Obama and Romney Are Politicians, Not Visionaries...

[Ben]

Obama and Romney Are Politicians, Not Visionaries

by Dean Baker

There is a dangerously painful story line that is being propagated about a presidential race between President Obama and Mitt Romney. The line is that this will be a contest over competing visions for the country. In this story the alternative visions are outlined in the competing budgets put forward by President Obama and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, which Governor Romney has embraced.
The story of competing visions is a cute fairy tale for people who don't know anything about Washington and American politics. For adults who have not newly arrived from some foreign country, this line is just silly.
President Obama and Governor Romney are politicians, not philosophers. They have not made it to the top of the political ladder because of their grand visions of the future. They got their positions by appealing to powerful political actors who were able to give them the money and/or votes needed to get ahead.
The absurdity of the competing visions story is apparent to anyone who has looked at the Ryan budget. According to the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) analysis of Representative Ryan's budget, which was prepared under his direction, the budget would shrink all non-Social Security and non-health care spending to 3.75 percent of GDP by 2050.
To put this in perspective, the United States currently spends roughly 4 percent of GDP on the military, not including spending on the war in Afghanistan. Since the start of the Cold War it has never spent less than 3.0 percent of GDP on the military. Ryan does not want sharp cuts in defense; in fact he has already criticized the modest cuts President Obama's 2013 budget proposal.
Let's assume that Representative Ryan wants to keep defense spending somewhere between its 3.0 percent of GDP low and the 4.0 percent current level. That leaves somewhere between zero and 0.75 percent of GDP for everything else the federal government does other than Social Security, health care and defense.
This spending must cover all of the federal government's spending on road and bridges, airports and every other form of transportation. It covers its spending on aid to education, from running day care and Head Start to Pell grants and other college aid. It covers research and development including funding for the National Institutes of Health. It includes the money needed to run the State Department, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the federal prison system. It includes the money to pay for the border patrol and immigration enforcement, the patent office, and Food and Drug Administration.
In short, if the Romney-Ryan budget is taken seriously, then the vision essentially involves shutting down the federal government. All the federal government will do is literally run a military and pay out money for health care and Social Security. We will have no federal courts, federal law, patents, copyrights or borders since their budget has no money to pay for the institutions needed for enforcement.
So what exactly is the Romney-Ryan vision in this scenario? How do they envision that Pfizer and Merck will make money when there is no patent agency to register their drug patents or courts to enforce them? The same applies to copyrights for Microsoft, Time-Warner and all the other firms that depend on copyright protection.
What will be U.S. immigration policy when we have no one to enforce borders or even issue passports? Is the Romney-Ryan vision an open country with no borders? How about the airwaves, what will broadcast and telecommunications giants like Comcast and Verizon do to secure their access to the airwaves when there is no Federal Communications Commission to parcel out bandwidth?
Will there no longer be an interstate highway system, since there will be no federal funds to maintain it? Will airports and air traffic control be left to states, since there is no money for the Federal Aviation Commission?
These are the questions that reporters should be asking about the Romney-Ryan vision. The arithmetic in the Romney-Ryan budget says that they want to shut down the federal government outside of Social Security, health care and defense. Maybe the reporters who are singing about competing visions can try to tell the rest of us what the Romney-Ryan vision means, since the information on the table does not give a clue as to what the Romney-Ryan world looks like.
Since the Romney-Ryan vision makes zero sense (challenge to pundits: try to show otherwise), let's try an alternative story. Suppose that there is no Romney-Ryan vision. Suppose that Romney and Ryan are politicians trying to appeal to rich people by promising them big tax cuts. After all, big tax cuts for the rich is the item is that is most clearly defined in the Romney-Ryan budget.
So why don't "neutral" reporters just tell us what the budget does -- it gives tax cuts to the rich and guts programs that benefit the middle class and the poor. The stuff about "vision" is just nonsense to tell children and Washington pundits.



Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer and the more recently published Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of The Bubble Economy. He also has a blog, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues.

[Ben]

Does the 2012 Presidential Election Matter?

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/...on-matter.html

[Ben]

[Ben]

[yodajazz]

I dont think that anyone could be elected president without a broad consensus. Also any viable candidate would need lots of money. I dont believe any one candidate could over staunch opposition from big money entities. The same would apply to major media. It's just reality, today. It's sometimes hard for me to believe thats the case but it is. Look at the war in Iraq, and how little critical think was on this issue. I criticize conservative positions, however Democrats share the guilt, by not exposing the the true picture, of our corporate oligarchy.

