Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

I’ve got an idea for a new song for the Dixie Chicks. Maybe they could sweep up the redneck capital of Nashville with it.

After sleeping late this Thursday morning, and after I got the coffee going and the laptop setup to blog, there was the mug of George W. Bush, our lame-duck president, making another one of those misleading morning speeches that define his failed eight years in office.

Then the next face to hit the screen was Sarah Palin, the diva of the so-called “New GOP,” the nitwit governor of Alaska who helped John McCain lose his bid for president, thank Dog.

I’m torn between two competing emotions.

On one hand, I want Bush and Palin off my TV.

Bush needs to go back to Crawford, Texas, and cut himself up into little pieces with his brush-cutting chain saw.

And Sarah Palin just needs to take her new wardrobe and go back to hunting wolves from helicopters in Alaska.

On the other hand, maybe it would be best to just keep these two anti-intellectual losers on the tube every day as a reminder to the independents in this country of how sad and pathetic the Republican Party is now.

If that is going to be the strategy for ratings, however, I’m just going to turn off the TV. I don’t want to see their faces any more or hear their idiocy.

A very smart man has now won the presidency. And he’s assembling a team of smart people to fix our national problems, at least the ones the federal government is best situated to deal with.

Like a majority of Americans, I have confidence that the Obama administration will be able to straighten out our economic issues, which will involve getting the U.S. military out of Iraq. And yes, it will involve helping U.S. automakers to survive.

As Bill Clinton’s former labor secretary Robert Reich has been saying in TV interviews, the federal government is the lender and spender of “last resort.”

And Obama is going to need Detroit to re-tool the American auto industry in the coming Green Revolution. Alabama could have been part of that, but they blew it. McCain won Alabama and managed a higher percentage of the white vote than any other state except maybe Oklahoma.

But now is the time to take the politics out of policy in this country. We’ve had enough after eight years of Karl Rove making all the decisions about what the Bush administration would do in order to try and create a Republican majority for the next generation. He failed in that. And he failed the country.

We now know that Bush was not “the decider” after all. Every decision Bush made was guided by the perceived effect on politics. But that is no way to run the government of the most powerful country in the world, not if your goal is long-term success.

So maybe it’s time for the Dixie Chicks to get in the studio and break out a new record, perhaps with the title song: Get Bush and Palin Off My TV!

The song that is ringing in my head for no apparent reason is Money For Nothing by Dire Straits, maybe because of the line in the song, “I want my MTV.”

[Video link]

I remember distinctly when that song came out and hit number one on the charts in 1985. I recall hearing it up loud in Johnny Wyker’s family hardware store in downtown Decatur, Alabama. I was a political reporter for The Decatur Daily at that time.

Wyker was a member of the one-hit wonder rock group Sailcat, which scored with the song “Motorcycle Mama” in 1972.

Another tragic story of an Alabama native who almost made the big time but blew it. Wyker got too drunk and stoned before a showcase performance in front of a major record label and vomited on stage. So much for Sailcat.

Karl Rove Halloween mask

The Dixie Chicks almost disappeared into obscurity when they became mired in political controversy after comments made by Natalie Maines about the 2003 invasion of Iraq and Bush. Maines told a sold-out crowd in London, England, “We don’t want this war, this violence; and, we’re ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.”

But they made a major comeback in 2007 and won the coveted Grammy Award for Album of the Year for Taking The Long Way.

I have made a point of playing the first and third songs on the record at least once a week on the drums for the past two years, as a way of bashing out my anger on what Bush has done to this country. I have a mask of Karl Rove hanging on the wall of The Bunker right behind the drum set.

But now that Obama has won, I think it is time to retire the practice, burn the mask and bury the hatchet. Now if only Bush and Palin would get off my TV!

This week on Bill Moyers’ JOURNAL, he interviewed economist James K. Galbraith from the University of Texas. Author of the new book The Predator State, he gave the best summary I’ve seen yet on the causes of the economic crisis and how the U.S. might best move forward. The main point is we have the institutions — created in the 1930s to get out of the Great Depression — to get out of this mess. But we must understand those lessons and use those institutions.

The cult of the free market has dominated economic policy-talk since the Reagan revolution of nearly thirty years ago, according to the Amazon.com book review. Tax cuts and small government, monetarism, balanced budgets, deregulation, and free trade are the core elements of this dogma, a dogma so successful that even many liberals accept it. But a funny thing happened on the bridge to the twenty-first century. While liberals continue to bow before the free-market altar, conservatives in the style of George W. Bush have abandoned it altogether. That is why principled conservatives — the Reagan true believers — long ago abandoned Bush.

Enter James K. Galbraith, the iconoclastic economist. In this riveting book, Galbraith first dissects the stale remains of Reaganism and shows how Bush and company had no choice except to dump them into the trash. He then explores the true nature of the Bush regime: a “corporate republic,” bringing the methods and mentality of big business to public life; a coalition of lobbies, doing the bidding of clients in the oil, mining, military, pharmaceutical, agribusiness, insurance, and media industries; and a predator state, intent not on reducing government but rather on diverting public cash into private hands.

In plain English, the Republican Party has been hijacked by political leaders who long since stopped caring if reality conformed to their message.

Galbraith follows with an impertinent question: if conservatives no longer take free markets seriously, why should liberals?

Why keep liberal thought in the straitjacket of pay-as-you-go, of assigning inflation control to the Federal Reserve, of attempting to “make markets work”? Why not build a new economic policy based on what is really happening in this country?

