Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog

I (a democrat) would vote for *Bush* if he got rid of Cheney, Rumsfield, Ashcroft. (4 years later and I still am dumbfounded that the Bush administration rewarded a man *who lost a re-election contest to a dead man* with the position of attorney general. http://www.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/11/07/senate.missouri/)
I've heard a few New York Republicans voicing similar sentiments, in private after a drink or several.

Whatever Brad. Replacing Bush on the ticket would be devastating for the Republican party. The social conservatives would stay home in droves for decades, or start their own party, if Bush were replaced on the ticket by a moderate. You're not being serious, are you?

_Freeing_ themselves of their captivity to the social conservatives would not likely hurt the Republicans in the long run, A-Ro. The fact is that it is not the Republicans that have the social conservatives, but the social conservatives that have the Republicans. The agenda that the social conservatives have foisted on the Republican party has limited their mainstream appeal for over two decades, and the Republican Party (Reformed) would be much better able to position itself to get the votes for fiscal conservatives and responsible stewardship that are currently going to Democrats. The cost would, of course, be several electoral cycles in the political wilderness. But, frankly, that's the price you pay for selling your soul, as the current Republican party has done.

In fact, I suspect that that is exactly the outcome Prof. DeLong would like to see. I know I would.

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Put down the glass, Brad, and slowly step away from the Kool-Aid pitcher.

1. Florida recount 2. PNAC founding member 3. A Bush

NBarnes,

My point was that blatantly alienating social conservatives is something that the current Republican party will not do. I agree that it would be desireable for them to do so, but it will just never happen. Here is why:

Placating the social conservatives does indeed limit the Republicans' mainstream appeal, just as people (like me) who advocate for full marriage rights for homosexuals limit the mainstream appleal of the Democrats. But we have a two party system, and the moderates have to live with the extremists in both parties in order to have a seat at the table. No one with power in the Republican party would be willing to give up their seat at the table for several election cycles for the longterm good of the country's moderates. They have the house, the senate, and the presidency. They might lose the presidency and congress is deadlocked, but something is better than nothing. And that's what they (the individuals currently in power within the Republican party) will get if they burn down the party in order to improve it for the moderates: a great big, liberal-controlled nothingburger for the rest of the prime of their careers.

In short, the Republican party establishment is so disincentivized to alienate the social conservatives that they would NEVER replace Bush with a moderate.

They would never replace Bush with a fellow social conservative for other reasons: because, as you pointed out, social conservatism limits the Republicans' mainstream appeal. In other words, if someone like Ashcroft of Orrin Hatch who can't pretend to be compassionate were nominated, Kerry would win.

In other words, for current Republicans, ousting GWB would mean voluntarily giving up their seat at the table and destroying their own politcal careers.

I don't think the Wall St. folks are alone--check out Niall Ferguson's op ed article in today's Wall St. J. I think there's more dissension in GOP ranks then is readily apparent, not surprising given the way the mainstream media's been performing for the last 5-6 years and especially since Bush cheated his way into the Oval office. If, in fact, the GOP party really stands for a smaller federal government, fiscal responsibility, then the Bush Administration, which has acted to restrict the civil rights of individuals, claimed the authority to pass laws in areas traditionally (and by pretty widely accepted constitutional interpretation) reserved to the states, invaded another nation for made up reasons and is running up debt like there's no tomorrow, should disappear in November. I've never really understood why the right wing fundies are considered to be social conservatives--their behavior and apparent goals seem to me to be radical, even revolutionary, given the history of the US.

“Whether or not you like him, you can't change leaders during a war.”

That's got to be the lamest excuse for trying to reelect a president ever.

Right you are, Kaus.

The boat's sinking from neglect, firing cannons indiscriminately and has been lost at sea for months... but don't *dare* change the captain! That would be reckless!

The head of a Wall Street firm made that quote, huh? Sounds like another child left behind.

Kaus Hackula:
This -- "you can't change leaders during a war" -- isn't even the most disturbing part of the whole "We can't abandon Bush now" argument. Ask yourself, which war is it that is forcing some people to support Bush against their instincts? The War on Terror. Will the War on Terror end neatly in November 2008? Does our current president have a secret plan, a la Nixon, to win it in his second term? Will George W. Bush go gently into the good night of retirement? Is he aware of the twenty-second amendment to the constitution? It's not like it bans flag-burning or unpleasant late-term abortions, or authorizes school prayer or requires a balanced budget (with a few exceptions), so I suppose he can be excused for assuming it doesn't matter or, heaven forfend, *apply*, to him.
Just a thought...

