Merry Christmas to us: Wall Street Bull, Cost-cutting CEOs and the politicized U.S. Supreme Court

The CEO's were not the only ones busily tightening the screws on us ordinary, gullible and dumped-on Americans. The new class of business aristocracy that had emerged starting in the 1960s from Harvard Business School, Wharton and other mass producers of financial whiz kids were emptying our pockets as we stood tied to a pole, ready to be cannibalized by savages dancing to the beat of a jungle (survival of the fittest and best connected) drummer.

We were overnight transformed from a producing society to a consuming society, overnight transformed to consumers of Wall Street's raging bull droppings. Instead of making things, we are now selling things made by others. But, there are not enough sales jobs in warehouses and retail stores to go around, so we sell each other financial products invented for us by the financial wizards in our midst. The financial whiz kids from Harvard and Wharton sold us a gargantuan Ponzi scheme that dwarfed even Bernie Madoff. They sold us securities consisting of worthless mortgages and products not the smartest among us could understand.

Wall Street icons sold us worthless securities knowing full well they were worthless, bet against the products they were selling us, effectively tanking their reputations by telling us those securities were opportunities of a lifetime. They were out for the quick buck, these gleaming cap-toothed suits, they were not concerned for their long-term reputations. "A horse, a horse, my reputation for a horse!"

Continuing with Robert Borosage's blog post, "Obama and the CEO's: Looking for Love in all the Wrong Places":

Financial Speculation and Soaring Insecurity

40 percent of American households have experienced unemployment, foreclosure, underwater homes or mortgage arrears in the financial collapse. Americans lost some $11 trillion in savings and home values, dashing retirement plans. At the height of the Bush economy, Wall Street was capturing fully 40 percent of corporate profits, as the housing bubble built on a tsunami of financial speculation. UBS and General Electric, whose CEOs met with the president, were among the financial institutions bailed out by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury.

This bubble-bust Wall Street economy was a product of deregulation, the growth of a shadow banking system, and the spread of leveraged speculation with other people's money. President Obama was right when he said Wall Street needs to be smaller and engaged more in real investment than in speculation. But the president's cautious reforms engendered a multimillion-dollar lobby reaction from Wall Street. The banks were rescued but not reformed, the casino has reopened, and Wall Street's back to paying record levels of million dollar bonuses. The pervasive fraud and abuse revealed in the housing bubble has resulting in shockingly few prosecutions.

(Nykos2: We as a country do not want to learn. We are split by ideology. Those in the right are getting hoarse, screaming into our ears that we must leave business alone. They are drilling into our cerebellums the notion that government is the problem, therefore, government cannot possibly have the solution. Our government, effectively neutered, has stepped back. Wall Street is back in business, selling us on their latest Ponzi schemes.)

The economy can't work well without major reforms that curb financial speculation and make banking boring again. That requires tighter control on leverage and activities, curbs on banker's compensation schemes, and, as even the IMF now supports, taxes on banks -- including a financial transaction tax that would dampen computer-driven speculation. Needless to say, America's financial barons and their lobbies will oppose these reforms fiercely.

(Nykos2: From the Washington insider bloggers' website, The Hill: "One idea for raising taxes to pay down the debt is the bill introduced this February by Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-Pa.). His “Debt Free America Act” (H.R. 4646) would impose a 1 percent “transaction tax” on every financial transaction — whether paid by cash, credit card or any form of financial transfer, the only exception being transactions involving the purchase or sale of stock. Theoretically, everyone would pay one cent on the dollar for every such transaction in America every day — whether $3 million on a $300 million business acquisition, $300 on the purchase of a $30,000 car, or $5 on a $500 ATM withdrawal.

"To reduce the impact of such a flat tax on the poor, Fattah’s bill provides for a 1 percent tax credit for couples earning $250,000 or less ($125,000 or less for individuals) and discretion by the Treasury Department to exempt certain transactions on which lower-income people disproportionately rely. Another idea would be to amend his bill to exempt all transactions below $500.

"Using 2008 numbers as an example: There was $755 trillion in total transactions that year. If you deduct the exempted $312 trillion in stock transactions, that leaves $443 trillion in revenues, minus the cost of the tax credit and other possible measures to soften the impact on the poor. This means that with Fattah’s transaction tax in place, there is a real chance for eliminating the national debt within the next 10 years..."

This is a great idea, and easily enforceable. Will the U.S. Congress pass this bill? Of course not. Many in the lower House and in the Senate are kangaroos in Wall Street's pockets.)

Top End Tax Cuts and a Collapsing Infrastructure

America is literally falling apart. Collapsing bridges, exploding water mains, crumbling levees are a deadly clear and present danger. Children go to schools that are dangerous to their health. Our declining infrastructure is also costly economically, with outmoded transport, crowded highways, slow and inadequate broadband impeding our ability to compete. As President Obama has suggested, we need to make significant investments in building a 21st-century infrastructure, in education and training, in research and development as a foundation for a revived American economy.

In theory, the business lobby supports these investments. But they also lobby hard for top end and corporate tax cuts, and for spending cuts that makes it impossible to finance them. A fruitful conversation with the CEOs might have focused on whether they would commit real resources in a drive to increase investment in areas vital to our future. Instead, reports are that the president promised to move directly from the egregious top-end tax cuts in December to cutting spending and reducing deficits in January. If the wealthiest Americans, like those around the table with the president, are going to continue to pay a lower effective tax rate than their secretaries -- as Warren Buffett has noted -- then America will continue to starve investments in the areas vital to our future.

(Nykos2: Why shouldn't America's secretaries pay a higher effective tax rate than their bosses? The secretaries are lucky to have jobs. Top executives, after all, no longer need secretaries. They can do all their communication themselves via the Internet, using their companies' sophisticated email. The filing work can and is being done in India by some outsourcing company at the fraction of the cost of America's secretaries.

Their coffees? The executives can designate one of them to be in charge of coffee for the day. Each executive from division manager on shall function as the coffee guy or gal to serve all the other executives. By installing such a system, the executives will be forced to communicate with their fellow executives, promoting inter-department, inter-division communication.

Why shouldn't the executives eliminate the position of secretaries? They've eliminated their personnel managers, their data processing people, their accountants, their factory workers, their staff managers, etc. Every job that can be off-shored or outsourced to China, India and other countries is already either in China or other countries, or on a plane going to destinations suspected but officially unknown.

Their Boards of Directors are rewarding executives for shipping jobs overseas. Wall Street loves news about jobs going to China and making multinationals enormously profitable.

Secretaries who still have jobs should be eternally grateful that their jobs are not yet being outsourced to some heavily-accented Indian. So, yes, tax the secretaries more than their S.O.B. bosses.)

Regressive Tax Reforms and Record Poverty

More than 43 million Americans are in poverty, the highest number since they began keeping records. More than 42 million are on food stamps. Millions of homeowners are still facing foreclosure and loss of their homes. Mass unemployment continues, with more than 20 million Americans in need of full-time work. An entire generation of urban kids is essentially being written off, sentenced to crowded schools, broken families, dangerous streets, and joblessness. This is the tinder for social explosion.

Yet, programs for the poor will be on the chopping block from conservatives when the new Congress convenes. The politicians that the CEOs supported will be adding to, not subtracting from, the burdens of the "least of these." For there to be a serious effort to address poverty, to promise a fair start for every child, to provide the core elements of a real hand up that offers them the opportunity for a good education, a decent job, an affordable home and hope, we'll need costly new priorities that will have to be pursued largely without significant corporate support.

(Nykos2: The rich, the powerful, the well-connected are the new aristocracy in America. The outrageous compensations that they have packaged for each other have put them on a rocket ship to space. They no longer identify with ordinary, everyday Americans. "Americans are starving? Let them eat cake. I don't have time for them," they seemingly say to each other. "They are scum because they choose to be scum."

Listen to these new American aristocrats talk. Then, and only then, will you know if you still have a future in this country.)