The real economy is not a free-market economy. It is a complex combination of private and public institutions, including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, higher education, the housing finance system, and a vast federal research establishment. The real problems and challenges — inequality, climate change, the infrastructure deficit, the subprime crisis, and the future of the dollar — are problems that cannot be solved by incantations about the market. They will be solved only with planning – with standards and other policies that transcend and even transform markets.

A timely, provocative work whose message will endure beyond this election season, The Predator State will appeal to the broad audience of thoughtful Americans who wish to understand the forces at work in our economy and culture and who seek to live in a nation that is both prosperous and progressive.

“James Galbraith elegantly and effectively counters the economic fundamentalism that has captured public discourse in recent years, and offers a cogent guide to the real political economy. Myth-busting, far-ranging, and eye-opening,” says Robert B. Reich, Professor of Public Policy, University of California at Berkeley.

Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences, says the book, “shows how to break the spell that conservatives have cast over the minds of liberals (and everyone else) for many years.”

“With a combination of erudition, insight, and wit worthy of John Kenneth Galbraith, Thorstein Veblen, and John Maynard Keynes, James K. Galbraith offers a critique of the conventional unwisdom about the economy that is as compelling as it is provocative,” says Michael Lind, Whitehead Senior Fellow at The New America Foundation and author of The American Way of Strategy.

Bruce Bartlett, author of Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy, says, “James Galbraith has written an extremely challenging book. Although its principal target is conservative economics, it is no less critical of conventional liberalism. Galbraith correctly recognizes that today both approaches are intellectually bankrupt and incapable of addressing the nation’s pressing economic problems. I hope The Predator State stimulates needed debate among both liberals and conservatives on the mistakes both sides have made that have gotten us to where we are now.”

This looks like a must read to me!

You can’t turn on the local television news or read an Alabama newspaper online these days without seeing a puff piece on the ill-conceived “Take Back Our Highways” campaign.

I’m wondering who the state troopers think they are taking back the highways from: The people who pay taxes to use those highways?

It’s enough to make a person lock themselves in and never leave the house in the police state that is America today.

According to this puff piece by the Alabama bureau of the Associated Press, on Monday - a full four days before the peak traffic on the Thanksgiving holiday - cops in Alabama had already had 3,272 encounters with drivers on Alabama’s roads, and that includes 1,486 speeding tickets, 547 citations for seat belt/child restraint violations and 42 tickets for cars following other cars too closely. Twenty people were arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol in one day.

The report says nothing about arrests of illegal immigrants, thieves, murderers or major drug dealers, so we can only assume that no real criminals were arrested in this police state crackdown. And even if they did concentrate on catching real criminals, the jails are already so full there would be no place to house them.

And here’s an interesting point. There has never been one single report of police catching a so-called “terrorist” in this crackdown. Not one.

But by the time the holiday weekend is over, we can expect to see a press release claiming upwards of 26,000 arrests and citations, and police credit for saving a few lives since only about 20 people will die in traffic accidents over the weekend.

I called the National Restuarant Association and the Alabama Restuarant Association to see if they had any objection to this campaign, since it will quite obviously result in a drop in business for thousands of bars and restaurants all over the state. But they did not return phone calls seeking comment.

One of the main reasons this bothers me is because of the obvious lack of mass transit in the suburbs of the South. Mississippi and Tennessee are also getting into this crackdown act.

What are families and single people supposed to do if they want to go out to a restaurant and have a bottle of wine or cocktails with dinner? Not everybody goes to grandma’s house for turkey.

Everybody is also not in a position to employ a designated driver. And taking a cab from the suburbs to the city takes way too long and costs way too much.

Birmingham’s new mayor Larry Langford has vowed to work on the mass transit problem, but it is doubtful anything will ever be done in this car culture we have developed with major government subsidies for all the wrong industries.

This leads to other major problems, like the ozone haze problem in Birmingham, global warming and climate change.

Would anyone else like to see some of those police resources going to other problem areas, such as busting illegal meth labs, catching illegal immigrants and fighting environmental crimes?

Why doesn’t some cop in this state go arrest the president of Alabama Power company for fouling our air? A huge fine might also be in order, if Alabama had an environmental agency that was not just a one-stop pollution permitting outfit.

Does this bother you at all? Maybe you haven’t thought about it because no reporters ask any real questions about it. It is just assumed that more cops on the road is a good thing, and that includes road blocks and check points and even allowing small town Barney Fiefs to make arrests on the Interstates, contrary to a law passed a decade ago by the Alabama Legislature.

Is it really in the power of the Alabama Department of Public Safety to override a law to write a bunch of tickets on a holiday weekend?

The people of this state are vehemently anti-taxes. Where is the outrage over all this police activity?

Can you afford a ticket or the expense of a DUI? What do you plan to do this weekend? Lock yourself in your house and go nowhere and spend no money out?

Tell me how that helps the economy, please. Maybe I am just a drunk driving Alabama dumbass, but it pisses me off. You?

The Bush administration is asserting that George W. Bush is the only one who can decide if you will be granted habeas corpus rights to a fair trial or be locked away indefinitely as an “enemy combatant.”

Some major U.S. news outlets have assured American citizens that they still have habeas rights even if the Military Commissions Act of 2006 took them away from everybody else. But Bush’s lawyers say no, it doesn’t matter if you’re a U.S. citizen or not.

Bush is the “Decider” on who gets or doesn’t get what the Founders used to call the “unalienable rights?”

For the full story on America’s truncated rights, go to the independent ConsortiumNews.com.