Fournier for Congress

The American people went up against some high-rollers in a table-stakes showdown yesterday, and the professional gamblers blinked. The people had to call their bluff, because the people are the only ones holding any high cards in this game. We have a vote, and we can close down the table.

It’s the Rumplestiltskin story on a grand scale. The maid pledged her first-born to a troll in exchange for the ability to spin gold from straw. That’s what Wall Street’s been doing, spinning gold from straw, on the pledge of the US government to mortgage our kids and grandkids. Except that the people wouldn’t go along.

In the first place, the people don’t trust Rumplestiltskin with their kids’ money. The people are aware that Bush, Paulson, and their cronies in Congress have been running a scam. Nobody says exactly what this money is for. Nobody says where this money is coming from. When the people try to find out, through their trusted news-suppliers, where the heck the billions are going, the policy-makers leave the room. Would you pledge your first-born to people who refuse to answer questions?

To say that bailout proponents are a collection of cynics would be an understatement. On the Democrat side, they allowed more than a third of their majority to vote against the bill–mostly, incumbents who face tough election contests–believing they could pass it easily with the help of those notorious agents of greed, the Republicans. But there weren’t enough “safe” Republicans to risk a vote for blackmail. It wasn’t principle that won the day for the people, but stark terror.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Congress, in giving the Bush plan any serious consideration at all, exposed itself as an assembly of thugs and enablers. The gamblers in banking and real estate bid up prices on everything with easy credit, pocketed the profits and commissions, and put housing and a decent quality of life out of reach of half the population. Now their equity is being devalued, as prices begin to retreat to within the range of ordinary people, and they want government to make up their losses. Only a corrupt government would do such a thing. They made their buck on the inflation of the bubble, and now they expect to be compensated because it busted?

Voters also noticed that in the “legislation” proposed by the Bush/Frank/Paulson cabal there was no provision for the raising of the money. They were just going to spend it, and they never said where they were getting it from. That’s dishonest, and the people saw through it.

How would the people have reacted if Barney Frank had written a bill that called for a one-time property tax levy, graduated, on owners of more than five million, to put the banks back on their feet? The people would have applauded, but Frank didn’t propose such a tax. In fact, nobody proposed anything except the blank-check approach. No government subsidies for college loans and small business loans. No direct assistance to mortgage debtors. No rent subsidies for displaced tenants and homeowners. No public works. Nothing but the Bush plan, slightly revised. People aren’t stupid enough to accept the first solution offered to a problem as complicated as this one, especially from people they don’t trust who have lied to them before.

As low as members of Congress score on the public trust scale, the news media rank lower. News-consumers must have noticed the dismay on the faces of the TV people–their cooperation in sowing panic has been a mainstay of this blackmail attempt–as Dow Jones declined ever so moderately (much less than the gains that brought it to its current overpriced level) and didn’t crash. There was panic among the news-mongers that there was no panic. Bluff called.

Will there be a depression? Of course commerce will slow down. That was already happening. A bailout might have postponed the reckoning until after election day, but when you spend what you don’t have, you eventually have to pay up. As individuals, we borrowed to eat and work. As a nation, we borrowed to enable our leaders to loot, waste and ravage. The bill is coming due.

As it turns out, the creditors, who said they wouldn’t lend without this payment, stand to lose more by burying their money than by lending it, and so the credit markets continue to function. It might become harder to borrow, but for the vast majority of Americans, blacklisted or about to be blacklisted by credit rating bureaus, it will be no less impossible than it is now. Let this bailout die, and let’s oust this racketeering outfit that used to be our government before we allow them to dabble any further in finance.

The mock debate on the Wall Street bailout that transpired in the House of Representatives today was a travesty of government and a triumph of unreason. One after another of the supporters railed against the deficiencies in the legislation even as they pledged to vote for it, because, as some of them said, it might just work. The legislation would have entrusted the Bush administration with a blank check to purchase junk securities at a price to be set by officials with close ties to the financiers who would receive the money.

