I received a forwarded email the other night that was in itself a forwarded message many times over.  The message included a link to the video below, and a rather innocent sounding but decidedly loaded statement that appeared to be written by Ann, who is a somewhat distant relation.  She said:

Once again I mean no offence (sic) to anyone. Please, watch this video and tell me where you disagree and why. I really am trying to see both points off view and to get at the truth. I love America as I am sure you do. If we are losing our precious freedom bit by bit, I want to know about it and maybe we can work together as AMERICANS to stop it!

The statement is dipping with Tea Party code words.   Truth, I love America, precious freedom, work together as Americans…phrases that make you want to stand up and salute.  The subtext is that Ann is really trying to get at the real truth, and this video is so compelling and is motivating her to action in a way that only my specific and detailed (and likely un-American) rebuttal of its content might stop her.  She needs my help.

In honesty, and with no intended disrespect to Ann, it is so cleverly worded, I strongly suspect it was written by some political spin doctor rather than by her.  But perhaps her motivation in copy/pasting was sincere, and with that belief, I’ll actually bother to address her request about the video.  Instead, if she did write it herself, then it’s highly likely this will fall on deaf ears, if any ears at all.  She has already made up her mind and this is just propaganda.

To begin, I find the whole premise of the video faulty.  It is positioned as a plea/warning from people who voted for Obama and the Democrats in Congress that they are failing to deliver on what they promised, and if this continues, they will be voted out.  It then goes on to make very generalized accusations about taxes, health care, the economy, bail-outs, and other topics.  Should you go back and look at what the Obama (and by extension, the Democrats’) 2008 campaign platform was, you’ll find that in many ways the video is correct.  We were promised health care with a public option, a cap & trade policy, the closing of Guantanamo, the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the abolition of No Child Left Behind, and other things that have not been delivered on.  However, the reality of Obama and the Dems is not that they’ve been way more liberal than they advertised, but that they’ve been way more centrist.

Yet, the video clearly inserts the Socialism label and ends with a call to take back the country from the liberals.  This is not the work of a disenfranchised far left constituency.  So am I being asked to believe that the video was created by people duped into voting for Democrats because they thought they would be pushing a Conservative political agenda?  If they were so naive as to think that, then they deserve what they got.  But I think it way more likely that this video is a creation of people who never voted for any of the people it is complaining about.  Rather, it is sour grapes for being forced to endure a government their minority didn’t elect.  Welcome to the realities of representative democracies.  Like it or not, this is working just as the Founding Fathers intended.

As to the specific content of the video… well, there really isn’t any.  It touches on some major tea party themes, most of which I’ve written about before.   There is the myth of the tax increases we’re all suffered under; the unyielding creep of the scope of government; the horrendous and destructive government bail-out packages; the scourge of Socialism; the pain of healthcare; and even the obscene behavior of the corporately owned Democrats in government.  These themes don’t whether well in the face of facts, but they play well to those seeking emotional resonance and a healthy spleen venting.

I get that there is anger with the government.  I feel that too.  Both parties have ample dysfunction to go around.  No one should be happy with the way the government is functioning.  But positioning the current government as a threat to our safety, our health care, our economy, and our individual liberties is unfounded.  Disagree, debate, and vote with your convictions.  But do so out of a considered and analytical assessment of the facts and the implications of different proposals and platforms.  Minimally, try back tracking your positions into history and assessing the implications on your life today.

For example, if you oppose all forms of social welfare programs, would you be happier today knowing that there was no Social Security and Medicare waiting for you when you retire?  Are you prepared to refuse medical treatment, food, shelter, and education to children whose parents can’t afford it?  If you oppose government regulation on business, are you prepared to assess the safety of your own food and drug supply?  Are you willing to trust that your employer has provided all the safety measures necessary to keep you from being injured at work?

