisions to end segregation.  The snarling police dogs, the murder of civil rights leaders, the peaceful hymn singing marches,  brought sufficient sympathetic support from diverse quarters  for the  causes so eloquently expressed by King,  that  it ended  government supported  segregation. The US worked through its civil war  of decades past with a much different outcome than Yugoslavia experienced..

Those same techniques developed by Gandhi and  MLK helped the participants in the Arab Spring overthrow oppressive dictators.  The outcome of the revolution in Egypt is jeopardized by violent religious strife. Tahrir square occupiers  have forgotten that non violence was their effective tool and that violence could nip their establishment of democracy in the bud as the military  imposes  the very same practices to stop the violence that  were  the reasons for the revolution. Non violence is not a one time matter; it must be practiced until the goal is reached.

  Occupy Wall Street has a chance  to translate sympathy into  votes and governmental action,  democracy’s  way of facilitating change. Non violence has been their mantra and  response to action by police.  They so far have learned the lessons of the civil rights movement well.  They need, though, to heed another lesson from MLK: to identify their goals and objectives.

The Occupy movement so far is just an expression of anger. Participants have not agreed on what they want either the private sector or government  to do.  Dr. King moved the civil rights activists past  anger to specific  objectives concerning  voter rights and eliminating  segregation .  They also need to channel their  rage into  reformist  goals if they  want to  rally  others to take action beyond merely  expressing sympathy.

Disconnect between Wall Street and Wal-Mart

My column in today's Sky Hi News...
In the past weeks, the angry Left began a revolt and it is spreading. Occupy Wall Street has the potential to counterbalance and even overwhelm the power of the Tea Party. While both of these populist movements share anger, a feeling that they have lost control of their destinies, and were born in raucous demonstrations, there are some profound differences.

How presidential and congressional contenders tap into the anger could determine the outcome of 2012. Riding the tiger of populist anger may be an opportunity to score some political points, but there are dangers too.

Peggy Noonan, columnist for the Wall Street Journal, wrote last week that she sees a “new convergence of thought among Democrats and Republicans who are not in Washington and not part of the political matrix. They are in agreement about our essential problems and priorities, that the economy comes first, all other crises … come second.”

She had watched two focus groups of “Wal-Mart” moms, middle and working class women in Indiana and Florida, who related their personal and economic pain and fear of layoffs and foreclosures, who just wanted someone to “fix it,” and sadly concluded that those in Washington “won't care till they're affected.”

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor dismissed the demonstrators as a “mob.” He may regret his words some day. The demonstrators are a manifestation of wider unrest, an unrest described by Noonan that goes beyond the parks occupied by demonstrators. The Wal-Mart moms may never join the demonstrators, but they may express their shared anger at the ballot box.

The 2012 winners will be those who have conveyed that they, too, “feel the pain” of the Wal-Mart moms and their “fixit plan” contains enough hope it will work.

The difference between the Tea Party and the president lies in the “fix it.” The new movement has not yet focused on the “fix it” part. It needs to do so if it is to spread beyond the demonstrators and encompass the broader population.

The Wal-mart moms' anger is not so much directed at the president, according to Noonan's observation, but at resentment of Wall Street and being suckered in by bankers to go into debt. They blame both parties in Congress.

I noted in Noonan's reporting the women were not demanding the Tea Party platform of lower taxes and shrinking the federal government, either. The Tea Party anger and fanatical single-minded dedication to anti-tax libertarianism and states rights were turn offs to some in 2010 and in Colorado, support of their anointed GOP Senate candidate proved toxic. The Democrat, Michael Bennett, won. With GOP presidential candidates trying to pass the Tea Party litmus tests, riding that tiger could eventually hurt them in critical swing states, especially if the Occupy Wall Street movement broadens its base.

The President does not need to become the demonstrators' spokesperson, but expressing empathy with all of those struggling in the economy and also reminding us of his policies that contrast with the GOP's, could give focus to some constructive action both the Wal-Mart moms and the demonstrators angry could support.

The GOP's obstructing his jobs bill , their mantra of “kill Dodd-Frank (Wall Street reform),” and tagging Obama's “tax fairness” as “class warfare” only adds fuel to the new movement's fire.

The President has a strong case to make. Independent experts interviewed on Sunday TV talk agreed that the jobs act would create more jobs and even be insurance against a double dip recession.

Obama signed legislation that addressed Wall Street greed. Killing reform would allow Wall Street to revert to practices that caused the 2008 crash … the banks too big to fail, of turning a blind eye to predatory lending, of lowered standards for capital requirements or down payments, or obscure, unregulated investments. Those kinds of practices caused the speculative bubble that led to the Great Recession, the biggest jobs killer since the Great Depression.