Brad, it IS too late. First of all, you'd need a majority of the GOP Senate caucus willing to stand up and say a new candidate is needed. Run down the roster of GOP Senators, please, and find me 26 names that have demonstrated sufficient independence from the party line to even think about such things, and have anything approaching the courage to go against the party's established order in a situation like this.

Let's face it: if John McCain, formerly Mr. Straight Talk, has downed the BushCo Kool-Aid to the degree he's demonstrated lately, then that particular door is shut tight - who else is going to lead this hypothetical revolt, if he's gone that far over to the Dark Side?

Then there's the matter of the Convention itself. Every last delegate there is pledged to vote for George W. Bush on the first ballot. And these guys were picked, not for their wallets, but for their belief in what the White House is selling. You ask them, even in a heart-to-heart moment, and upwards of 90% of them will tell you that the tax cuts are great, the deficits will eventually become manageable again, Iraq's going through some tough times now but will eventually be a democracy and besides, we needed to get rid of Saddam, and Dubya's doing a great job in the War on Terror.

IOW, they're not going to change their votes. It IS too late. Bush/Cheney is the ticket, period.

The problem comes down to this: there just aren't that many 'grownup Republicans'; they're a fringe group within their party; they're doomed to have little influence. If they want to pull either the country as a whole, or the GOP itself, in their direction, their best bet is to break away and form their own party. Suppose they can turn a 50-50 nation into 45-45-10, with their being the 10 in the middle. (Or even 47-47-6.) They can't govern, but they can decide who does. And if you can decide who wins, you can tell them upfront what the price will be.

Wasn't one lesson of the 1990s that what Wall Street likes or wants isn't always good for America? Wall Street's interests are the short term, they don't see that far ahead, and they have short memories. They're probably just unhappy that the Fed increased rates a tiny bit.
Anyway, GWBush has already got all the money he needs, from energy and extraction industries and evil bloodsucking corporate lawyers.

Nah, the grownups in the GOP knoe that if they replaced Bush they are still likely to lose and the reactionary religious faction would blame the wobblers for the defeat.

Better to have Bush take the Religious Reich down with him - and if the espionage allegations pan out, the likudniks too.

http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/webfeatures_econindicators_income20040826

Income inequality has also increased, both in the past year and to a greater degree over the recession and jobless recovery. Low-income households—those with incomes that place them at the 20th percentile of earners—have experienced income declines of 6.0% since 2003 and 1.9% since last year. The median household (the 50th percentile) is down 3.4% since 2000 and essentially unchanged (down just 0.1%) between 2002 and 2003. Upper income households, with incomes at the 95th percentile (i.e., only 5% of families have higher incomes) have been relatively flat over this full period.

Maybe even rich people in NYC aren't feeling too safe:

To the Editor:

With inspectors on the ground and no weapons of mass destruction in the country, George Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq. Now, with almost 1,000 soldiers killed and hundreds of billions of dollars spent, George Bush claims we are safer.

However, when asked this week about North Korea and Iran (two-thirds of the "Axis of Evil") having developed nuclear weapons during his presidency, "he opened his palms and shrugged," as reported by the New York Times. (http://tinyurl.com/4f584) "I don't think you give timelines to dictators,'' he now claims.

Two avowed enemies of the U.S. now have the ultimate weapons of mass destruction. Is this consistency? Is this leadership?

RT writes:

> Brad, it IS too late. First of all, you'd need a majority of the
> GOP Senate caucus willing to stand up and say a new
> candidate is needed. Run down the roster of GOP Senators,
> please, and find me 26 names that have demonstrated
> sufficient independence from the party line to even think
> about such things, and have anything approaching the
> courage to go against the party's established order in a
> situation like this.

Clearly this is right. However. There are some signs that enough GOP senators are not very interested in playing ball with Bush anymore. There was a (brief) push to make the tax cuts permanent in this session, but that faded away when it became clear that they were risking an outright loss in the Senate. So think ahead to March, 2005. The all-important first budget act is ramping up, and Bush is president again. He wants to extend the tax cuts, but a mere 5 northern Republicans tell him to stick it. I'm not sure what the response could be. Any attempt to slime or pressure them only makes them caucus with Jeffords (not even the Democrats, if they don't want) and Bush loses the Senate. Bush could easily end up being the lamest lame duck in history, starting with an approval rating of 50 or under.

