Bernie Sanders, FDR, and the Export-Import Bank

Senator Sanders followers love his attacks on Hillary Clinton. They love his promises of free things: free college educations, free medical care, and free money without working.

They love his alleged Socialism.

When asked who his hero is, Sanders said FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President-for-life from 1933 until he died in 1945.

Yet Sanders voted, along with Tea Party Republicans, against renewing the Export-Import Bank of the United States (ExIm). According to Sanders, ExIm is just corporate welfare. Sanders says the government should not own a bank that finances exports and provides jobs for American workers.

Um, might I point out that under Socialism, the government is supposed to own businesses, including banks? That pushing for state (as in California, or Oregon) owned banks is something that lefties and socialists have been pushing for recently?

The federal government actually makes money from ExIm. So it is not really a subsidy for corporations. It makes money from corporations. At the same time allowing businesses to make money exporting American products, creating jobs for U.S. workers.

But Senator Sanders (a certified member of the Establishment since 1980) gets confused easily. He calls this confusion "having principles." Is Socialism one of his principles or not? Don't ask, he'll wave his hands in the air, act indignant, and change the subject.

Did he ever retract the FDR is his hero statement? Let's take a good close look at that. Unlike Sanders, Roosevelt was a lifelong Democrat, though his uncle, President Teddy Roosevelt, was a Republican. FDR was not an independent.

And talk about Rich. FDR was born richer than Hillary and Bill will ever be.

And talk about militaristic. FDR was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1913 when he was just 31 years old. His qualifications? He was from a rich and powerful family. On his mother's side, the Delano fortune came from running opium into China. His father was one of the Robber Barons in coal and railroads.

But FDR presided over the complex system of programs that came to be called the New Deal. In some ways it was socialist, but there was also a fascist element to it. In any case:

Franklin Roosevelt (by executive order, without help from Congress) created ExIm in 1934.

Sanders can't think straight. But he is one of America's longest reigning politicians because he is really, really good at making promises and at lying.

No serious American leftist could support Senator Sanders based on his actual voting record in Congress. He gives a good stump speech. It sounds like he is a leftist. It sounds like he is for the poor, impoverished, college-educated white male voters that fund and power his campaign.

But look at his votes at the beginning of the Great Recession, and you can see why it would be folly to make the man President. In 2008 things fell apart for a variety of reasons, not just because some banks were too big, too stupid, and too greedy.

The important thing for Government was arresting the downward spiral. Poor people and working people are the ones hurt worst by a downward spiral. A family with $100 million can lose 90% of it and not starve. But for most people losing a job will wipe out any savings or assets they have, and may scar them for life. And if things got as bad as during the Great Depression, masses of people would have been dying in the streets

The first thing FDR did when he took office in 1933 was rescue the banks. Why was Senator Sanders against rescuing the banks in 2008-2009? Because he doesn't like big banks. Like anyone much does. He was willing to let America go down the tubes just so he did not have to go on record as doing what his hero did, saving the banks. Same for the auto industry. And again, the bank-saving plan turned out to be sound, eventually earning the government more than it put in.

So why is Bernie such an idiot? You might speculate he took too many hallucinogens between when he arrived in Vermont in the 1960s, the son of a rich Brooklyn business owner, and when he emerged from the fog in 1980 to take his first decently-paid job as a politician.

I don't know about the origins of Bernie's mental and emotional disabilities, but I have an analogy that explains how his current personality operates. He is like a foody who goes into a party with a giant smorgasbord and notices some offending food. He waves his hands, twists his face into a parody of an insane person, declares everyone at the party unclean, and walks out.

But what particularly saddens me is all the leftists who have fallen for his BS. College students I can understand. They are typically privileged children of privileged parents, and he has promised them more privilege, not having to pay for college, not having to make any contribution to society, just reaping the rewards of high-paying jobs requiring college degrees.

But leftists and even progressives should know better. They should be able to check voting records and do a little bit of critical thinking. Instead most have just been caught up in the hatred Bernie peddles.

Bundling Immigration, the Economy, and the Environment

A few personal notes before getting onto the topic of the day:

I am now getting abusive email from a neo-Nazi who objects to my America: Republic or Democracy? essay. He favors republics over democracies. And presumably dictatorships over republics. I am sure conservatives who prefer a republic with minority rule by the rich are really glad to have neo-Nazi protection of their flanks on this issue.

Volunteers collected enough signatures to put me on the ballot for the state assembly race as the Green Party candidate (1st Assembly District, California), but not enough that I could be on without paying a filing fee, and not as many as I said I would require to show that it was worth running. The incumbent Democratic Party guy raises hundreds of thousands of dollars every cycle. If I had governed California as bad as he had I would fall on my sword, but this guy just has staff members collect his signatures and pay his filing fee. Even if I coughed up the filing fee, the expense (time and energy as well as money) of running a campaign is not the best use of me this year. On the other hand I have until March 12 to make a final decision.