Corporate Power and Corrupted Democracy

Corporate lobbies and corporate money are corrupting our politics. Over the last two years, we've witnessed graphic scenes in how powerful and entrenched corporate lobbies could fend off common sense reforms in health care, energy, finance and trade. The decision of the conservative Supreme Court gang of five in Citizen's United, overturning settled precedent to declare that corporations had the same free speech rights as people and could spend unlimited amounts in independent expenditure campaigns to influence elections, contributed to the flood of corporate money that helped to bring Republicans the majority in the House.

Washington can't work as an instrument of common purpose so long as corporate lobbies dominate the backrooms and corporate money dominates elections. Hundreds of billions of subsidies are now wasted on entrenched corporate complexes -- the military industrial complex, the drug and health care complex, the agribusiness and Big Oil complexes. Needless to say, the Obama CEOs aren't about to cut back their lobbying unilaterally and oppose bitterly any restrictions on their political activity. Yet, no reform agenda can survive unless the corporate hold on Washington is challenged.

This list can go on. Talking with CEOs makes much sense. Finding areas of agreement -- perhaps around infrastructure investment, education, R&D -- is useful. (It remains bizarre that corporate America so vociferously opposes single-payer health care that would remove from their balance sheets a major expense that harms their ability to compete). Making an alliance with the small businesses and national companies that actually want to prosper in America might be possible.

But the president should not use his "bully pulpit" to teach the wrong lesson. America can't succeed without prosperous companies, but global corporations now are prospering while America fails. They stand in the way of reforms vital to our economy and society. If Obama is at peace with America's corporate barons, he isn't doing his job. Embracing their agenda isn't "moving to the center," it is abandoning the fundamental reforms this country desperately needs.

(Nykos2: Obama has not completely capitulated to the business interests. I know, I was overly harsh on him in my past comments. Further reflection has convinced me that this guy may have the right stuff after all. He has allowed Big Business, Big Oil, Big Insurance, etc. to win this round. Hopefully, if he is re-elected in 2012, we will see the real fight between this administration and a business community that is drunk with power. The CEOs and their satellites and sycophants have, after all, most of the power centers, including the U.S. Supreme Court, seemingly in their pockets.)

Follow Robert L. Borosage on Twitter: www.twitter.com/borosage

Merry Christmas to us: American CEOs creating jobs in China

I can't get that old Christmas spirit this year. I remember waking up many times as I progressed from year to year in my childhood immersed in a serenity that I could never feel in adulthood. Childhood, to me, left when I could no longer genuinely feel and see the words of "Silent night, holy night. All is calm, all is bright."

I have a 14-foot Christmas tree in my house this year, yet I can barely sense the smell of pine. As a child, my family's Christmas trees were no more than six feet tall, yet each morning during the Christmas season I woke up to the sweet aroma of pine. If I knew tai-chi, I probably would have gone to the nearest fog-shrouded park and practiced that serene art of kung-fu in slow motion.

I know I'm in trouble because I can't smell the pine in my house, which now has a massive 14-foot Noble tree top straight from the rain forests in Oregon.

An Internet friend forwarded this Christmas message to me, which flummoxed me. Was I supposed to be offended, or was this a genuine Christmas wish full of hope and encouragement? You be the judge:

"To My Progressive Friends:

"Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2011, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great. Nor is this to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country nor the only America in the Western Hemisphere . Also, this wish is made without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wishee.

"To My Traditional Friends:

"Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year"

I opened my mail this morning and lo and behold, I am getting excited again. A lifelong friend who lives in Australia emailed this piece from Huffington Post that puts into words exactly how I feel about my beloved America, only much better than I ever could.

Robert Borosage is the President of American Institute for America's Future and a regular blogger at Huffington Post. As I read his piece, which I am reprinting in my blog in two installments (with my commentary, of course) I was reminded of John F. Kennedy, who used all the moral suasion powers at his disposal to bring down the mighty U.S. steel industry to its knees. American power and hegemony was unquestioned in those days and what the President of the U.S. said was the law. No hemming and hawing, only universal respect for the Office of the Presidency.

Borosage, in his latest blog, noted that President Obama has met with the very people that he should be castigating. He led with an apology when he should be demanding one from the CEOs of the very corporations that are responsible for the gutting of American labor and the dismantling of the American middle class.

I do not believe that Obama owes any American CEO any apologies, so why did Obama apologize to them? I am an anti-conservative, yet I am being drawn closer and closer toward the conservative position that Obama is too humble. He bowed to the Emperor of Japan, to the Saudi prince, and who knows who else?

Obama must learn to project power, not humility. Especially not before the very people - the CEOs of the major multinational corporations - who have wrecked the American economy while building their multinationals. It is as though these CEOs have conspired to ruin America and partition the country into corporate serfdoms that are part and parcel of their empires which transcend national boundaries.

That's not OK by me, and should not be OK by Obama. He, after all, is the President of this country that is being partitioned by these multinationals for their personal gain and not for, by and of the American people.

From Robert Borosage"s "Obama and the CEOs: Looking for Love in all the wrong places":

The president kicked up his "corporate charm offensive," meeting for hours with 20 CEOs yesterday. Characteristically, he started with an apology for not "finding the right balance" in addressing business. "We want to be boosters," he said, because "when you do well, America does well." The president and the business leaders talked about free trade, fiscal discipline, and relief from regulation. The White House let it be known the president was considering a speaking gig at the board meeting of the Chamber of Commerce, the right-wing corporate lobby that had accused him of waging a "general attack on our free enterprise system."

You can't fault the president for showing a little love to America's corporate leaders, but there is one small problem here: The entire premise of the meeting is wrong. The reality is that the corporations are doing extraordinarily well -- and America is in trouble. US corporations recorded the highest profits on record last quarter, while more than 20 million people were in need of full-time work, and poverty is at record heights. What is good for General Motors or General Electric or IBM is no longer necessarily good for America.

In fact, these executives and their companies are more part of the problem than part of the solution for this country. They've been making out like bandits, but Americans are less and less the beneficiaries of their success. As President Obama has stated, if we are to revive an America with a vibrant middle class and a widely shared prosperity, we need fundamental reforms to build a new foundation for growth and prosperity -- an agenda the country needs and the CEOs he met with largely oppose.

Consider:

Unsustainable Trade Deficits and Massive Job Loss to Offshoring.

America was running a trade deficit of more than $2 billion a day when the economy collapsed, borrowing that sum from abroad, largely from Chinese and Japanese bankers. We've been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs for years. Now the big companies are offshoring information technology and back office jobs in large numbers. We're running a growing deficit in high technology goods with China. The CEOs the president met with -- from General Electric, IBM, Cisco, Intel , Boeing -- have been at the front of this trend. As Andy Grove, the former head of Intel,warned, there are now fewer manufacturing jobs in the US computer business than there were when the first PC was assembled in 1975.

(Nykos2: I remember 1975. I remember when the first IBM PCs came out. They were 16 kilobytes in capacity. Now my PC has 326 gigabytes. I was one of the few lucky ones who had access to those PCs. Ninety percent of Americans were unfamiliar with the PCs, yet astonishingly, we had more employees in U.S. computer manufacturing then than we do now. These computer manufacturing companies are saturating the American market with computers made in foreign countries, using coolie labor trained by genius American trainers.)

The president rightly made balancing our trade central to his economic agenda. That requires pressure on China, Germany, Japan and the surplus nations -- not more trade accords that allow them to play by a different set of rules. And it requires making things in America once more, with companies committed to exporting goods, not jobs.

(Nykos2: Exporting jobs is almost as dastardly as the Philippine policy under former President Arroyo of exporting people.)

Yet, the CEOs the president met with have fought hard against reforms that would end tax breaks companies collect for moving jobs abroad. They champion trade accords that have helped disembowel manufacturing in this country. They support lobbies like the Chamber and Business Roundtable that oppose bold industrial initiatives that might help American manufacturing revive. Their increasing ability to run up profits while moving jobs abroad and using the threat of doing so to lower wages at home undermines America's prospects.

Gilded Age Inequality and a Declining Middle Class

In the five years before the financial collapse, when the economy was growing, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans captured a staggering 2/3 of all income growth. Household income for the typical family actually lost ground over the course of the decade. Corporate and Wall Street executive compensation practices allowed the top executives to capture excessive rewards, while workers were facing lay-offs, wage and benefit cutbacks, and greater insecurity.

