Monday, December 26, 2011

Greece, America and GOP 2.0

Krugman tells us Germany and the EU must bail out Greece lest the entire EU crash and burn. Germany is unenthusiastic. Michael Lewis makes Germany's lack of enthusiasm understandable ...

Amazon.com: Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World Michael Lewis

… government owed … $1.2 trillion, or more than a quarter-million dollars for every working Greek ….

… In just the past twelve years the wage bill of the Greek public sector has doubled … The average government job pays three times the average private-sector job ...

… The national railroad has annual revenues of 100 million euros against annual wage bill of 400 million ...

… The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as "arduous" is … fifty for women …

… In 2009, tax collection disintegrated, because it was an election year ...

… as estimated two thirds of Greek doctors reported incomes under 12,000 euros a year ...

…. Greece has no working national land registry ...

… all three hundred members of the Greek parliament declare the real value of their houses to be the computer-generated objective value … "every single member … is lying to evade taxes"...

Lewis describes Greece as a "perfectly corrupt society". Greece seems to have hit the limits of corruption; where the only honest people are either perversely oppositional or autistically incapable of deceit.  It's easy to see why Germany wants to put Greece through a world class social reengineering program.

Wow. Good thing we Americans aren't so corrupt. Good thing we don't have vast corporations paying no taxes. Mercifully our corporations aren't hiding trillions of dollars abroadOur politicians don't use charitable donation scams or generate profits through insider trading that's illegal for all but Congress critters.

No way do we have the kind of widespread fraud and abuse of the weak that can lead to economic collapse.

Seriously though, if Greece is a nine on a ten point scale of democratic collapse and societal bankruptcy, how do we score? Are we a six? Do I hear a seven?

More importantly, how do we get back to a reasonable "four"? Greece is getting schooled by Germany (whose bankers were as stupid as any on earth), but nobody is going to school the US. All of Greece is barely New Orleans; we're too big to be taught.

We are going to have to reform ourselves. Occupy Wall Street can help, but to reform government we need to solve the problem of the Republican Party.

Both our political parties are corrupt, but the Dems are at least connected to science and logic. The GOP is no longer a part of the reality-based community; whatever Romney and the like may really think they have to pretend to be delusional.

We can't salvage our democracy with only one working political party. We need a reformed GOP. Some party has to do the bidding of the powerful -- lest the powerful tear the nation down. We don't need the GOP to become a shining beacon of integrity, but we do need them to be connected to logic and arithmetic and falsifiable predictions.

This isn't inconceivable. I can't imagine voting for a modern Republican, but only fifteen years ago I voted for a Republican Governor named Arne Carlson. Arne is still around, and he represents a faint voice of sanity in the modern GOP (emphases mine, note that "Pawlenty" is considered a "moderate" by modern GOP standards, but to Carlson he's a far right extremist) ...

MinnPost - Gov. Arne Carlson Blog: Bedford Falls or Pottersville?

... the Republican Party went from moderate to what I call “the new Right”. But it was more than a shift in political philosophy. Leaders like Sutton and Pawlenty and numerous others saw the party as representing not only a different and more narrow philosophy but also as having the power to rigidly enforce that philosophy on its elected members. Orthodoxy prevailed over representativeness and the result has been that cooperative governance with Democrats, Independents and Republican moderates is not possible. It is either the way of the “new Right” or not at all.

Politics is no longer a contest of competing ideas with respect for dissent but increasingly the imposition of an authoritarianism that all too often is cloaked in patriotism and religion. In this environment, the party and its beliefs are paramount and elected officials serve the party...

... my memory of Republicanism in Minnesota goes back to a party that was always building a better community … So many of our leaders came out of the progressivism of Harold Stassen while still committed to the conservative virtues of prudent financial management. Policies ranging from consumer and environmental protection to human rights to metropolitan governance bore the fingerprints of an endless array of community oriented GOP Governors from Elmer Andersen to Harold LeVander through Al Quie and on.

In addition, Republicans produced an endless array of truly talented legislators from all over Minnesota who came to our capital city to govern and always with an eye to the future. Simply put, Republicans, like their counterparts, the Democrats, felt that good politics stemmed from the competition of good ideas that produced quality governance.

And in this mix, leaders from every walk of life and every profession from medicine to agriculture participated. There seemed to be a sense of obligation to give something of oneself in order to build a better community for our children….

...The Republican Party both in Minnesota and nationally has a choice to make. Does it want to build a true Bedford Falls with a commitment to the well being of the whole or does it want to lead us to “Pottersville” where the quality of life rests with the privileged few?

We're in a bad place, but we can work our way out. Occupy Wall Street can help with some things, but they can't help with the critical mission. The critical mission is to reform the GOP; and only Republican voters can do that ...

So how do we help them?

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