> Let's face it: if John McCain, formerly Mr. Straight
> Talk, has downed the BushCo Kool-Aid to the degree he's
> demonstrated lately, then that particular door is shut tight -
> who else is going to lead this hypothetical revolt, if he's gone
> that far over to the Dark Side?

Nah, this is just more Dingbat Kabuki. McCain knows that he can't win unless either Bush loses despite his effusive support, or Bush wins *only* because of his effusive support. (If Bush wins going away, every grown-up Republican is screwed anyway.) In the "McCain tried to save my bacon" scenarios, McCain gains quite a bit of clout. In the "Bush manages to lose 40 states scenario", McCain loses some clout (although being friendly with Kerry could help a lot). So don't get too freaked out by this.

I've said this before in comments, but any GOP revolt had to happen in the spring/summer of 2003, where Bush had exquisitely timed our going to war, snuffing that one out.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/28/business/28fed.html

Warning Anew About Retiree Expectations
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. - The chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan, warned on Friday that the federal government might have to scale back promises to the elderly in programs like Social Security and Medicare.

"As a nation, we owe it to our retirees to promise only the benefits that can be delivered," Mr. Greenspan told a conference here sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

"If we have promised more than our economy has the ability to deliver to retirees without unduly diminishing real income gains of workers, as I fear we may have, we must recalibrate our programs," he said.

Mr. Greenspan has expressed similar views many times in the past, but he went further on Friday by warning political leaders that they cannot count on continued rapid rises in productivity and faster economic growth to solve the problems ahead.

Economists have warned for years that retirement and health care costs will soar as the baby boom generation reaches retirement age and as the number of workers shrinks as a share of total population.

Let me think about responsible political leaders who managed to be ever so fearful about a hard won budget surplus in 2000, and turned it ever so quickly to a deep deep deficit. Suddenly, surprise, we need to think through whether we can honor promises made to an aging worker. Yes, responsible leaders.

Brad,

You'd make a lousy doctor.

What I mean by that is that George W. Bush, the individual, is not the problem. He is not even part of the problem. He is a symptom of the problem. The problem is the Republican Party. The Republican Party is not its public face. The Republican Party is its grassroots organization and its grassroots propaganda, both of which are explicitly totalitarian. All of this is still well below the media radar. You have to actually come out into the rural areas and observe with the same kind of patience and care that an anthropologist would use in studying an undiscovered tribe.

Frank Wilhoit's point about the wide spread, under the carpet totalitarianism is a very good one.

For those of us who think there should be more than two parties in this country, a split (no matter into how many pieces) in the Republican party would be welcome. Then we'd see where the money goes, for starters!

I certainly sense a similar split or splits within the Democratic Party though perhaps, because the Democrats are much less angry and aggressive than the Republicans at this point, the process would be slower and gentler.

No, I like the idea. It would call for much more thought on the part of voters and would cause wonderful ructions among party officials (a plague on all their houses!) and that can't be a bad thing!

> or even Jeb Bush,

If there is one thing that I truely hope the entire polity can come to agreement on after George W. Bush loses in November, it is that there should be no more family inheritance of high political office in the United States. We fought a war over that in 1776, for very good reason. Let's remember those lessons in the future.

Cranky

It has astounded me the way so much of the Wall Street crowd has not been honest about who really buttered their bread- Bill Clinton, Robert Rubin, and the Democrats. To call for four more years of the kind of austerity they have been enduring seems a kind of masochism in behalf of cultural issues Wall Street has no interest in whatsoever.

"It has astounded me the way so much of the Wall Street crowd has not been honest about who eally buttered their bread- Bill Clinton, Robert Rubin, and the Democrats."

Interesting comment, how do you account for this?

I'm getting sort of sick of Brad's "Grownup Republicans" schtick. Sure, it's mostly a way of putting pressure on Republicans, but it assumes that a lot of Republicans are good at heart and that some of them will come around. There's not a lot of evidence of that so far. In this case, we're told that Wall Street men who raised five million dollars for Bush might stop there and don't feel enthusiastic any more. It's grasping at straws to find hope in lack of enthusiasm for the worst president in American history.