(Nykos2: The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans captured a staggering 2/3 of all income growth? How did this happen? This is like in old Europe, when the kings and the royal family, relatives and friends of the court lived lavish lifestyles while 99% of the population lived in abject poverty.)

The CEOs the president met with are perfect examples. Kenneth Chennault, the CEO and Chairman of American Express, pocketed $17.3 million during 2009 when the economy tanked, about 542 times what the average worker makes. Jeffrey Immelt, Chair and CEO of General Electric, took home about $9.8 million, 308 times a worker's pay. Paul S. Otellini, the CEO of Intel, was paid about $14.5 million, making more in a day than the average worker in a year.

(Nykos2: I remember reading this classic novel about American business in the 1950s, called The Executive Suite. The main character in the book was the CEO of a major food manufacturer whose salary was $50,000 a year. That was 10 times what the average worker in his company earned. Ten times, not 542 times, which is what the Amex Chairman and CEO makes today, compared to the average Amex employee.)

A prosperous middle class economy cannot survive if the wealthiest are capturing this proportion of the rewards. In the US, we've never done much redistribution through taxes. The only successful strategy -- the core of the post-World War II economy that built America's middle class -- has been a strong labor movement in a full-employment or near-full-employment economy. When labor was 35 percent of the private workforce, it not only lifted the wages of its members, but its wage and benefit packages set a standard that non-union employers had to respond to. And a strong labor movement provided an internal check on executive excess. A full employment economy lifts the demand for labor, making it easier for workers to make wage demands, as demonstrated most recently in the dot.com economy of Clinton's last years. Reforms are also needed to limit current executive compensation schemes, which hide the full cost of pay packages through stock options, give perverse short-term incentives that have little to do with relative performance, and rely on board compensation committees that are controlled by executives.

(Nykos2: No wonder these executives cry "socialist," "commie," "hippie" every time their outrageous compensation packages are mentioned in polite and impolite company.)

Needless to say, the CEOs that the president met with are unlikely trumpets for these reforms. Business lobbies warned that labor law reform would bring down Armageddon on the administration. Curbing excessive executive pay meets fierce resistance. But it is hard to imagine how we rebuild a broad middle class unless workers can once again capture a fair share of the productivity increases that they help to generate and executives are limited in how much they can plunder the companies that they head.

(Nykos2: I know you can absorb only so much in one sitting, so I want you to think about what you have read so far, toss it around in your head, and I will pick it up from here in my next blog. It only gets better.)

Dear Santa

Dear Santa,

I'm sorry I doubted you it's just that some kids at my school made fun of me for believing in you.

Here is a list of the item(s) I would like for you to give to me.

* Skate 3 (Xbox 360)
* Castel Crashers (Xbox 360)
* Star War Force Unleashed 2 (Xbox 360)
* Ghost Busters (Xbox 360)
* Batman Arkham Asylum (Xbox 360)

If you cannot fulfill a certain one of my wishes please do not buy an alternative like if you can't make Skate 3 do not make skate 2 as an alternative and even if it's the same game for a different console like the wii or ps3 do not use that as an alternative

Sincerely,
Paul Lumba

"Mom," my then 9-year-old son Paul asked his mom in 2008, "I'm upset with Santa. He never gets me what I want. I asked him for an Xbox 360 and all he gave me are these stupid things that are made in China. I thought his dwarfs make toys in the North Pole. Why are these things made in China?"

His mom replied, "Paul, Santa ran out of Xbox 360s because so many poor kids in Africa want them. Those poor kids get nothing else for Christmas, and it's very important for them to get their wish."

"But those kids don't even have TV. How can they play with their XBox 360?"

My wife looked at me, suppressing her laughter.

I chimed in. "Oh, but their tribal leaders have TV sets, and electricity. The kids just take their XBox 360s to their leaders' houses so they can play their favorite games on them."

"I hate Santa," Paul said. "He never gives me what I want, only these stupid stuffs from China. His dwarfs don't even make these things."

"There are so many kids nowadays," his mom tells him, "and the dwarfs cannot make enough toys for everybody. So Santa is now buying toys made in China, like everybody else."

Fast forward to today. "Dad," Paul, now eleven, tells me. "Santa never gives me what I want, that is why I am asking him for only small things."

"You kidding?" I asked Paul, feigning incredulity. "I saw the list you sent to Santa. That's a lot of stuff you're asking from him. And, by the way, you are not using the correct punctuations. You have run-on sentences. Maybe we should revise your letter."

"Forget the letter, Dad," Paul says. "Here's what I want you to buy for me."

He told me what he wanted me to buy, something that costs $200. That's all that stuck in my head, that it would cost me 200 bucks. I didn't really hear what it was that he wanted. All I knew was that it would cost 200 bucks. And it was not just $200, of course, because the small items he wants from Santa all add up.

I'm a smiling Scrooge. Especially when it comes to buying things for myself and my wife.

"Paulits," I usually told her in Christmases past, "Let's not get each other big gifts. We both go out throughout the year and buy whatever we need. I can't think of anything that you and I don't already have. Every day, it seems, is Christmas day for you, with all the compulsive shopping that you do."

I hate shopping. Rarely do I go with Paulita shopping. And when I do, I always manage to disappear into a corner of the mall, sit and wait until I get tired of waiting. That's when I start to look for her. Usually that's a major production. Whenever Paulita is in the mall, she vanishes into thin air. I can never find her. Sometimes I suspect she hides from me. As soon as she sees me coming, she ducks into the women's fitting room.

Instead of relaxing on a comfy seat in the mall, I spend 90% of my time looking for her. Usually, I remember that I need something for myself, like batteries or a Just for Men hair dye. So I go to one of the stores that I know carries the stuff that I need, plus two cans of cocktail peanuts perched on a shelf near the checkout counter. I go in, pay for my stuff, and come out. I head for the seat in the mall where I was sitting just a few minutes ago.

Still no Paulita.

I think I have a theory that partly explains why the American economy is now dependent almost exclusively on the American consumer. Most American consumers are women. And they are a patsy for the store displays and merchandising that retailers have now reduced to a science. My daughter is graduating next year from the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in LA, the same school where the internationally famous Filipina designer Monique Lhuillier studied and was some sort of a legend in. I'm going to ask my daughter if my theory is correct: that because of the science of merchandising which is aimed at women shoppers, women simply cannot resist going shopping and feeling like it's Christmas everyday, thereby fueling the American economy.

The empowered American woman shopper is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the old days, women were on strict budgets from their husbands. The husbands worked while wives took care of the kids and made the home and themselves pretty. Now, women occupy important positions in society and many out-earn their husbands. The woman shopper has become empowered. She buys what she wants, when she wants. Her husband has very little input in the shopping process.

Many of Paul's classmates are being cared for by their fathers. The moms work while the dads stay home. I can't say for sure that the phenomenon of the working wife and the stay-at-home dad is prevalent here in Las Vegas, but if it is, there's a reason for it.

Male employment in Vegas has dried up. The construction trades, the real estate field, the casino dealers jobs - all male dominated employment sectors - have laid off tens of thousands of workers and have not rehired the laid-off workers. So the men stay home.

Luckily for most of these families, women's jobs are not hit as hard. The nurses, other hospital workers, secretaries, retail clerks, hairstylists, etc. continue to work in droves. On top of that, traditionally male fields like sales are also employing a lot of women. Women are generally better salespersons because they are capable of more empathy than men.

After more than two years of lopsided male unemployment, the women's liberation movement is now complete.

Like I said, I don't know if most of the male parents of my children's classmates are stay-at-home dads. The kids that my son hangs out with, however, almost without exception have stay-at-home dads. Maybe it's because Paul is attracted to those kids, since he himself has a stay-at-home dad. I've been retired since 2004 and have been taking care of Paul 24/7 all this time.

While long-term unemployments is really bad for the dads' psyches, I can see that the kids themselves are flourishing. Dads make their sons like sports more. Dads teach their sons how to grow up and be a man. Dads teach their sons at an early age how to fight off bullies and assert their rights on the playgrounds.

Paul, taking his cue from me, also hates shopping. Sometimes I think he hates shopping even more than I do.

