A rare combination of bad stomach, Veterans Day and unscheduled holdover weekend in El Paso has sentenced me to a Motel 6 with no MSNBC. Normally don’t have time to keep up with DU except for a couple minutes a day so offer this observation on the Republican Debate as a slender tether to sanity in a week with multiple calamities including losing a smart phone that wasn’t smart enough not to get misplaced.
The Three Debate Gaffes that dwarf Perry’s ‘mind freeze’ gaffe.
Since (Half Governor) Palin lifted the already high ‘Gaffe Ceiling’ of the Republican Party taking it from the already celestial levels of GWB outward past the rings of Saturn the current clown car Republican presidential field has blown through that ceiling lifting it to heights that can only be observed with assistance of the Hubble telescope.
No longer able to experience the mind numbing idiocy of the Republican Gaffe Cornucopia (Gaffecopia?), I wait for the excerpts afterward.
This time I saw three short clips plus Perry’s ‘mind freeze’ which seems an odd characterization because it suggest that the famous 53 seconds is somehow distinguished from the rest of the time that Perry’s mind/mouth are in operation. That is a highly debatable assumption.
Any discussion of Republican Gaffes must be strictly limited.
Without time and context restrictions a limitless discussion would absorb all our time not spent sleeping.
For example GOP Joe “crazy man” Walsh’s rant was such a wild event that it spread throughout the English speaking world.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2059294/Joe-Walsh-meltdown-video-Illinois-congressman-says-dont-blame-banks-p---off.html . While his behavior and comments about banks were universally noted as major gaffes the central talking point that the GOP uses on a daily basis is even more absurd.
Walsh was repeating the daily mantra of the GOP that ‘government regulation’ creates inefficiency and distortions and eliminating government regulation will increase productivity, jobs and wealth.
This is a kind of daily Republican Gaffe that is said so often that many believe that if not completely true then it has an element of truth to it.
There is no truth to it.
If the premise that government is the main problem and that unfettered natural markets are the solution then would the GOP please explain why countries like Somalia that have no regulation and are governed by local religiously pious elders are excruciatingly poor and countries that have massive regulation, like Switzerland and Germany, are among the richest countries in the world?
Smart regulation begets prosperity. Sometimes there are outdated or poorly considered regulations. If the regulations are no longer optimum change them.
The logic of the GOP Gaffecopia runs like this:
Sometimes there is botulism in food, therefore we should eliminate food in order to eliminate botulism.
Ironically Hong Kong, the ultimate example of no government restriction, no taxes, free markets declared that today they officially have entered the recession.
So ubiquitous is the cacophony of GOP Gaffes that we have to narrow the discussion or it will never end.
This discussion will be limited to the three brief clips I saw from the debate, all of which demonstrated much greater Gaffes in their scope, span, depth, and damage to public thinking than Perry’s ‘mind freeze’.
1) Gingrich’s Gaffe We start with Gingrich because he is the “smart one”, “the college professor”, “the expert in history”.
Here is the 35 word clip of the “smart college history professor”.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/45232734/page/6/“Historically, this is the richest country in the history of the world because corporations succeed in creating both profits and jobs, and it's sad that the news media doesn't report accurately how the economy works.”
This isn’t just stupidity. This is an aggressive no holds World Wide Wrestling Federation scripted assault on history and intelligence. Nothing he said had any relationship with the truth. It is much more damaging than Perry’s mind fart because it fits with a fanciful mythology of America that feeds people like Tea Party supporters.
For the record here are the actual facts of corporations and wealth creation in America.
1)
America was not founded on capitalism. The existing economic system up until the 19th century was Mercantilism. By the end of the 18th century there were only 8 manufacturing corporations in the US. The New York Stock Exchange was founded in 1817. Up until 1830 corporations were so unusual and infrequent that they required state legislation on an individual process.
2) More to the point
capitalism didn’t create wealth it created chaos. It went through multiple boom to bust cycles until the federal government asserted more control in the 1930s.
3)
Europe and America’s wealth creation prior to capitalism was an imperialistic strategy called mercantilism that concentrating on using national forces to create free land through occupation and free labor through slavery (12 million taken from Africa and millions more born in slavery), indentured servitude (2/3rds of English settlers) and other forced European labor. It’s pretty easy to create wealth with both free labor and land.
4)
If you exclude the slave economy the vast, vast amount of wealth creation was not with large corporations but in small and medium sized businesses, including family owned farms. The shift to an all corporate domination model is a relative recent invention and Gingrich’s Gaffe shows how far the Republican Party has gone in abandoning its traditional constituency of small and medium sized business owners to become full time lackeys of major corporations.