Most people who bother to genuinely think through the implications of their all-or-nothing points of view quickly realize their world is a lot grayer than they imagined.  That clearly doesn’t mean Democrats are right and Republicans are wrong.  It also doesn’t mean whatever government is in power should rule unchecked.  But it does mean that if we can cut through the emotional rhetoric, we will often find there is quite a bit of common ground to work with.  Videos like this one add nothing to the conversation, and shed no light on the common ground we need to find to make progress on anything.

Ann, if by chance your mind is truly open, I urge you to study both sides as you claim to want to do.  But do so through a multi-sourced study of the facts and the most dispassionate analysis you can find.  Ignore Sean Hannity, Keith Olbermann and other voices at the edge. And don’t try to decide what side you’re on.  Rather, try to identify the common ground.  It’s easy to divide a group and get them to stand on either side of a fence and hurl rocks and insults at each other.  It makes for a great news story, but it accomplishes little.  Getting the group to work together to achieve small collective gains is damnably difficult.  And it rarely makes the front page, but it is the path of real progress.

Listening this week to the Senate go after Goldman Sachs on the financial meltdown was disheartening, but not surprising.  CEO Lloyd Blankfein and his cronies were adamant they had done nothing wrong and felt no remorse.  Senators were hypocritically apoplectic. (Say that five times fast…)

For most of us, our ethics are not the same as the laws that govern us.  Granted, for the most part people find illegal things to be unethical.  But most of us also have many things our ethics prevent us from doing that don’t get us in trouble with the police.  What the executives demonstrated was that they have no such distinction.  If it’s legal, it’s ethical.  They will feel no shame or remorse unless and until they are in jail.

The senators haven’t made such public assertions about their lack of shame, but their role in deregulation also places some responsibility on them.  While they are willing to appear on TV looking like they are gonna pop a vein or two while excoriating the banks, I haven’t seen any mea culpas from them either.  To President Clinton’s credit, he did recently step up and claim his role in deregulation was a bad decision and he regretted it.  But in fairness, he’s retired now, and has less to lose.  Nonetheless, I though it was admirable that he took some responsibility.

I admit that it’s unrealistic to expect Congress or the banking execs to admit any fault here.  And in the end, I don’t care.  We’re here.  Let’s focus on how to get out.  But the lessons from the Senate hearings this past week could not be more clear.

Capitalism in general and businesses in specific have yet again demonstrated they will push whatever envelope contains them.  Perhaps a particular CEO or two might be constrained by personal ethics, but their lunch will quickly be eaten by some other company whose leader has no such compunction.  If ever there was a poster child for why strong regulation is required it is Lloyd Blankfein.  He basically said that left to his own devices Goldman Sachs will repeat the shady financial practices that are pretty universally agreed to have caused the financial meltdown.  Since they’re not illegal, they must be okay.

We have the power to fix that.  And shame on us if we don’t, because there certainly won’t be any shame on him.

John Voight appeared recently on Mike Huckabee’s show on Fox News. Apparently his intent was to drive home the wisdom of Fox’s disdain for Hollywood celebrities spouting off on politics like their pin-headed opinions should matter to anyone.  If so, this is a brilliant performance.

And if the hypocrisy of Fox News doesn’t get you, consider the irony of Voight claiming supporters of Obama are either uneducated or are leeches on society, while Voight’s alleged educated position is that Obama is a Marxist bent on raping and destroying the country.  Way to use your noodle there John.

Much ado is being made over the Supreme Court’s recent toe-dip into technology.  The case actually involved privacy rights, but they were over whether or not an employer had the right to monitor or view an employee’s text messages on a company phone.  The chuckling included moments when Justices Roberts and Scalia seemed to get wrapped around the axle trying to understand that messages passed through a service provider network rather than being delivered directly device to device.  And there were repeated attempts by the lawyers and the Justices to equate texting to letter writing.  Most of the confusion was over issues that would have been easily answered by any teenager.  The horror.

Actually, I’m having trouble getting too worked up about it.  The court is largely made up of septuagenarians, and totally composed of lawyers.  Neither group is known for being particularly tech savvy.  Further, I’d be surprised if you polled politicians in general if you’d find a majority were technically literate.  The horror.