Democrats and Republicans hatched a conspiracy yesterday to pay off the bad debts of the nation’s crooked bankers. The bankers had been bidding up the price of real estate with low-interest mortgages for the past few years and pocketing the profits, when the bottom fell out of the market. Last week, they threatened not to lend any more money unless the American people give them almost a million million dollars to compensate them for their losses. Democrats and Republicans in Congress have now agreed to meet their demands, in a bailout they hope will postpone the reckoning until after election day.

This is not the sort of bailout sailors accomplish with buckets on a leaking boat. It’s more like the bailout that frees an accused thief from the slammer or that allows a flyer to land safely while his plane crashes. It’s risky, and it salvages almost nothing, and regular people are overwhelmingly opposed to it.

People understand that there’s no money to do this deal and that the value of their money and property will have to be degraded. It’s a trillion-dollar redistribution of wealth to rich creditors from debtors, whose worth has already been hurt by war, government malfeasance, and unemployment. And like a debt at the company store, it can never be paid back out of meager earnings. Our children and grandchildren will be sweating out the payments long after we’re gone.

Some observers are saying that the bailout can’t work without public support. Polls show (and congressional mail confirms) that, by a a huge margin, the people don’t want to put up the money. Their reluctance is understandable: they know their government is a collection of crooks and scoundrels whose rap sheets of lying, cheating and stealing stretch from here to Nicaragua. Trust them with a million millions? We don’t think so.

So here’s the deal. Government, clean up your act and put the executive branch in receivership right now. Get resignations from Bush and Cheney and allow the Speaker to take office and then we’ll give you your bailout check.

We’re not asking much. The investment houses had to replace their management. Shouldn’t their facilitators in government be answerable as well? Throw them out or get their resignations. As fiduciaries, they are tainted and corrupted and could never function credibly in any market of any kind. Their word is worthless. Their motives are venal. They are brutal and dangerous.

So here’s the deal. You want our money? Close down this racket. Give us back our laws. Give us back our decency. Give us back our peace. Give us back our country.

I may be the only one of the five Green Party candidates for Congress who agrees with the League of Women Voters’ decision to allow only Democrats and Republicans to take part in the “debates” that group plans to sponsor.

The fact that the League demands anything more than ballot access (which requires weeks of petitioning and thousands of signatures) is instructive. To accommodate all of the candidates, the League would have to set up one or possibly two extra microphones at each debate, hardly enough of an inconvenience to justify the exclusion of any of them and an imposition far outweighed by the value of additional voices. The League seems to have taken the position, arbitrarily, that two points of view are all the voters can handle. I have a hard time currying favor with a voters’ organization that demonstrates such a low opinion of voters.

To keep interlopers out of its debates, the League sets a fund-raising threshold that peace-and-justice advocates can never achieve without compromise. As a voluntary association, the League has the right to do this. If this assembly of upper-middle class voters allowed us to participate, they would risk the system that keeps them flush.

Our promise to shake things up seems to resonate with voters, and any one of us might win if voters get wind of our message. The reason Greens can’t meet fund-raising thresholds is that our advocacy is reserved for policies that will benefit people at the bottom of the economic ladder and cost those at the top. You can’t raise money from people who don’t have it, and most of the people who have it won’t donate to somebody who wants to reduce their holdings.

I’m OK with that. The people with money are used to paying others to do things for them, and that’s the way they do politics. They fund organizations like the League and the Democratic and Republican parties, and these groups do what’s expected of them. This gives us a government of indentured incumbents, and it preserves the status quo ever so tenuously.

I’m OK with this because I know that the have-nots outnumber the haves twenty-to-one and can oust the government whenever they choose. Working people can’t finance political campaigns but they can vote. To get me elected, they would have to do a little extra work, but they’re workers, and they have the means.

There won’t be a lot of yard signs or TV ads, and our point of view won’t be debated, but voters who want a new government can certainly spread the word, by mouth and by email, that Greens have candidates who haven’t sold out. Need proof? Greens collected thousands of signatures but couldn’t raise enough money to make the League of Women Voters’ cut. Thanks, League.