5)
Does Gingrich really want to drag up the early history of Standard Oil, the Railroad monopolies and so on? Consider the two most successful early capitalist enterprises; Lloyds of London and the East India Company. Working together these two companies pioneered the perfection of Imperialist Capitalism. After securing monopoly rights in India East India perfected the marketing of tea to the masses in England. Unfortunately there was nothing that the Indians wanted so there was a depletion of gold in England to pay the Indians for the tea. By introducing opium from India to China they opened a steady supply of silver. When the growing number of addicts and the depletion moved the Chinese to ban the trade the English used their navy to lob cannon balls up and down the Yangtze until the Chinese conceded, gave them rights to sell opium and the territory known as Hong Kong to develop a harbor for their trade.
(Ironic exclamation point to the whole discussion; Hong Kong was established as a center of unrestricted capitalism with no interference in such socialist tools like ‘minimum wage’ and so on. Today Honk Kong announced that they officially had entered into a ‘recession’.
http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=169875 Note how this not only counters Gingrich’s idiotic point but Walsh’s idiotic point discussed above)
We could go on.
Let’s not.
Let’s just pause and realize that this idiotic claptrap comes from what they consider their leading light of intelligent discourse of political history.
Gingrich is considered brilliant because he doesn’t suffer from ‘mind freezes’. Rather he inflicts on the listening public a constant flow of diarrheic nonsense that is manufactured wishful fantasy that seeks to whitewash America’s historical beginnings and invent an economic history that never existed.
2) Romney’s Gaffe
Here is what this genius said;
“What happens with profit is that you can grow the business. You can expand it. You have working capital and you hire people. The right thing for America is to have profitable enterprises that can hire people. I want to make American businesses successful and thrive.”
The short answer is – he is 100% wrong. Here are the details;
1)
The ONLY factor that determines the hiring of people is an increase in demand in goods or services. Think about it. You’re a CEO. Profits have increased 20% but there is no demand for additional goods or services. No additional workers would be hired. Now consider a second scenario; profits are down but demand is up – would you hire additional workers to meet demand and increase profits. Of course you would.
2)
It is quite possible to have very little capital, no profit and hire lots of workers. I know because I did it. In 1989 I started a furniture company and because I showed up to the bank with over a $ 1 million in letters of credits for future orders I could get the working capital I needed from the bank and it grew to 450 employees. This is known as “packing orders” and is common to get the financing you need for working capital to pay for raw material and direct labor. The basic formula the banks are looking for is that your paid up capital covers your capital costs (land, machinery, and so on). With a good business plan and controls it is relatively easy to raise working capital needed to hire workers if they can hold title on your capital assets. And the bigger reality is that if you have the orders then it is also easy to raise the capital you need. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and hundreds of other entrepreneurs have used this same model.
3)
Additionally profit can only be used to grow the business IF big IF it is kept in the company. If it is paid out in dividends then it isn’t in the company and can’t be used to grow the company. 4) It is true that if you have increased demand or want to expand demand it is easier to do so if you have existing profits to expand your capital base, but if you don’t its easy to find. The critical point is demand not profits.
5)
If you put aside points 1-4 then Romney’s point would only make sense IF the direct labor involved was domestic. If the direct labor involved is in China then the expanded business that Romney is dreaming of would mean that there would be increased labor demand in China, not here. 6)
Romney fails to disclose that INCREASED PROFITS COULD ALSO LEAD TO A DECLINE OF JOBS. He knows this very well because this was the model at Bain and Co. Make more profit – buy companies – consolidate operations – reduce direct labor – make more profits – buy more companies, and so on. And in a less malicious example, increased profit could well lead to increased investment in advanced production facilities that would lead to a decline of jobs. The move to increased robotics is an example. Again folks these were excerpts that the media put out not of ‘Gaffes’ but highlights of Republican leaders doing a good job putting forth their talking points. Romney and Gingrich were both understood to have performed great and these were the excerpts offered as proof.
Has anyone in the media actually studied history or actually started a business?
Gotten that off my chest makes my stomach feel better. Tomorrow off to Yuma, Calexico, Brawley and other outposts deep in the red underbelly of the Southwest.
Oh and the third Gaffe that was actually worse than Perry’s?
That would be ahhhh, damn oh what was it? Something about His Royal Highness Prince . . . .
What was his name again?
Oops.
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