So in other words, a true visionary would have make major compromises to rule. Or they would be eliminated by the powers that be.

[Ben]

I dont think that anyone could be elected president without a broad consensus. Also any viable candidate would need lots of money. I dont believe any one candidate could over staunch opposition from big money entities. The same would apply to major media. It's just reality, today. It's sometimes hard for me to believe thats the case but it is. Look at the war in Iraq, and how little critical think was on this issue. I criticize conservative positions, however Democrats share the guilt, by not exposing the the true picture, of our corporate oligarchy.

So in other words, a true visionary would have make major compromises to rule. Or they would be eliminated by the powers that be.

We certainly do have a dictatorship of money in America. And Canada. And Australia. And the list is seemingly endless.
Just a few questions: do governments care more about people or corporations? And do we have a democracy? Not just elections but a meaningful democracy?
And, too, we could fund elections through public money. Ya know, no money from the corporate sector whatsoever.
But then you've the problem of restricting free speech. But is money speech???
We've got some monumental challenges on our plate -- ha ha!
Here's the former Governor of Minnesota on elections and political parties:

[robertlouis]

We certainly do have a dictatorship of money in America. And Canada. And Australia. And the list is seemingly endless.
Just a few questions: do governments care more about people or corporations? And do we have a democracy? Not just elections but a meaningful democracy?
And, too, we could fund elections through public money. Ya know, no money from the corporate sector whatsoever.
But then you've the problem of restricting free speech. But is money speech???
We've got some monumental challenges on our plate -- ha ha!

Is it all corporations Ben? At one level yes - the Faustian pact has been there since the very first attempts to impose anti-trust legislation and make it stick in the early 1900's. But what we've seen in the last ten years is the inexorable rise of the banks as super-corporations, seemingly untouchable and able to go blithely on their way and profiteering still further from the global financial meltdown they created.

It defies belief. But it's clear that there is no global will to take them on and put them back inside the financial pandora's box. Any one country that mutters about it, viz Germany, France etc, is quickly told to shut up.

There's a difference of degree between corporations laying down the law to individual governments and the banks' global reach to tell every government on the planet what they should do. It wasn't the IMF that laid down the swingeing austerity measures on Greece - it was a consortium of bankers who made sure that their own highly profitable income streams would be enhanced by adding to the misery and fuck the consequences.

Forget the war on terror - we need a weaponless but effective war on the hegemony of the financiers.

[Stavros]

We certainly do have a dictatorship of money in America. And Canada. And Australia. And the list is seemingly endless.

Ben, its called Capitalism. There is some debate about when the Capitalist revolution began because it has been through different phases, eg, mercantile, industrial -but it isn't over yet, it hasn't exhausted its potential. Capitalism has emerged from six hundred years of conflict as the victor -free markets, albeit regulated to 'some extent' -and how far that regulation goes varies from state to state- have established themselves as the most efficient way of organising economic behaviour in society where 'liberal democracy', a mode of electing accountable and temporary governments manages the framework through which capitalism can work.

And, just as capitalism in its late, industrial phase began in Europe and spread to North America, now it is growing through Asia at the expense of Europe and North America, and by the end of the century will be growing in Africa -as someone long ago pointed out when discussing trends in capitalism:


"The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

"The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country...it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations."

I wonder, who wrote that?

[allurstouse]

the Ryan budget is a masterpiece of propaganda the media refuses to challenge. it relies on economic erformasnce numbers we havent seen since industrialization. 1 percent unemployment next yr???? please. itr also uses the sham projections of thre heritage foundation to make it a deficit reducing plan. Even with the sham numbers it doesnt balance the budget in my life time but instead 30 yrs from now...because it really is a trojan horse hiding another rounf of massive taxcuts to the wealthy

They are both technocrats imo ...Obam and Romney

the thing is that implies management skills and Romney can't get his taxes done on time even with a pro doing them. That isn't exactly an endorsement to hid imagined skills at efficency. Only a fool thinks the truth is he doesnt want to release his taxes pre election and be shown to be paying a rate a walmart greeter would envy on 120 mil a yr. If that's the case he has proven he places pursuit of power over law because he is claiming rthe need for an extension when there is no need.

[buttslinger]

Obamas the name and politics is the game.