Two facts: 

US government ownership of private business is un-American. People don’t have enough money to pay their debts.

Congress is about to make an unprecedented payment on the national credit line that will cripple at least two generations of American workers. Even though Democrats and Republicans have been siphoning wealth to their rich patrons (foreign and domestic) from the rest of us for a couple of decades, it doesn’t seem to have been enough. The big owners just suffered a loss of about 10% of their U.S. holdings and they’re threatening to ruin us if we don’t make a big payment. Now. Their sugar-daddies in Washington are leaving government, and they figure they had better get it now if they’re going to get it at all.

If this sounds like racketeering, that’s because it is. It’s trillion-dollar blackmail. The blackmailers are folks who accumulated dollars by selling us crap and then loaned most of them back to us so we could afford to spend. We mortgaged everything to get the money, and we bid up the price of everything with the money they loaned us. Meanwhile, the actual value of our assets (and theirs) was degraded by war, outlaw government and criminal business practices. Now, they want their money, and, if the racketeers who run our government don’t pay them, they’ll shut the whole operation down.

Somebody could have told the creditors that US dollars were a bad risk. Here’s a nation that wages aggressive warfare year after year, that imprisons large segments of its population and drugs the rest, that craves violent entertainment, that doesn’t read, that elects crooks to public office, and that believes God is coming presently to take them directly to heaven. Responsible investors know better than to dispense money to an outfit like that. These suckers fell for an old con game–churning up sales to simulate value–and they deserve to bear the consequences. But if we don’t meet their demands, the economy will crash, our leaders tell us.

Poverty is spreading like a virus, and this makes it easy to sow panic. Certainly, the commercial news media (owners of many excess dollars) and the political class have been promoting the idea that there will be a catastrophe if we don’t make the protection payment. Notice that they never tell us where the money will be going. Which pockets will be full when the trillion is handed out? Not mine, I’m betting, and not yours, either. Ask your congressman how much of it will be going to foreign investors. Ask the pundits how much will wind up in the hands of millionaires. Ask how much will be used to augment bank accounts already swollen by two decades of frantic buying and selling.

Will we be saved if we fork this money over? It’s just a downpayment, after all, and the financiers’ creditors are merciless. As extortionists, they will demand and demand and demand, and our kids and grandkids will have to sweat out the next half-century trying to meet the obligations we take on. Then there’s the problem that the money to pay the protection doesn’t exist. We can print it, but that will degrade the value of the dollars in our pockets and bank accounts, which will buy less and less. That’s already happening.

What if we refuse to pay? That will be the end of loaned money for awhile. At least, that’s what they’re threatening. My credit card from Chase Bank probably won’t work anymore because Chinese drug-makers and Arabian oil-mongers and German wine-merchants will no longer be giving Chase money to lend. It’s not smart to lend to debtors who can’t pay the money back or who will pay it back in devalued currency. When credit dries up, commerce slows, and people lose jobs. That’s already happening, too.

So we’re screwed either way. If we don’t make up the crooked financiers’ gambling losses they won’t lend us any more money. If we do, we saddle our kids and grandkids with debts they can’t possibly handle. Either way, most of us end up broke, and many of us end up hungry and homeless. All because of our profligate system, which requires us to buy endless crap, including megatons of bombs and bullets, with money we don’t have.

If I have to choose between profligate poverty and responsible poverty, I’m inclined to choose the latter. Our leaders have disqualified themselves from making any further decisions for posterity, and we should stop them from throwing our grandchildrens’ money away. Voters should pledge not to vote for any incumbent or candidate who supports this. Let the lenders grab their lost money from the billionaires who have it. Don’t put it on my tab. Economic consequences? Bring ‘em on!

Is it possible that a tiny cadre of unelected officers–seven bankers–should have the power to commit the taxpayers of the United States to the purchase of a private company for 85 billion dollars? Where do they think they’re getting that kind of money? Can they just order the mint to print it up and send it out to the company’s creditors?