The Republican Party is run by the crazies, and most of the moderates or "adult Republicans" will fall in line.

I think that there's a subtext here, frankly. You have the good sensible people in the middle, and the dangerous wackos at the extremes. All the sensible people should get together and marginalize the extremists.

As it happens, the Republican extremists run the US, and the moderate Republicans enable them. But the left wing of the Democratic Party is, in fact, a pariah. That part of the job has been done. (Some of the things Brad supports, e.g. in medical care, are primarily supported by the left fringe of the Democrats, rather than the moderates and still less by the so called adult Republicans. But he's still using the centrist rhetoric.)

The same happened with the Iraq war. During the debate over the Iraq War, all doves and anti-war voices were marginalized, and the centrists mostly gave qualified or reluctant support to the war. Now that the facts are in, it would seem that the people who were wrong should be demoted, and the ones who were right promoted, but nothing like that has happened. The liberal hawks, secure in their command of "the center", have just said, "Heh-heh, guess I was a little off there!"

Of course Wall St. is not happy because Bush and his bufoon economic team keep trying to sell "The U.S. Economy is Strong and Getting Stronger meme" with nothing but smoke and mirrors and smart investors are not buying it.

August 25, 2004
RICH AMERICA? POOR AMERICA? AN IMPORTANT DEBATE
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/000027.html

Excerpts:

During the 80s and 90s, America's current account deficit as a percentage of GDP basically wavered between 2.5% and 3.25%, but recently, the current account deficit has surged to nearly 5% of GDP and is projected to rise to about 6% in the near term. Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf has written some superb commentary regarding America's worsening macroeconomic conditions, and sensibly argued that "the high and rising U.S. current account deficit is one of the most remarkable features of the world economy."

I have never worried that much about the absolute dollar value of the current account deficit -- but when GDP ratios begin changing quickly over short time spans -- I get concerned. Wolf agrees that deciding whether this current account deficit surge matters or not "is of some significance."

An array of structural imbalances in the American economy is making America feel like a richer nation than it is. U.S. savings levels have reached all-time lows. America is exporting the least in memory in comparison to that which it imports. And as Martin Wolf writes, "foreigners are now funding close to three-quarters of net U.S. investment." In commentary that Wolf offered a week ago (on August 18th), he writes "unless trends change, 10 years from now the U.S. will have fiscal debt and external liabilities that are both over 100 per cent of GDP. It will have lost control over its economic fate."

Despite this worrisome data, Japan and China continue to finance America's current account gluttony to keep U.S. consumers intoxicated on their exports. At some point, however, the only way out of America's dysfunctional binge is that it consumes less or exports more; that it buys down debt and external liabilities by working harder without near term rewards because these rewards were enjoyed yesterday and paid for through a mortgage. At minimum, when accounts revert to historical trendlines, American living standards will certainly flounder but more likely fall.

President Bush's Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, N. Gregory Mankiw, is duking out the real state of the economy with President Clinton's former Chair of the same Council, Laura D'Andrea Tyson, who is here in London as Dean of the London Business School. In the International Herald Tribune (and perhaps the New York Times which I haven't seen -- just found it and link is here), Mankiw reports that Tyson has said that this is "the worst economic recovery period in terms off job creation that the nation has experienced since the Great Depression."

There is not only anxiety out there about job and retirement security -- but there is some sense that people are beginning to notice that America is becoming a less rich nation. With oil now hitting $50 a barrel how can Mankiw and his boss, President Bush, think that they can get away with the headline "The U.S. Economy is Strong and Getting Stronger."

What is their definition of a weaker economy? Would they know it if they saw it?

Bob H wrote, "It has astounded me the way so much of the Wall Street crowd has not been honest about who really buttered their bread- Bill Clinton, Robert Rubin, and the Democrats."

Anne replied, "Interesting comment, how do you account for this?"

Huh? Throughout history the rich and powerful have shown that they'd *literally* prefer civilization to crash than to give up their "right" not to pay their fair share of taxes, or to give up their "right" to collect various economic rents.