Going back to this business of Santa. I'm waiting until the stores run out of merchandise so I can tell Paul he can't have everything on his Santa list. I know that I have to buy the big item that he wants me, not Santa, to get for him. There's just no escaping that. But I don't want him to get everything that's on his list, which incidentally, will probably grow as Christmas fast approaches.

I want him to know that he is not going to get everything he wants out of life, and I want him to get used to that idea. That is an important life's lesson that he should be learning now, not when he's 30 years old.

In my own family, the younger children who were born shortly before my father entered politics and the family got wiped out financially, have done very well in later life. Better than most of us older kids, who got used to the good life when we were young. The younger kids knew at a very young age the value of money, hard work and grit and determination. They were more focused on their career objectives in later life than us older kids.

Having tasted hardship at a young age turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to them.

And now this letter from me to Santa:

Dear Santa,

Please don't give Paul everything he asks for. Leave out one or two of the items, just so he knows that in life he cannot get everything that he wants. It will be the most important lesson you will teach him.

Yours sincerely,
You

This is your moment, Mr. President

Just before the then Senator Obama clinched the Democratic Party nomination for President in June, 2008, his primary opponent and major headache, Senator Hillary Clinton, went into an all-out attack, unleashing devastating ads that portrayed Obama as un-ready for the Presidency. Clinton's missives hit the mark and Obama failed to win a single big state that still had to vote in the primary contest. Clinton won New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, California and other big states.

Obama had won most of the small states and nearly all of the caucus states (the states that selected their presidential candidate in caucuses and not by direct vote.) Clinton no longer had a mathematical chance to overtake Obama through the primary process. The only avenue left for Clinton was the at-large primary voters consisting of the "super delegates" - the Senators, congressmen and other Democrats elected to public office.

If Clinton could convince the still-undecided super delegates to dump Obama because he could not win the big states, an argument could then be made at the convention floor to un-select Obama and throw the convention in the hands of all the delegates attending. Clinton's hope was that the delegates would negate the result of the primary process and select her in the end.

The super delegates refused to reverse the judgment of the primary process and lined up behind Obama. That was how Obama won the Democratic nomination for the Presidency.

The lesson that may be learned from this now seemingly insignificant episode is what many now feel is that Clinton may have been right all along. Obama may in fact not have been ready to be President when he became the 44th President of the U.S. And not because Obama was not qualified to take the 3:00 a.m. call, but rather the other calls that may come along in the rest of the 24-hour day.

Consider this: while Clinton was on the attack, getting Obama's nose bloodied in the process, Obama chose to be "above the fray," calling Clinton's attacks an indication that the campaign had entered "the silly season."

By dismissing the attacks lobbed at him by Clinton as silly, Obama never did address people's reservations about him. He dismissed them as silly and just walked away, thinking that the criticisms would all die on the vine.

And so it came to pass that during the nearly first two years of his presidency, Obama refused to engage those who questioned his citizenship at birth, those who maligned and smeared the health care bill, those who questioned his resolve because the stimulus bill that passed Congress was not large enough to put America back to work, those who complained that the Wall Street reforms did not reform Wall Street.

Obama seemed to trust the American people to come to the conclusion on their own that what he had done was actually good for the country. He assumed that, like his students at the University of Chicago, the American people would do their homework and conclude that everything that he had done as President was good for the American people.

Obama did not answer the passion of the opposition with his own passion during much of his first two years as President. He did so only in the last few months of the 2010 campaign, when the die had been cast. It was too little, too late.

Fast forward to today. After the drubbing the Democrats took in the last elections, during which the Republicans vowed to repeal the health care reform law, to investigate Obama's alleged attempts to offer Joe Sestak incentives to pull away from a fight for the Senate seat in Pennsylvania in favor of incumbent Senator Arlen Specter, to investigate Obama's natural-born citizenship status, to frustrate all efforts by Obama to solve the unemployment problem, Obama's first response was to offer an olive branch to the Republicans.

The Republicans do not want the olive branch. They want his head. The far-right's hatred for Obama is visceral. They don't like him as a human being, they will never cooperate with him if their life depended on that cooperation.

Obama obviously thinks it's the silly season redux. Professor Obama rationalizes this visceral hatred for him and acts as though it would all disappear if he looked in control, cool and above the fray.

My unsolicited advice to President Obama:

Mr. President, many of these people don't consider you their President. They see you as a black man who has desecrated the Office of the Presidency.

The American people want you to fight for them and fight your enemies hard if that is the only way you can defend the interests of the American people against the pro-Big Business, pro-rich, pro-Big Oil, pro-Health Insurance companies, pro-China, pro-Wall Street enemies of the people.

If you will not stand up to a Republican Party that clearly is not interested in the welfare of middle class Americans, a political party that has thrown its lot with the Mr. and Mrs. Bigs in America, then we grass-roots Democrats, the youth, the hopeful independents who put you in the Oval Office may have made a colossal mistake.

We expect you to fight for us, to take a stand, to show backbone. That backbone is very important to win the fight. It is not for bending backwards.

Your first major stand must be on the extension of tax cuts for the top 2% of Americans. Most Americans do not want to extend the tax cut for the top 2%. The tax cut has done nothing for Americans except increase our debt. We borrowed from other countries - China mainly - over the past ten years more than $1 trillion to finance the tax cut. We have been paying interest on that $1 trillion and will continue to pay interest on it till hell freezes over. Now, you are going to compromise and extend the tax cut for the top 2% to the tune of another $700 billion over ten years?

We middle-class Americans and - get this - many of the rich people themselves have drawn that line in the sand. Why do you not join us and be on our side? You know that it is wrong to extend that tax cut for the top 2%, yet, incredibly you are willing to extend it for perhaps two or three years, knowing that if you do that it probably will become permanent because the Republicans will not allow it to expire when the two or three years are up.

Please read this analysis published by Bloomberg News just last September:

"Give the wealthiest Americans a tax cut and history suggests they will save the money rather than spend it.

"Tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 under President George W. Bush were followed by increases in the saving rate among the rich, according to data from Moody’s Analytics Inc. When taxes were raised under Bill Clinton, the saving rate fell.

"The findings may weaken arguments by Republicans and some Democrats in Congress who say allowing the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans to lapse will prompt them to reduce their spending, harming the economy. President Barack Obama wants to extend the cuts for individuals earning less than $200,000 and couples earning less than $250,000 while ending them for those who earn more.

“ 'I would tend to wonder how much the tax cut actually influences spending behavior,' said Chris Cornell, an economist who mined government reports back to 1989 for West Chester, Pennsylvania-based Moody’s Analytics. 'Spending by the top 5 percent of households seems much more closely tied to business- cycle issues than it does to tax-cut issues.'

"The Moody’s research covering couples earning more than $210,000 found that spending by the wealthy is more likely to be influenced by the ups and downs of the stock market than changes in income-tax rates."

This is not the Silly Season, Mr. President. This is not a game either. This is the season for demonstrating your allegiance to the American people. You are our leader and we expect you to fight our battles for us. There is a massive and long-term transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich that has been going on since President Reagan sat in the Oval Office. We in the middle class are fighting back. We do not want to be impoverished in order to please those in the higher income brackets. We expect you to be our leader in this fight.

The American people do not want you to compromise on the tax cuts for the rich. They want those cuts to end on December 31, 2010. Period. And, if middle class taxes rise because all of the Bush tax cuts expire at the stroke of midnight on December 31, so be it.

You are a great orator. Go before the American people and explain to them why their taxes are going up. You should trust yourself and your ability to convince Americans that their tax rates are going up because Republicans have decided to play games. You have to have faith in the American people. You must learn from Bill Clinton.

President Clinton took a principled stand against the Republicans even to the extent of seeing the Federal government be in lockdown. The lights went out in the White House and most federal buildings, federal employees were furloughed and except for emergency services, the Federal government completely shut down. Eventually Americans turned their fury on the Republicans and Gingrich and his Republican cohorts caved.

This is the moment, Mr. President. The American people are behind you all the way on this. The American people are waiting for an opportunity to make shared sacrifices for the sake of the country, for the sake of their children and their children's children who will end up paying for the deficits to be created by the tax cuts for the top 2%.