Actually, they can’t do any of those things, and whatever papers the Federal Reserve Board of Governors has generated to seal this transaction will eventually be used to stock the dispensers in the lavatories. AIG would do as well making a contract with a horse or a slice of bread.

The law is clear on this. The Fed has only the powers granted to it under Section 241 of Title 12 of the U. S. Code, entitled, just to make sure there’s no misunderstanding, “Enumerated Powers. ” The power to own and control a private company–other than a bank–just isn’t there.

The Fed is authorized by law to regulate banks and to act as a bank. That’s about it. It can’t appropriate money. It can create and destroy money with variations in the rate of interest it charges for loans, but it can’t create a government indebtedness unless the money has been appropriated by Congress. It can’t just dip into the Treasury, and it can’t print the dough, either.

If the U. S. Code means anything, the Fed’s move to “buy” AIG is altogether illegal and altogether voidable, and the next Congress (or maybe this one) will repudiate it whenever that becomes convenient, as it certainly will. That’s if the member banks, which are on the hook, too, don’t move to invalidate it first.

People disposed to rely on the faith and credit of the U. S. Government to make good on this transaction would be well advised to consult a lawyer. It’s never been tried before, because it’s a violation of federal law. Harry Truman once tried to take over the country’s steel mills when steelworkers threatened to strike. Supreme Court said, “No. ” The present crop of justices will give the same answer here.

Ever run over a squirrel or a raccoon with your car? Do you remember musing at the time that that little critter was alive and sentient and then suddenly it wasn’t and being a little sad about it. Sarah Palin doesn’t get sad about that sort of thing. Rather, she gets a thrill when she ends the life of an animal, and the thrill is bigger when the animal is bigger. Given the joy with which she kills, do you think she’d hesitate to shoot and skin you if you gave her half a reason?

Maybe she would, but Palin and McCain are definitely billing themselves as unapologetic predators, she an enthusiastic killer of wild animals and he a heroic terminator of people who happened to be under the bombs he dropped on Viet Nam. They and their supporters revel in the superior status the power of life and death confers, and you could see it on the cruel, pallid faces and hear it in the ecstatic drawling voices on display in St. Paul.

Republicans square this somehow with a belief in the divinity of Christ, who was not known for his prowess as a hunter or as a soldier. This exposes Republicans as hypocrites and their piety as a sham, but never mind: Jesus is OK with war now, and he will save the warriors when the final reckoning comes, and it’s coming soon.

According to some public opinion polls, from the average American’s point of view, if you’re not a predator, you’re prey, and this explains all the Republican strutting. When all else fails, when your candidate has a face like a sphincter, act tough, and put some religious conviction behind it.

A person would have to be fairly gullible to believe that Jesus changed his views on violence since he expired on the cross, but that’s what they’re selling, and the mass media, at least, say people are buying it. We’ll have to wait for the end of the world to see who goes to heaven and who doesn’t, but many believe that the meek and unarmed will have an advantage at that point that they definitely don’t have now.

Obama could easily fall into the macho trap that Palin and McCain have set. We’ve seen him bare his figurative teeth in the past and we’ve seen him flex his figurative muscles so as not to be mistaken for prey. His aggressive positions on Afghanistan and Iran are examples of predatory posturing.

I hope Obama saw that clip on YouTube in which a herd of water buffalo stood up to a pride of lions. The tasty ungulates were bigger and more numerous, and the one the lions were trying to eat finally got away, with a couple of lions getting thoroughly roughed up by stronger members of the herd. If Obama keeps up his predator act, he could get beat up and maybe eaten.

In recognition of a remarkable effort by a team of volunteers to put my name on the ballot for Congress, the Connecticut League of Women Voters invited me to submit a brief bio and answers to three questions for inclusion in the League’s on-line Voters’ Guide, slated to appear September 19 at http://www.lwvct.org.