My spring garden is well underway. Fava bean plants are about 4 inches high, radish sprouts are visible, and the earliest apple and plum trees have already started blooming. My tea plants were devastated by a rabbit or other rodent a few weeks ago, so I put wire cages around them and am hoping for a recovery.

I did a lot of good thinking about an Assembly campaign. How would I answer a question on immigration? Immigration is a great example of bundling issues, and the problems that causes.

The left, including the centrists who call themselves liberals, like to be pro-immigrant. The right is mainly anti-immigrant.

But the left also tends to be environmentalist, and most environmentalists will admit that we have an unsustainable global population. The population of the U.S. is too large too. My district is traditionally forested, so we could probably convert more forests to food production and sustain a larger local population, but lefty environmentalists are against that. You would think environmentalists would be against immigration, even legal immigration. It not only raises the population (and stress on the environment) in the short run, but immigrants tend to have a lot of children, so it leads to even more stress in the long run.

For many conservatives the bottom line is not "unborn babies," but the economy. That is why taxes are so important to them. They want economic expansion, the environment be damned. Low taxes are a priority. So you would think they would favor unlimited immigration, at least for middle-class to rich immigrants. Think how fast housing stock would be dried up if anyone who would buy a house would be allowed to immigrate legally and immediately.

So why is pro-immigration sentiment bundled with contradictory leftist views, and anti-immigrant sentiment bundled with contradictory rightist views?

Emotionally leftists can identify with immigrants; conservatives see immigrants are foreign in a scary way. Other issues feed into these basic emotions. Liberals and conservatives both say they care about human rights, but the rights they care about differ in subtle ways. I think the liberal-left feeling is that you really need to treat all individuals equally, so if someone is physically present in the U.S., even after illegal entry, they should be treated like citizens, who are citizens precisely because they are phyiscally present.

Conservatives feel no similar obligation. Human rights are largely property rights, and property rights have a history for each individual. To the extent citizenship is a property right, you can't just get it by standing on American soil. You need to establish title.

Would it be possible to change the bundling? I have seen it tried several times. I have seen environmentalists argue against illegal immigration (trying to get large organization like the Siera Club to take a sensible position). They get screamed at as being racist neo-nazis for even trying to discuss the subject. On the other hand I have seen many attempts by Republican business men to try to get fellow Republicans to show some sense about the business benefits of immigration. Even former President George W. Bush tried to make this argument. The only result was that Republican politicians learned to keep any pro-business, pro-immigration ideas out of their campaign rhetoric. The rank-and-file will not stand for it.

Locally (Humboldt County and Mendocino County, California) the talk is usually in terms of development. Liberals and environmentalists are usually anti-development but pro-immigrant, which is contradictory. Conservative are pro-development and anti-immigrant. Also contradictory.

I would like to see the immigration issue unbundled from the liberal v. conservative fight so that we can talk about it rationally. There are economic benefits to high level of immigration, and there are environmental consequences to immigration. There are also legitimate human rights issues involved.

Adobe and the Capitalist Firing Squad

Did you hear about the leftist firing squad?

Everybody stands in a circle and fires at each other.

So now lets talk about the capitalist firing squad. They are in a circle now, blazing away, and hoping the government will intervene to

They are not firing bullets (yet); they are firing people.

I thought of this because I listened to Adobe (the software makers of Acrobat and Flash fame) management do their analyst conference yesterday. You can read my financial commentary on Adobe at Dissecting the Bull. Here I want to remind people about how selfishness can be negative even for the selfish (in contrast to the Adam Smith inspired sentiment that greed is good for society).

Adobe is immensely profitable. In the latest quarter they had profits of $320 million on revenues (sales) of $915 million. They say they would have done better if we were not in a recession.

So what are they going to do? Their profits were up 10% from a year-earlier, at a time when a lot of people and companies are in a world of hurt. But their response is to fire a large percentage of their employees. Actually, apparently the pink slips went out at the beginning of December.

Those employees will respond to their own personal situations by cutting their spending. Joining other laid-off workers, they will contribute to a macroeconomic spending downturn. Other companies, feeling less demand, will do another round of layoffs. Perhaps compelling Adobe itself to lay off more workers in 2009.

You can understand layoffs when a company is losing money. But Adobe is not the only company that is firing people just to keep its stock price up. Practically every profitable company I have paid attention to has done the same. They have absolutely no loyalty to their workers. If the past is any indicator, corporations will lay off some of their best workers and keep the ones whose main characteristics are lip puckering and back stabbing.

I believe we are actually in a fairly typical cyclical economic downturn. For the usual reasons, probably in 2009 we will realize that the bottom is behind us. Companies will start hiring again. The capitalist firing squad will go back to its usual anarchistic ways. Housing led us into the recession and will probably lead us out of the recession. Very few new homes are being built right now, and with interest rates and housing prices low, excess inventory is beginning to be sucked up (except when it was built in the middle of nowhere) [See California Housing Dynamics]

On the other hand, if the capitalists close their circle tighter and shoot more accurately than I expect, there is still a possibility that they can turn a recession into a depression. Then it will be the leftists turn to go hunting among the disillusioned and hungry.