And I’m still having trouble getting worked up about that.  It did get me thinking though, how should issues requiring specific domain knowledge be handled?  The world in general is a pretty complicated place.  It’s not just about technology, but global economics and banking is frightfully complicated.  Military strategies in the age of wars without fronts and attacks ranging from the technological to the biological to the nuclear are extremely complex.  It is completely unreasonable to expect politicians and judges to be up to speed on these and other areas such that they can make good decisions.

Historically, when dealing with a highly technical topic, experts would be consulted.  What was required by politicians was the ability to assess the credibility of the expert and the implications of the proposed plan.  Experts are still called on today.  The difference is that in our current 24×7 news cycle, the experts are vetted by the court of public opinion rather than the politicians.  All too often, it isn’t about which plan is best for the nation, it’s about which plan can be digested down to a sound bite and accepted by Joe Six-pack.

Participatory government is a good thing.  However, having everyone involved in the minutiae of every plan and policy is not a good thing at all.  The Founding Fathers created a representative government for a reason.  It wasn’t just the impracticality of holding a national referendum on every detail in the 18th century.  Rather, it was that having that many cooks inevitably spoiled the broth.  Not that government should operate in secret, but recognizing that you elect a President, a Senator, and a Representative to do what they think is best.  Based on their results, you decide whether or not to send them back for another term.  It doesn’t work that way anymore.  The campaign never ends.  The news polls are incessant.  The result is that our politicians have become puppets with many people pulling the strings all at once.

An open statement to anyone I’ve ever elected to office:  if you need advice on computer networks, communications infrastructure, or similar topics, call me.  Maybe I can help.  If you need advice on military strategies, medical policy, transportation planning, economic development, or damn near anything else, I’ve probably got an opinion for you.  But if you pay it any mind, you’re an idiot.

Einstein famously said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”  As a society we’ve begun to habitually ignore the second part of that quote.  We just want it simple.  But the world isn’t so simple.  And we, and more importantly our leaders, keep treating it that way at our own peril.

In a move that should surprise exactly no one, the GOP has unified it’s opposition to financial reform.  It has successfully filibustered the bill into legislative oblivion.  What may surprise quite a few is that I think this is brilliant.

Not brilliant in the sense this is good for the country.  It absolutely is not.  Failure to enact tough financial reform and bring the US financial system under the regulatory stability it enjoyed from the 1930s to the 1980s will invite a repeat of boom/collapse cycles typified by the S&L crisis and more recently the depression narrowly averted by the TARP program.

Rather, this is a brilliant bit of marketing engineered by the financial institutions themselves.  Oh sure, GOP stalwarts like Mitch McConnell are the mouthpieces of this plan, but there is little doubt the banks are pulling the strings.  What’s brilliant is that the strategy is not simply to oppose reform.  It makes sense that the banks don’t want anything to impede their ability to continue to reap the obscene profits they’ve come to enjoy.  But the alternative plan they are pushing is to let capitalism run its course.  The claim in hindsight is to simply let the banks fail.  Think about that.  The banks are advocating for their own demise. Or are they?

Well of course they aren’t.  They know full well that they cannot be allowed to fail.  And that isn’t just because they are too big.  The finance system might better be thought of like the power grid for business.  It is a fundamental part of the infrastructure.  If it goes dark, business comes to a standstill. And the reality of modern banking is that much like the power grid, it’s all interconnected and interdependent.  Whether it’s organized as a few really huge companies or lots of tinier ones, small failures will quickly cascade and bring the system down.

The larger question is, why does this “just let ‘em fail” message sell?  The reason is essentially the same reason that the movement to stop stimulus spending sells.  Simplicity.  Macroeconomics is mind bogglingly complicated.  But boiling economic strategy down to household economics makes it all seem so clear.