They hear echoes of President Kennedy's speech that famously included a call to sacrifice. The American people are asking what they can do for their country. If their taxes have to rise to prevent the continuation of the scandalous tax cuts for the top 2% of society, they are willing to make that sacrifice.

And another thing, Mr. President. Do not walk like a lone basketball player when you alight from your presidential helicopter and across the White House grounds. Walk deliberately and powerfully, the way a Boss like the late Mayor Richard Daley would. And always have two or three VIPs walking with you. Do not appear on television again walking by yourself. It reinforces people's assessment of you as some kind of elitist and indecisive Hamlet.

Show that important people in this country are walking side by side with you. Biden, Hillary, Bill, Reid, Pelosi, Durbin and Schumer. Those people represent us in every way and have earned our trust. Those are people who are willing to do the right thing even if it means that they will lose an election.

When they walk with you, we are walking with you. Just remember that. As long as you are fighting for us, we will back you up. If you refuse to fight for us, we will find someone who will.

Your humble servant,
Cesar F. Lumba

Who do we shoot?

In a scene from the John Ford adaptation of the John Steinbeck classic, Grapes of Wrath, the farmer Muley was evicted by an agent of a shadowy organization from the farm that his family had worked for three generations.

MULEY: You mean get off my own land?
THE MAN: Now don’t go blaming me. It ain’t my fault.
MULEY’S SON: Whose fault is it?
THE MAN: You know who owns the land — the Shawnee Land and Cattle Company.
MULEY: Who’s the Shawnee Land and Cattle Comp’ny?
THE MAN: It ain’t nobody. It’s a company.
SON: They got a pres’dent, ain’t they? They got somebody that knows what a shotgun’s for, ain’t they?
THE MAN: But it ain’t his fault, because the bank tells him what to do.
SON: All right. Where’s the bank?
THE MAN: Tulsa. But what’s the use of picking on him? He ain’t anything but the manager, and half crazy hisself, trying to keep up with his orders from the east!
MULEY: (bewildered) Then who do we shoot?

In the recent elections, the American electorate was farmer Muley. But it was a different farmer Muley, one who was infinitely more determined to shoot. That electorate rampaged on the streets looking for people to shoot, people deemed responsible for their miseries. Except that now in 2010, those going postal pick off their managers.

The American people knew exactly who to shoot. It was the managers. And that meant the Democrats.

One by one, Democratic congressmen and women were picked off, downed by marauding mobs brandishing hunting rifles and shooting wildly into the air just to make sure their weapons were loaded and firing.

It was a massacre. Some of the best and brightest went down, along with the new ones who entered Congress only two years ago, men and women who clearly had nothing to do with the Great Recession that started in 2007, when the absentee President, George Bush, Jr., was still President.

The people are still jobless, their homes, their farms, their businesses have not been returned to them, but at least the American Muleys had found their revenge.

Now the Republicans are in charge of the House of Representatives, and they have two years to prove that they can do a better job than the Democrats in the area of job creation. The people want jobs, jobs, jobs. They are not interested in the ideological warfare that is going on between progressives and conservatives, between liberals and libertarians. They just want to work again. Is that too much to ask?

A lot of Americans - especially those 50 or over - who lost their jobs in the Great Recession just past, a recession that is officially over but is for most people still going strong, may never work again. Unless some drastic, even draconian steps are taken by the U.S. government. And what steps may those be?

Oh, please. Don't give me this tax cuts for the rich thing that Republicans Boehner and McConnell are trying to sell to the American people like snake oil. Reagan and Bush, Jr. slashed taxes for Americans in dramatic fashion and few jobs were created. Bush, Sr. and Clinton raised taxes and the economy boomed, with 22 million jobs created in the 1990s during the Clinton presidency. Were the jobs created because of the tax increases? Of course not. But this proves that tax cuts do not create jobs, while tax increases do not lead to job losses.

What actually created jobs in the 1990s? It was American ingenuity and entrepreneurship. There were so many start-ups that were created by the high-technology boom during the Clinton years. Those start-ups were formed in kitchens and garages, employing one person plus the partners. They quickly grew and soon they were employing hundreds and relocating to Silicon Valley, Manhattan, Northern Virginia, Boston and other centers of high-technology. A lot of Americans were known to have day jobs and night jobs, some of them my nurse clients who worked in hospitals for three days and in nursing homes the rest of the week. Money was easy during the Clinton years.

America must start making things again in this country. All these American companies that pay their CEOs and top managers salaries and bonuses in the tens of millions while laying off American workers and transferring manufacturing and back-office operations to other countries, must be discouraged from doing so through punitive taxes. These companies must be encouraged to relocate plants and operations back in the U.S. or forced to pay punitive taxes. What? These companies will simply relocate to other countries to escape U.S. taxes? The U.S. Congress will know exactly what to do with such companies.

The challenge for these companies that relocate manufacturing plants in the U.S. is to remain competitive in the global markets, since American-made products will tend to be more expensive than goods manufactured in, say, China. How will American business accomplish this? By increasing productivity. We can put a man on the moon, we can explore the universe with our probes. We should be able to increase productivity enough to compete with any country.

The process will take time, over at least a ten-year period. In the meantime, the U.S. must impose tariffs on goods coming from countries that have a lopsided balance of trade with the U.S. If a country exports to the U.S. lopsidedly more than it imports from us, there will be tariffs imposed on their products that are exported to the U.S. We want trading partners, but we want partners who will buy from us, not just sell to us.

Think China. Of course this legislation would be aimed at China. Serves them right. Many economists, notably Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman, believe that China manipulates its currency to make the dollar more expensive than it should be, rendering American goods uncompetitive in the Chinese market. The tariffs against Chinese products will level the playing field and encourage American manufacturers to relocate back to the U.S. Chinese companies may also be encouraged to manufacture products intended for the U.S. market to be manufactured on our shores.

There is a widely held doomsday scenario that features a China retaliating and taking the world to the brink of a trade war between the world's biggest trading "partners." Fine. Let there be a declared trade war. There is currently an undeclared trade war being waged by China against the U.S. and other countries such as Japan and Brazil through its currency manipulations. In a declared trade war the American people will be on the same page, and on the same side.

In a trade war, the American market will be virtually closed to Chinese goods but will be open to Canadian, Mexican, European, Australian and Asian manufacturers. Most countries will be on notice that if they exploit the American market through predatory practices, they too will suffer China's fate. China, in such a hypothetical, will be forced to sell goods normally sold to the U.S. market in other countries, but this avenue appears closed to China because China has also manipulated its currency vis-a-vis other currencies. The result is that non-U.S. markets will not absorb the excess Chinese capacities resulting from the closure of the U.S. market.

In fact, other countries such as Japan, Brazil and Europe would likely be emboldened to confront the Chinese and join the U.S.-initiated trade war.

It is an Armageddon that China would rather not face. China will try to avoid this Armageddon from ever starting. However, if the world moves inexorably towards a trade war, the most likely scenario that will unfold is that China will dramatically ease its controls on its currency and allow it (yuan) to float to its true value vis-a-vis world currencies such as the dollar and the yen. The rise in value of the yuan, will of course happen gradually and the U.S. must not consider this as a cure-all.

The U.S. must insist that the multinationals that have access to the world's biggest and most reliable market - the American consumer - must go back to manufacturing in the U.S. once again. At minimum, the U.S. government must insist that the multinationals manufacture products intended for the U.S. market on U.S. territory.

Americans must have jobs again. The continued high unemployment in the U.S. will eventually result in the collapse of the American consumer market, which will not be good for China, Japan, India, Europe and all exporters to the U.S.

Besides, continued high unemployment will further stoke the fires of anger and angst in the U.S. and marauding mobs will no longer be just active during the election season but will be active year-round, year in and year out. Institutions will collapse and nihilists and anarchists will rule the streets, the airwaves and the academic communities.

American manufacturing must be revived, and quick.

Meanwhile, as China sees the error in its ways, the rest of the world will probably look upon the U.S. with admiration and gratitude because most of China's trading partners have suffered the same fate as the U.S. Especially hit hard, in fact, are some of the European countries. China's march towards world dominance will be slowed and to an extent reversed.