Standa, you're making me nervous, and not just about "structural imbalances," but about the fact that they're becoming publicly manifest--attested and discussed, and hence a source of generalized tension, the kind that generates an impulse to do something, anything, that looks responsible. Bush will raise the tension-level next week with an "acceptance" speech that rhapsodizing about "ownership" and the despotic drag of social security, and if he's re-elected, there'll be lots of pressure to act on his particular "acceptance" of things, forcing battered lower- and middle-class wage-earners to accept an accelerating depreciation of their public franchise. If Bush is re-elected, the next session of Congress is going to be absolutely deranging.

alabama sorry to make you nervous. However, if Bushco with Rove can continue to dupe middle class America with their "smoke and mirrors" economic ruse then America will get what it deserves.

Please read this...

The Big Squeeze
By David J. Sirota
09.01.04
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=8344

Republicans have always defended big business. But they’ve never done it quite like this.

Excerpts:

For most Americans, the last four years have represented a low point in our economic history. But for the big-business interests financing the Bush campaign, these have been high times. In previous eras, and even under previous Republican administrations, corporate America was one of a number of players in the public-policy arena. But under the Bush administration, big business is both the player and the referee, having finally won its decades-long campaign to eliminate the boundary between executive suite and public office. No longer does the private-profit motive compete in the legislative process with public good; profit now owns the process, and the middle class is left to the vultures.

We technically have a representative government, but it is far less like democracy than like WWE wrestling -- entertaining theater with colorful characters, much fanfare, and a few body slams, but ultimately a rigged outcome. Industry no longer needs to lobby hard for regulatory rollbacks, because many of its own lobbyists have been appointed federal regulators. Congress openly admits that business writes many of the most important pieces of legislation. The White House slaps an official seal on memos from corporate executives and labels them “presidential policy initiatives.” The vice president is permitted to own shares of stock in a company for which he coordinates government contracts. And the Oval Office is occupied by a man whose major life experience was not public service but money-losing business deals (that somehow seemed to just make him richer and richer). In short, the government is now a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America.

The George W. Bush era is simply the full-grown, out-of-control, bastard child of this 30-year orgy that’s been running roughshod over the middle class.

This administration, by contrast, resists any government intervention or deviation from the big-business agenda, no matter how dire the situation. It is all the culmination of the industry’s master plan: Take over the government and remove it as an obstacle to fleecing the average American. If any legitimate proposals arise to reregulate the market, they are bludgeoned with any red herring available: Health reforms are tarred as “socialized medicine,” tax reforms are attacked as “job killers.” While the fat cats make off like bandits, the rest of us are left, in five crucial areas of economic life, facing the big squeeze.

THE HEALTH-INSURANCE SQUEEZE

THE PRESCRIPTION-DRUG SQUEEZE

THE ENERGY SQUEEZE

THE WAGE SQUEEZE

THE TAX SQUEEZE

At a high-society dinner during the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush looked out on the audience and joked, “This is an impressive crowd. The ‘haves’ and ‘the have-mores.’ Some people call you the ‘elite.’ I call you my base.”

We should give him credit: It is a rare occasion when a conservative politician admits who calls the shots, even in jest. Most of the time, the right wing’s real motivations are hidden under the populism of a cowboy hat, or in the fine print of books about the free market.

But what is happening in this country is no laughing matter. Average Americans are being screwed as never before, and our government is helping those turning the screwdriver. The result is that George W. Bush has become not just a “war president” on foreign policy but also on domestic policy. Only here at home, he is waging a war on the middle class, and the results have been downright devastating.

IF you want to watch people put their money where their hearts are then I recommend

http://www.tradesports.com/

you can watch the Bush campaign slowly erode as traders move their bets to the winner's circle hedging all the while.

I think RT is right, and that Kerry should make a direct pitch to the rational remainder of the republican party. Even if they just don't vote for Bush, Kerry will win handily. Maybe Kerry is just setting up that strategy by refusing to criticize Bush too directly on the war.

standa, this gets downright wounding. As a teacher, I've been subscribing all my life to TIAA-CREF and to one or another state teachers retirement fund. This makes me one of the "haves," if not actually one of the "have mores" (because these funds aim to be as tough as any investor in the marketplace--with or without their "ethical" investment options). I'd like to plot a pertinent next move, and I don't take much comfort in the options afforded by the electoral process.

This is the most reassuring thing I've read in a long time. It's pretty clear at this point that the only people who have any input into policymaking in the Rove-DeLay GOP are business and financial honchos - i.e. big campaign contributors. They're the only ones who can save us now. They can refuse to continue to support the GOP if something is not done about the fiscal imbalances.