Opposition to stimulus spending is fueled by the simple analogy that if your family lost a big chunk of its income, it would reduce its spending.  Therefore, the federal government should be tightening its belt during rough economic times.  On the surface, this makes lots of intuitive sense.  You can’t spend your way out of unemployment.  But the reality is that the federal government isn’t financially structured like your family, or even like a state government.  It’s debt isn’t like your debt.  And ultimately, as the creator of the currency, it has levers to pull you do not.  Most importantly, it is the spender of last resort.  The economy runs in no small part on spending.  It is the flow of money, rather than the existence of it, that drives the economy.  When the economy turns south, if everyone tightens their belts, things just get worse.  Hoover proved this with a remarkable demonstration called the Great Depression.  Still, it’s hard to prove the catastrophe that was averted.  So there is political hey to be made by opposing the stimulus, as long as it’s working.

The rationale for letting the banks fail works along similar lines.  On a small scale it’s easy to see that if your mom & pop organic tea shop makes some bad business decisions and gets in financial trouble, it should just be allowed to go under.  No argument.  But because of the interconnectedness of the banking system and its role in the economy as a whole, that argument absolutely does not scale up to financial institutions.  But the analogy sells.  And again, there is political hay to be made by advocating for letting the banks risk failure, as long as they do not actually fail.

Thinking again in terms of the power grid, which incidentally is a heavily regulated industry, would we seriously want to remove those regulations?  Would we be wiling to accept the risk that we would be left in the dark because a bunch of executives made some bad business decisions for their own personal gain?  I suspect not.  The difference is that while we have a tangible notion of what life without electricity is like due to occasional local failures, we have no palpable sense of what a comparable banking failure is like.  Not since our great-grandparents has anyone been allowed to lose money in a bank or be personally wiped out because a bank failed.  It would be as if no one had experienced a blackout in 75 years.  It would be easy to be cavalier about the power industry.  It seems indestructible on a whole, so why not spend less effort to control it?  And that will seem like a great plan, right up until the lights went out.  Then everyone would freak.

A recent New York Times /CBS poll showed that Tea Party supporters were better educated and financially well off than average Americans and more than their reputation would suggest. Friend of the blog Bridget asked what I made of this.  Her basic confusion seemed to be that these people were largely paying less taxes under Obama, in many cases enjoying (or getting pretty close to a time when they’ll enjoy) our socialist programs like Medicare and Social Security, and yet were fuming about the direction the country is taking.  Yet as among the better educated, they should be in a position to recognize that things are not as bad as they are worried about.

I guess I don’t see this as all that surprising.  Despite all the other demographic categories this group fell under, the most telling was that they self-identified as “very conservative”.  By definition this means they are afraid of change. And I don’t mean that to be demeaning.  Technically, they are resistant to change, but by and large, the reality is that the resistance manifests as fear.  Further, as people who have largely made something of themselves, they have more to lose… and more to be afraid of losing.

The irony is perhaps that the “change” they are afraid of is mostly caused by the high prospect of unemployment and the loss of their 401k value which was a direct result of the uber-Christian neo-conservative hero George Bush.  There has been little negative (or positive) impact yet as a result of the healthcare reform plan or anything else the secret Muslim hyper-liberal Obama has done.

But fear is a powerful motivator.  It trumps rational logic hands down.  Note that 30% of those polled believe Obama was born in another country, and 59% support Glenn Beck. And while we’re talking about talking heads.  It is the likes of Dick Armey, Liz Cheney, Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity, Michele Bachmann, and others who fuel these flames of fear for their own benefit.  Anyone who’s ever told spooky stories to children late at night in the dark knows that amping up small fears is simple pie.  It’s easy to reinforce fears that already exist.  And when you’re afraid, every shadow is a bogeyman.

The Tea Party isn’t about an alternate plan.  It isn’t about conflicting ideology.  It isn’t about rationality.  As I elaborated on in a previous column, the Tea Party is about venting spleens and channeling fear.

Pick your favorite horror film.  One person starts freaking out, and it spreads quickly to all the others who are nervous and trying hard to contain their latent fear.  The rational voices can’t be heard over all the shrieking and screaming.  Next thing you know, it’s all naked coeds and blood.  Okay, I’m not sure how that applies, but it was a decent analogy right up until then.