China will someday be the biggest and most important economy in the world. Only a fool would deny its inevitability. But it must be slowed to allow other countries, especially the U.S., to make structural changes that will ensure the viability of their consumer markets, which is important for an orderly globalization of the world's economies.

A word on the Chinese threat to stop buying U.S. treasuries. The additional revenues generated by our resurgent manufacturing will expand the U.S. economy, which in turn will be able to absorb the shock of a closed Chinese market for our treasuries. If that proves insufficient, we can print more money, causing a measured devaluation of the dollar, making us more competitive. The Fed has in fact done this recently, when it bought $600 billion worth of U.S. treasuries. U.S. short-term interest rates would go down further, causing an uptick in economic activity. The resulting inflation will also cause an increase in the value of U.S. assets, especially houses, rescuing homeowners from their upside-down (houses worth less than the mortgages on them) financial condition.

Consumer items will cost more, but the unemployment rate will drop dramatically and people will actually have money to buy the more expensive goods. The President and other political leaders will have to be on TV almost daily, explaining why higher prices are actually good for the American worker. Higher prices will mean lower unemployment in the U.S. in the long-run and a less reliance on a predatory Chinese economy in the short-run.

When normal trade resumes with China, the U.S. trade deficit with that country will be dramatically down. U.S. manufacturing will be healthy and strong and the relationship between China and the U.S. will be mutually beneficial, not one-way as it decidedly is now.

A new high-tech industry in the field of alternative energy, a long-range program of upgrading U.S. infrastructure to the 21st century standards being set by China and other modern countries will parallel efforts to bring back lost manufacturing industries to the U.S. Tax revenues will increase and Clinton-style surpluses may soon appear on the horizon, finally breaking the back of the monster that dumps mountains of debt on American taxpayers.

You wonder how the world will change for our children and their children? The answer lies in the political will of our leaders. If they act decisively and smartly, there is no reason why our children and their children must live in a humbled, timorous and self-doubting America.

There is no reason why future generations must adjust to a standard of living that is down significantly from ours.

(Pictures used are from Glorious Opposition and Media Matters for America blogs.)

Under cover of darkness

Like most of you, I have over the years joined a lot of social clubs. In many of those clubs, leaders were selected by the few who dominated those clubs. There were elections, to be sure, but most of the elections had predetermined outcomes.

The difference between social clubs and U.S. society at large is that elections for public office do not have predetermined outcomes, or so we hope. No matter how rich and powerful, those who rule over their fellow citizens cannot dictate who the voters should elect. There are just too many people to influence, coax, cajole and deceive.

Enter the United States Supreme Court. In the Citizens United vs.the Federal Elections Commission case, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations, unions, etc. have guaranteed first amendment rights to free speech. And money used by such groups to influence elections is a form of free speech. They therefore must be allowed to contribute to elections as much as their resources will allow. They are free to advertise and attack politicians they oppose, in the same manner that individuals are free to do so.

From the SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States) blog site:

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
Docket No. Argument Opinion Vote Author Term
08-205 Sep 9, 2009
Tr. Jan 21, 2010 5-4 Kennedy OT 2008
Holding: Political spending is a form of protected speech under the First Amendment, and the government may not keep corporations or unions from spending money to support or denounce individual candidates in elections. While corporations or unions may not give money directly to campaigns, they may seek to persuade the voting public through other means, including ads, especially where these ads were not broadcast.

These mid-term elections are the first elections held since that fateful ruling in January, 2010.

In his State of the Union speech last January, just a few days after the Supreme Court ruling was announced, President Obama warned that because of that Supreme Court decision foreign corporations through their foreign subsidiaries would be able to influence U.S. elections through largely unrestricted contributions to groups that target individual candidates and political parties they oppose.

I remember seeing Justice Samuel Alito flinch and with his lips moving, he seemed to utter the words, "That's not true." What Justice Alito was really saying was that Obama was lying.

Fast forward to the current elections. The New York Times, in a front page article October 21, ran a story naming corporations that have given huge donations to groups that have been running false and misleading ads targeting politicians that those groups oppose. In a prior article, the New York Times pointed out that groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Karl Rove's American Crossroads have been running television ads that run constantly - 24 a hours a day - about the record and the plans of certain politicians those groups oppose.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been receiving donations from unknown shadowy foreign corporations while the Chamber continues to flood the airwaves with misleading ads and outright lies.

Did the Supreme Court, in its ruling, intend this? Obviously not, but this is exactly what is happening. How does this affect our democracy?

We all know how powerful the TV medium has become. Many of the "facts" that we hold sacred nowadays we get from watching television. There are messages that come to us at the conscious level, there are messages that reach our subconscious.

The groups whose contributors do not have to be revealed are so flush with money they can afford to run political ads aimed at destroying political and personal reputations round-the-clock. One commentator who guests from time to time at MSNBC - I believe it was Jon Ralston - reported that one study found that in one day in Las Vegas alone 1340 ads were run, and most of the ads were either lies, half-truths or distortions.

I guess it is OK for candidates to throw mud at each other. Democracy, after all, is messy as one sage has observed. People lie about each other's record, plans and resumes. People lie about their own resumes.

But when groups supported by huge multinationals and foreign corporations are doing the lying, they do so in such a way that they flood the airwaves with these lies. These groups, multi-nationals and foreign corporations spend huge chunks of money on these lies because they know that the constant barrage of these lies will eventually work. The mind surrenders to lies that are told often and relentlessly.

This why a lot of people now believe that Obama is a Muslim who was born in Kenya. This is why people now believe that re-electionist congresswoman Dina Titus has voted to give Viagra to convicted rapists. This is why people believe that Harry Reid has voted to give Social Security benefits to illegal aliens.

Because the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the other groups, notably Karl Rove's, are targeting Democrats, the actions of these groups are effectively turning the country deep Red, that is, Republican and Tea Partyist. The country is on the verge of electing people hand-picked by the corporations - both local and foreign - and groups of wealthy individuals who have a decidedly right-wing agenda. Central to that agenda is the dismantling of the New Deal programs that have protected vulnerable Americans since the three terms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Justice Samuel Alito says the foreign corporations will not be allowed to contribute to the destruction of democracy in the U.S.? Happening now. Foreign corporations, under cover of darkness, have been contributing to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is spending record amounts on ads that lie and lie and lie about Democrats, making outrageously deceptive claims about Democratic candidates.

Not even the notorious political hacks who created the Willie Horton ads that linked Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis to the murders of women killed by serial killer Willie Horton, could possibly top the lies being served on dinner plates of Americans in this election cycle. All courtesy of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its secret, shadowy contributors, along with Karl Rove's American Crossroads. Right now, only a few foreign corporations are known to have contributed to these sleazy ads, but the elections are not over yet. The end-game, I understand, will feature record-breaking contributions from all sources - including foreign corporations - to seal the deal for the Republicans.

Our country may be on its way to becoming a social club democracy, where the rich and powerful people - including powerful foreign corporations - are the ones selecting our elected officials. There is no way to prove this, but we are all old enough to know that in politics when something is considered legal, it is done if it results in political advantage. George Orwell's 1984 is apparently happening now, with constant barrages of lies that are turning Americans into robots who follow the bidding of the powerful local and foreign corporations, courtesy of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the newly spawned groups masterminded by Karl Rove. Courtesy, ultimately, of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Every freshman college student who is taking a Psychology course knows that the information that reaches our subconscious is what propels us to act and not what is coming at us at our conscious level. We can repel the onslaught of information at our conscious level, even debate the sources of such information, but we are powerless against the information that has found a home in our subconscious.

The U.S. Chamber and other groups that are flooding the television airwaves with lies and distortions know this, and they are laughing at us as they pull the strings.

We must resist this violation of our sacred trust, the elections that are central to our democracy. We must vote for candidates that are being targeted by those groups financed by shadowy corporations, both domestic and foreign.

Let those corporations squander away their profits. We must send the message that we will not allow them to trick us into voting for their candidates.

Are you a true catholic?

There have been a lot of noise lately regarding people's catholicism. How does one know that one is a true catholic? Is someone a catholic if he/she goes to Church every day? Receives communion regularly?