I was disappointed that none of the questions probed my opinion of our policy of permanent warfare or our toleration of thugs in government, but I’ll seize any opportunity to rant, and so I answered as follows (abiding by limits on the number of words in my responses):

Bio
I attended the Hartford Public Schools and earned a BA and JD from the University of Connecticut. I served in the Air Force from 1966 to 1970. My wife Ruth (Tomasko) and I have three children and three grandchildren. We have been involved in the peace movement since 1970. I was elected to Hartford’s Board of Education in 1995. I write Current Invective, an on-line newsletter, sing with a small ensemble, and practice law.

1. Do you believe that changes in election laws are needed to make elections, fair, accurate, secure and responsive to the needs of the voters? Please explain. 

I support changes that will make it easier for people to vote and, through greater participation, strengthen democratic institutions. Holding elections on weekends would enable all voters to cast ballots. Instant runoff voting, in which second-choices count, would encourage citizens to run for office and improve the quality of elected officials by giving voters more candidates to choose from. Public financing laws can stem the corruption of public officials, but they must not create impossible barriers for independents and minor party candidates.  As for the corruption of the electoral process itself, considered by many to have been a major factor in the creation of the current government, a paper copy of every ballot, however cast, has become indispensable. Of equal importance are accountable, non-partisan election authorities, with competent, voter-friendly staff and procedures at polling places. An election process without credibility cannot sustain democratic government for long. 

2. What steps would you support to meet the demand for energy and to ensure an economically and environmentally sustainable future? 

I support strict efficiency standards for all fuel-burning machinery (not just automobiles), no-fare public ground transportation, limits on disposable packaging and products, deep cuts in polluting emissions of all kinds (including carbon dioxide), and government incentives for “green” industry and wind, solar and geothermal power plants (and not for new nuclear plants). None of these objectives can be met until the reins of national policy are snatched from the corporate interests that benefit from our current wasteful and polluting system. My first priority in Congress would be to expose corrupt, polluting policies and link them to the individuals and parties that promote them. Mega-polluters like General Electric, DuPont, and Exxon must be curbed by government and not coddled. These interests use their vast wealth to buy influence over legislative and executive decisions, and Congress must put a stop to that.

3. What initiatives do you support to guarantee that people can obtain affordable, high quality health care?

Public health in the 21st Century demands more than mere access to affordable, high quality health care. Europeans don’t have to obtain health care. It is a right that they take for granted, that they fund with taxes, and that makes their lives better in a hundred ways. Americans who work for themselves and those whose employers don’t provide insurance must fork over thousands for an individual health insurance policy that may not pay a dime until they shell out thousands in deductibles. An expensive health problem or one that inteferes with work, even temporarily, can put such people into bankruptcy in short order. If Medicare–the national health care system for people over 65–were extended to everyone, Americans would be healthier and more secure. In Congress, I would press for a universal, taxpayer-funded health system, starting, immediately, with Medicare for all.

That’s an edited version of my original submission, which I modified after I got feedback from readers. 

The League also let me know that I’m to be interviewed for possible inclusion in one or more debates. I have to meet these criteria:

1. Ballot access.
2. A formal campaign.
3. Broad voter support.
4. Financial support.

Of course, I’m aching to debate my Congressman and his Republican opponent on matters of war and peace and criminal malfeasance. I’m not certain how the League will apply its criteria, but they might want to see more than $1670 in the campaign treasury, the amount I’ve raised. If everybody who reads this were to throw in $20 (by credit card or electronic check at http://www.fournierforcongress.org/donate/ or by check to Fournier for Congress, 74 Tremont Street, Hartford, CT 06105), even if they did it only to make a debate happen in Connecticut, the League would have to recognize my candidacy.

On June 22, WFSB broadcast an interview with me by Dennis House on “Face the State.” Over the next several weeks, I visited the program’s website every so often, where interviews are archived and linked. Mine didn’t appear, and so, around the end of July, I dropped an email to Dennis:“Dennis, I notice that interviews with Republican Joe Visconti and Democrats Jim Himes and Joe Courtney are archived and linked from the Face the State website, but the interview with me (Green Party) isn’t. What criteria are applied to decide which interviews get archived there? Steve”