Will Republicans Maintain America's Honor?

The current political situation is bringing back some bad memories from my days in the Foreign Service.

The last time the Republicans took over Congress, with Newt Gingrich in the mid-1990’s, they cut off funding for one of the main scientific cooperation projects I was working on in Warsaw, Poland, although the US had signed an agreement to fund it for five years just before I got there a year or two earlier. A senior official in the Polish foreign ministry used to call me in periodically and berate me because the US had failed to honor its promise. As a Southerner who grew up with a strong dose of the importance of “honor,” I really didn’t like it.

Then the State Department asked me to go to Rome, and the Republicans shut down the government on the very day my wife and I were leaving. We had moved out of our house in Warsaw, had everything in the car ready to drive to Rome, when the Embassy in Rome called at about 4:30 pm and said, “Don’t leave; we don’t have money to pay for the trip.” That left us on the street in Warsaw with no place to live. It turned out that the DCM (deputy chief of mission, the Ambassador’s deputy) in Rome was a friend from a prior tour in Brasilia. When I spoke to him, he said, “Come on, we’ll work it out.” But the whole thing left a very bad taste in my mouth.

Then when we got to Rome, one of my responsibilities was the nuclear agreement with North Korea. Again, the Republicans refused to fund all of the American obligations under the agreement; so, one of my jobs was to go hat in hand to the Italian government, who at that time held the Presidency of the European Union, and ask them to fund some of the things that we wouldn’t, so that the US would not be in violation of its agreement with North Korea.

That’s one of the reasons I retired. I didn’t want to represent a government that would not honor its promises.

Does the current batch of Republicans in the House have any concept of honor? We'll see. Back in the 1990's one of the Republican complaints about the Democrats was that because they had no business experience, the Democrats did not know how to "meet a payroll." Then, it turned out that it was the Republicans who didn't know how to meet a payroll, or honor their legal, treaty obligations.

Glenn Beck and Elites

Glenn Beck talks about Jimmy Stewart & Bedford Falls, and elites, saying that George Soros represents the elites.  But in fact Fox is the spokesman for the elites, which are big corporations and banks.  George Soros is part of it, but the rich Republican establishment, represented today particularly by the Chamber of Commerce, is an even larger part of it.  Beck doesn't mention them, the Koch brothers, for example.

His participation in the Fox News disinformation campaign to claim that Obama's Indiq trip will cost $200 million per day is also despicable. The claim is based on an incorrect statement by some low ranking Indian local official. It's just the Communist big lie.  

The Economist on the Elections

The Economist magazine has some good points about the Republican landslide, the best being:

Only four years after the voters sent them packing, handing both chambers of Congress to the Democrats at the 2006 mid-terms, the Republicans are back. Voters then (and again in 2008) decided that Republican policies had blown up the deficit with unaffordable tax cuts, let the banks run wild, dragged America into two costly wars and produced a wretched harvest of stagnant wages, rising job insecurity and soaring health-care costs. Now they seem to have decided that they like Barack Obama and the Democrats even less.

I don't get it. The Republicans created huge deficits, a financial crisis, two worthless but expensive wars, destroyed the middle class, and seriously damaged the our system of medical care by giving the health insurance companies huge profits and greater control over patients. Then, since Obama didn't solve all these problems in two years, America voted the Republicans back in.

Obama's image of the Republicans as the people who drove the car into the ditch, seems perfectly logical to me. Why would America ask them to drive again? But people laughed at that simple comparison.

The first test will probably be the vote to raise the debt ceiling. Will the Republicans shut down the government again as they did under Newt Gingrich? The next will probably be what to do about the Bush tax cuts. The safest thing is probably to extend all the cuts for a year or two, although that is a defeat for the Democrats. Unfortunately, the Republicans are like a crazy man with gun; you can't risk trying to reason with them. It doesn't bother them if thousands of people go hungry, are cold, get poor medical care, but it bothers Democrats.

US Stimulus Goes Overseas

The other morning, Erin Burnett of CNBC said on "Morning Joe" that Bernanke and the Fed had generated about 20% of additional cash, but the economy had grown only about 2%. The implication is that the quantitative easing is not working. So where did the money go?

Businessweek last week said:

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has tried everything to feed the U.S. economy the liquidity it needs to revive. In the process, he has conjured up more than $1 trillion of fresh monetary stimulus out of thin air. Inevitably, much of it has ventured overseas in search of yield. The big beneficiaries have been the stock markets of the emerging-market economies.

So while Bernanke is pumping out cash, the main beneficiaries are sending that cash overseas to emerging markets. That is a problem with a concentration of wealth. The very rich, who are the main recipients of the cash, are not investing or spending in America. They are investing overseas. This tends to drive down the dollar, which offends the other countries, whose currencies are driven up, thus making their exports more expensive and harder to sell, etc. It will be an issue at the upcoming G-20 meeting.

If the rich were loyal Americans, like those running corporations for a generation after World War II, Bernanke's largess would stay in the US and benefit Americans, not Chinese, Indians and Brazilians.