The Jews were often in their synagogues, but Jesus Christ pointed out that a lot of them (Pharisees and Sadducees) were not truly religious. Christ railed against the hypocrisy of those alleged holy men. The religion that Jesus Christ was preaching was that of universal love and honesty and complete absence of hypocrisy. Christ went after the hypocrites and those who were defiling the Temple by turning it into a market place. He blessed the poor, the downtrodden. He honored gentiles who had good hearts.

To help my friends determine if they are true believers in the Catholic faith or not, I have devised the following 10-question self-examination, which measures one's true catholicity, and not merely count the number of masses attended in a week, in a month, in a year.

To take the test, rank yourself according to the following point system:

5 points - strongly agree with the statement;
4 points - somewhat agree with the statement;
3 points - neither agree nor disagree with the statement;
2 points - somewhat disagree with the statement; and
1 point - strongly disagree with the statement;

41 - 50 points - Ang lelang mong panot. Hindi ka katoliko, animal.
(English translation: Your grandmother is a baldy. You are not a Catholic, you animal.)

31 - 40 points - You are a hypocrite, but not as bad as the Congressman from Idaho, Larry Craig, who had railed against homosexuality but was caught trying to pick up an undercover male federal agent in a public restroom.

21 - 30 points - You are average. A cafeteria catholic. You have situational morality. People hate you because they can't categorize you.

11 - 20 points - You are a good catholic.

10 points - You are a true catholic both in theory and in practice. Unfortunately, you do not exist.

The Self-test

(Take as much time as you need)

1. On mendacity in my dealings with fellowmen:

I am capable of hoodwinking my friends, promising again and again to pay them back the money I borrowed and then surprising them with a letter from my lawyer announcing my bankruptcy petition, which wipes out my debts to them.

1-Strongly disagree: 2-Somewhat disagree; 3-Neither agree nor disagree; 4-Somewhat agree; and 5-Strongly agree.

2. On hypocrisy and sexuality:

I am addicted to calling other people gay to hide my feelings of sexual inadequacy. I am also obsessing about the sodomy that goes on between homosexual couples in the privacy of their bedrooms. This is why I oppose same-sex marriages.

1 2 3 4 5

3. On spirituality:

I think the only way to communicate with God is by going to church frequently and receiving holy communion. I also believe that people who do not go to church as often as I do are destined for hell.

1 2 3 4 5

4. On truthfulness:

I frequently lie and even more frequently exaggerate about other people's faults to score points in discussions and debates.

1 2 3 4 5

5. On race relations:

I make fun of people of color. I am especially harsh towards blacks and Hispanics.

1 2 3 4 5

6. On materialism:

I am glowing in my praise of people I judge to be hugely successful financially and dismissive and arrogant towards those who are less successful in my view. I am a name dropper, citing often the powerful people I know.

1 2 3 4 5

7. On attitudes towards the poor and downtrodden:

I am convinced that people on welfare are lazy bums, while those who are on unemployment compensation are spoiled.

1 2 3 4 5

8. On Social Security and Medicare:

I believe that people who did not plan for their own retirement or disability are not entitled to help from the government in the form of Social Security payments in retirement or in disability.

1 2 3 4 5

9. On health insurance:

I believe that everyone in the U.S. already has health insurance, for as George Bush famously said, people can go to emergency rooms when they get sick, and they will be treated at taxpayer expense.

1 2 3 4 5

10. On Muslims:

I believe that the only good Muslims are dead Muslims. I also get a lot of satisfaction in calling people I hate "Muslim" after going through half a lifetime calling people I hate "liberal," "commie" and "lefty."

1 2 3 4 5

This study, as far as I know, is the only objective measure of one's catholicity. It is universal in applicability because the Catholic Church recognizes that the catholics of today are not just baptized catholics. The classification also includes those who are catholics by blood (heroes) and catholics in spirit (non-catholics who practice catholic virtues.)

As someone who is not particularly religious, I probably am not the most credible authority on catholicism. To all the doubters I say: Eat your heart out. If you were so smart, why did you not think of this self-test first?

__________________________________________________


I won first place in a golf tournament without actually knowing how to play golf, courtesy of long-ball hitter Jun Teves and fellow beginner Bob Maglaya, in the second day of the golf outing of the Lasallian Boys at the Happy Valley Golf Club in Summerlin, Nevada, on the western flank of the Las Vegas valley. Gary Salcedo complained that he had been playing golf for twenty years but had never won a first-place trophy.

A trophy is a trophy, even though the honor is depreciated somewhat by the fact that it was a best-ball game and it was only for five holes. Long story. Each team had three members, and all three members hit at the best ball spot. My team leader, Jun Teves, almost always had the best ball, so all three of us hit from where his golf ball landed. It was as though we were all hitting exceptionally well ourselves and not slicing, shanking, hooking or hitting duds that dribbled a few feet in front us.

No, the game was very forgiving. And, in the case of our team, known as Team 6, very rewarding.

Had to fly to San Francisco Airport Saturday night to attend a wedding of my niece, Annabelle Lumba, to Antonio Calasanz, a San Francisco policeman. All the Lumbas were going to be in attendance, so there was no way I would miss the wedding. Drove more than 30 miles to San Jose (straight down Highway 101) to check in to my hotel room at the Radisson. San Jose is dead after 8:00 p.m. so after checking into my hotel I had to drive twelve miles to a Chinese restaurant that was still open to join my relatives for dinner.

It was a nice wedding at the San Jose cathedral in downtown San Jose and a very short walk from Fremont Hotel where most of my relatives were staying. Fremont is probably the number one hotel in San Jose, but it is also the most expensive. Though guests at the wedding got special rates, I stayed at Radisson, where I had booked a room through Priceline. It was the first time I had done anything through Priceline and I'm sure it will not be the last. Priceline is really, really cheap. My rental car, also through Priceline, was $12 per day. $12 per day, like in the 1970s.

The groom is the son of his namesake, Antonio Calasanz, who grew up with my younger brother, Amado, in Santa Ana, Manila. It's a big world, but also a small world.

A Conspiracy of Dunces

I'm hooked on politics. Maybe it's in my blood, in my genes. If I had stayed in the Philippines instead of immigrating to the U.S. 43 years ago, I probably would be in politics. I like to think that I would be one of the good guys, but realistically I probably would have become just like everybody else there, looking the other way while others stole from the country blind. To survive there, one must not speak out against the shenanigans of the most powerful and richest.

Unless one was willing to spend a lifetime in the limbo of lost causes and election losses.

I think that the way my life turned out is OK too. I am in the U.S., where the best democratic politics are practiced. As a spectator, I get all the thrills that any man has a right to expect to have. Politics in the U.S. is the best politics in the world. British politics is the only kind that even comes close.

That's because we have ideological clashes, religious struggles, the politics of money versus idealism, the politics of personal destruction, campaigns based on lies and padded resumes, labor unions versus multi-national corporations, conservative populists versus progressive populists, white racists versus empowered minorities. Name one contest of wills between two or more social groups or movements - we probably have it here.

I love those nail-biting elections the outcomes of which determine whether the U.S. will continue to expand its empire or recede into the background. Elections like Bush vs. Gore in 2000, when unfortunately the wrong guy was awarded the presidency by the U.S. Supreme Court and the country quickly went into a downward spiral almost to the depths of another Great Depression from which the U.S. has not yet fully recovered.

Yes, that's how important elections are here in the U.S.

There are of course major disappointments, the most infuriating of which is the contest between Brian Sandoval, the Republican, and Rory Reid, the Democrat, for the governorship of the great state of Nevada - my home state.

I caught their debate last Thursday and with mouth wide-open I could not believe that I was witnessing an actual debate. Reid appeared to have given up. Why he bothered to show up for that debate was beyond comprehension.

Sandoval, who refuses to tell the people of Nevada which costs he will cut when he becomes governor and who refuses to paint a clear picture of how he would govern if elected, kept lofting soft balls at Reid during the debate, but Reid would not swing.

I was beside myself. Reid was not prepared for that debate. He was at least ten percentage points down, with a little more than three weeks to go. He should have been swinging for the fences.

I hurriedly wrote a letter to the editors of the Las Vegas Sun, which the Sun decided to publish. In the letter I complained that Reid missed an opportunity to dramatically distinguish himself from Sandoval.