I recently came across this excellent piece by Bill Moyers that appears not to have been noticed much.

This is the Fight of Our Lives by Bill Moyers
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/071804J.shtml

Excerpts:

"The middle class and working poor are told that what's happening to them is the consequence of Adam Smith's 'Invisible Hand.' This is a lie. What's happening to them is the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that in its hunger for government subsidies has made an idol of power, and a string of political decisions favoring the powerful and the privileged who bought the political system right out from under us."

Says Warren Buffett, the savviest investor of them all: "My class won." Look at the spoils of victory: Over the past three years, they've pushed through $2 trillion dollars in tax cuts - almost all tilted towards the wealthiest people in the country. Cuts in taxes on the largest incomes. Cuts in taxes on investment income. And cuts in taxes on huge inheritances.

More than half of the benefits are going to the wealthiest one percent. You could call it trickle-down economics, except that the only thing that trickled down was a sea of red ink in our state and local governments, forcing them to cut services for and raise taxes on middle class working America. Now the Congressional Budget Office forecasts deficits totaling $2.75 trillion over the next ten years.

These deficits have been part of their strategy. Some of you will remember that Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to warn us 20 years ago, when he predicted that President Ronald Reagan's real strategy was to force the government to cut domestic social programs by fostering federal deficits of historic dimensions. Reagan's own budget director, David Stockman, admitted as such. Now the leading rightwing political strategist, Grover Norquist, says the goal is to "starve the beast" - with trillions of dollars in deficits resulting from trillions of dollars in tax cuts, until the United States Government is so anemic and anorexic it can be drowned in the bathtub.

There's no question about it: The corporate conservatives and their allies in the political and religious right are achieving a vast transformation of American life that only they understand because they are its advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries. In creating the greatest economic inequality in the advanced world, they have saddled our nation, our states, and our cities and counties with structural deficits that will last until our children's children are ready for retirement, and they are systematically stripping government of all its functions except rewarding the rich and waging war.

You just can't make this stuff up. You have to hear it to believe it. This may be the first class war in history where the victims will die laughing. But what they are doing to middle class and working Americans - and to the workings of American democracy - is no laughing matter.

Let's face the reality: If ripping off the public trust; if distributing tax breaks to the wealthy at the expense of the poor; if driving the country into deficits deliberately to starve social benefits; if requiring states to balance their budgets on the backs of the poor; if squeezing the wages of workers until the labor force resembles a nation of serfs - if this isn't class war, what is?

It's un-American. It's unpatriotic. And it's wrong.

But I don't need to tell you this. You wouldn't be here if you didn't know it. Your presence at this gathering confirms that while an America with liberty and justice for all is a broken promise, it is not a lost cause. Once upon a time I thought the mass media - my industry - would help mend this broken promise and save this cause. With some exceptions I was wrong.

What we need is a mass movement of people like you. Get mad, yes - there's plenty to be mad about. Then get organized and get busy. This is the fight of our lives.

If you're a Bill Moyers fan this is one helleva speech. You can watch the video here.

http://www.inequality.org/conferencematerials.html

There's a pretty long pre-amble until Moyers nails it about 2/3 way thru.

Yes, that's as clear as it gets--except that it overlooks the extraordinary self-compromising of the middle class through its pension-fund commitments (as mentioned upthread at 2:38 PM). Do we need another Great Depression to impoverish (and thereby radicalize) some 80-90% of the population? A thinkable prospect, I suppose, if we could also figure out the "timing" of the thing. But it probably doesn't have a "timing" in any punctual sense, just a long, gradual, and acclimatizing process of impoverishment--which is not the sort of thing that inspires effectual push-backs.

Why would anybody be surprised that Wall Street is getting a bit queasy about supporting Bush? Trading volume (the lifeblood of any financial services firm's brokerage-side income) is in the toilet. Market volatility (where all the index options and index futures guys make their money) is in the toilet as well. And finally, the S&P 500 is down close to 19% on a total-return basis since Dubya took office, making practically every money manager in the country look like he just lost his clients a boatload of dough, closet indexers and active managers both. And don't tell me it was Sept. 11 that the index down - it recovered the ground it lost after 9/11 in less than a month. So where's Wall St. making money? The only money the big WS firms are making is coming from investment banking - not exactly the route to wealth for the average investor.

"Even those who are campaigning for Mr. Bush sound increasingly defensive. “Whether or not you like him, you can't change leaders during a war,” said the head of one Wall Street firm."

==========

Is that like some anonymous off-the-record "head of one Wall Street firm"? Well, bulls&*t, that sounds like more RNC disinformation to me.

FDR succumbed under the burden of office during WWII, Truman took over, and the war was won only months later. Truman succumbed under the burden of office during the Korean War, Eisenhower took over, and six months later the war was over. LBJ succumbed under the burden of office during Viet Nam, Nixon took over, (stopped troop pullouts, illegally invaded Cambodia) but war was over.

So what "can't change leaders during a war" is this idiotic anonymous WS CEO talking about?

Let's let history books read: "GWB succumbed under the burden of office during the Second Iraq War, Kerry took over, and US troops came home only months later...."

Yeah, that's gonna happen.

As anyone who has worked in Federal government knows, the politicos play to only one side of the budget line. Entitlement spending has almost a zero discretionary capital budget, nothing for bureaucrats to finagle and embezzle, no dark ops, no massive buildups, no Great Society's.

It's discretionary spending where the politicos and their trans-national corporate masters flock. Discretionary war spending, black ops, secret defense programs, expansionist R&D, closed door non-compete IDIQ's, double-dipping generals turned lobbyists and corporate heads, homeland defense, prisons, farm subsidies, education, health research, places the GAO can't detect the signals of fraud and embezzlement that $782 BILLION in new spending would raise the red flags in under entitlement spending.

The "National Defense" category of federal spending (excluding veterans programs and other military-related entitlement spending) amounts to a 51 percent of all discretionary spending. (That amount totals nearly *10x* the Fed budget spent on education. It's no wonder that in some Western states, there's a 30% high school drop-out rate, and among minorities, a 50% rate!!)

Deep Throat warned Bob Woodward to "follow the money", and that's what we should do as the RNC drums out it's tried and true platitudes and homilies for our prime-time media in NYC.

Hey, it's a shrinking percentage of the Federal budget, true, but still, 51% of 39% of a couple $T's Fed budget is a whole lot of silver shekels in Halliburton's Cayman Islands bank account.

"Our total American debt is over $100,000 per American, an unfunded burden of $30T in 2004 dollars, 12x current Fed budget and 2.5x GDP."
(Office of the GAO)

http://www.heritage.org/research/features/agenda_budget.cfm

"The Fed government is on a historic spending spree. Current estimates reveal that it will have spent $782 billion more between fiscal years (FY) 2000 and 2003 than it did between 1996 and 1999. At over $73,000 per household, 2000-2003 is set to become the highest-spending four-year period in American history...."

For what? What has it bought us? Economic meltdown and perpetual war against Islam.

60 Minutes just had a piece on Halliburton and it's illegal operations in Iran, one of George Bush's "evil axis" can't-operate-there's, using a fake Cayman Islands front as a charade. This is the same Halliburton that's supposed to be feeding our kids bleeding and dying in Iraq, who are begging their parents for food care-packages so they don't have to eat the swill Halliburton is serving up for them, charging US double for, and threatening to stop payment to their sub-tier contractors if COE dings them for fraud!

We must follow the money, uncover the corporate and bureaucratic malingerers, publicly out them, and send them on a Benedict Arnold sleigh-ride out of the country. Bribery, extortion, fake offshore fronts, witness tampering, racketing, fraud, and theft of goods and services (grand larceny) is/are Federal felonies.

Yet nothing. It's not a conspiracy because it's happening in broad daylight and condoned by the Executive. Instead, the Feds go after the little guy for the miniscule theft:
http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/ma/presspage/July2004/Asselin-Raymond-indictment.htm

Go ahead, I dare you. Surf the DoJ site, and try to find even one single prosecution under the category of discretionary spending budget fraud.

"Even those who are campaigning for Mr. Bush sound increasingly defensive. “Whether or not you like him, you can't change leaders during a war,” said the head of one Wall Street firm."

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Others have pointed out some examples of how silly this "can't change leaders during a war" theme is, but I've yet to see anyone mention the most striking of counterexamples. England switched from Chamberlin to Churchill as prime minister only after the fall of France, well after the start of WWII. Does any sane person really believe that that was some kind of mistake?