The moderator kept asking Brian Sandoval if he would increase certain taxes, identifying specific areas where taxes might be increased. Sandoval kept saying no, he would not increase those taxes. Reid, when asked the same questions, simply kept saying he would not raise those taxes either.

It was a missed golden opportunity that probably put a nail in the coffin for Reid.

If I were Reid, I would have answered the moderator's questions this way:

"It is irresponsible for us to say we're not going to raise this tax, or that tax, this user fee or that user fee. We - all of us Nevadans - must ask ourselves: If we don't raise some taxes, can we get by with less money for the education of our children, or for the repair of our roads and bridges, or for the police and firemen? Are we going to let our local governments lay off more people so that the exodus of good people from Nevada continues unabated? Are we not going to take a stand so that our houses stop losing value as a result of being abandoned by Nevadans who are losing their jobs and moving to other states?

"We Nevadans must remind ourselves of what John Kennedy exhorted Americans in the 1960s to do (I'm paraphrasing): Ask not what your state can do for you, ask what you can do for your state.

"There is a 15% unemployment rate in Nevada, which means that 85% of Nevadans who want to work are working. True, many are working in jobs that are beneath their levels of expertise, but at least they are working.

"We must ask the 85% of Nevada workers to do more for the people of Nevada. If it means that they have to pay higher taxes or higher user fees, then I as governor and their leader, will ask them to willingly pay these higher taxes and user fees. This will benefit everybody. If the layoffs slow down as a result of local governments having enough money to keep their employees, the problem of empty, abandoned houses will be alleviated. Those 85% of Nevadans who are working will slowly see the values of their own houses rise as the economy improves all over America and the world and Las Vegas becomes even more attractive as the world's playground.

"As Nevada's governor, I will ask the people to make some sacrifices so that we can keep the current level of public sector employment while we create more private sector jobs, such as new jobs in renewable energy.

"In contrast, my opponent, Brian Sandoval, is not willing to tell Nevadans that in extraordinarily difficult times such as what we are faced with in Nevada today some taxes must be raised. Sandoval wants to take the easy way out. He simply promises not to raise taxes, which, under the circumstances, is irresponsible. Will he just let government services suffer for lack of money? That appears to be his prescription, since he is unwilling to raise any taxes, even though a majority of Nevadans in survey after survey indicate that they are willing to pay higher taxes or higher user fees to keep the level of government services they are currently getting.

"Sandoval is not a leader, fellow Nevadans, so how do you expect him to be a good governor? I want you to think twice and think hard from now until election day, about what I told you tonight. I want you to join me in putting our ship of state back on course. It will take a lot of sacrifices, but I'm asking you to make those sacrifices. Together, if you entrust me with the governorship, we will make those sacrifices and move our state forward.

"We were the greatest, most progressive state in the Union in the 1990s and in the first half of this past decade. We can be great again, if you elect me your governor."

Oh, I love making speeches. A speech like that, which comes from the heart, could have been the game-changer that Rory Reid was waiting for. The opportunity to make such a speech came in the debate last Thursday and Rory forgot that his goal was to swing for the fences.

I love politics, even when my dog won't bark - or bite. People will forgive me, I know, for suggesting that the campaign for governor of Nevada is a conspiracy of dunces.

Slavery in the Philippines

Many decades after my journey through Philippine elementary and high school education, I now realize how inadequate my education has been about Philippine history. We who grew up in the Philippines learned world history and American history rather early in our lives, but we learned very little about our own history. The historian I grew up with was Gregorio Zaide, who in retrospect was a historian who wrote Philippine history with a decidedly western world view. Either that, or my history teachers were mere parrots owned by the West.

We were taught - in the 50s - that the Spaniards had burned books about the Philippines because those books allegedly were pagan books and were works of the devil. This was why there was very little historical information about the Philippines prior to the arrival of the Spanish cross and Eskrima.

Turns out there was a wealth of information about Philippine life, social and political structures. The scholar-historians had to do some digging, but this they did and all the juicy information about the Philippines in pre-Spanish colonial era burst into the surface. I was already in college - a full-time working student - when new research about pre-Spanish Philippines found their way into Philippine history textbooks.

The result is that there are gaping holes in my knowledge of Philippine history. I suspect that there are many in my generation who have this problem.

I was therefore very happy, in fact deliriously happy to discover the blog http://mananalaysay.blogspot.com where the excerpt below can be found.

CHANGES IN SOCIAL STRUCTURE IN 17TH CENTURY IN THE PHILIPPINES

by
Roel Cantada

"Take a look at the figure above and compare the 16th century social structure of the Philippines with that of the 17th century. What changed? What happened to the Datu? Timawa? Alipin? Who occupied the highest and lowest social statuses?

"These questions are what we will try to answer in this lesson. Notice that the highest social status is now occupied by the Spaniards and all the natives are below them. This means that wealth is not the only basis of the social classes but race as well. The implication is that no matter how wealthy a native gets he will never be equal or higher than a Spaniard in the colonial society. The racial barrier is something that will never be overcome unless the Spaniards are removed from the country.

"What if a native marry a Spaniard will their children be considered Spaniards? The answer is no, the Spaniards consider only pure blooded Spaniards, and half-breeds whom will be called mestizos later on (creoles in Latin America) will not be accepted equal to Spaniards. But in the 17th century there is not enough half-breeds to constitute a separate class.

"During this time the Spaniards coined three terms to refer to the natives of the Philippines. They called the natives who had converted to Catholicism indios, the muslim moros, and the pagans of the Cordilleras in Luzon, igorots. All three terms had bad connotations and should be avoided today. Both the datu’s family and the timawa are now called indios which when translated in the native languages would be equivalent to Tagalog, Visaya, Bikolano etc. The word indio is a word used by the Spaniards to refer to the natives of Latin America, wherein Columbus I think made a mistake when he thought that he was in India when in fact he was in another continent. In English it is the same as calling the natives of North America Indians. It is also related to the terms Indonesia, East Indies (Philippines and Indonesia) , and West Indies (Cuba, Haiti etc.).

"Returning to our figure, you would have noticed that the lowest class is now occupied by the timawas. What happened to the alipins? They were freed or natimawa by the Spaniards. The King of Spain issued a proclamation banning slavery (esclavitud in Spanish), and the Pope also issued a bull stating the same and even threatening excommunication for anyone keeping a native slave. But these proclamations where not automatically enforced because there was one curious thing about the implementation of Spanish laws in the Philippines: the governor general can decide which laws to implement and when given the current conditions and because of the distance from Spain. It takes months before communication with Spain arrives and consultation would have been impossible for emergencies. It probably took a hundred years before slavery disappeared. Until the 17th century some Pampangan datus were reported to have filed cases in Manila against their slaves who had escaped. The Spaniards being weak and under threat from Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch and muslims tribes from the south did not want to alienate their datu allies. Rather it was the next generation who had converted to Catholicism and integrated the values of Christianity taught by the church that had resulted in the freeing of slaves.

"Of course for the Timawa the implication was not good, they had become the lowest class and lost prestige. In fact by the 17th century the word timawa is no longer associated with being free or freedom, something positive, but with being destitute, poor, and always hungry. Today no one wants to be called timawa, because it has been equated with being a slave rather than being free. But as late as 1896 during the Philippine revolution Andres Bonifacio used it in his poem to mean free. Later on they would coin the new word malaya (free) to avoid the negative connotations of the word timawa.

"The datus did not go unscathed by the freeing of the slaves. The power of the datus in the 16th century was based on slavery. The slaves did the extra farm work that provided more crops and they served as rowers in the balangay boat for warfare. Without the slaves the datus lost prestige, wealth and military power. Later on we will talk about how the Spaniards substituted other institutions for datus to remain higher than the timawas."

Who were the datus and what were their perks and privileges? In much of the Philippines, the datus were the political leaders and the owners of vast farms, called the bukid or kabukiran. They owned many slaves, which were differentiated according to whether they lived in their own houses (namamahay) or lived in makeshift shelters on the grounds of the datus' houses (sagigilids).

Because the Catholic Church forbade slavery in the 17th century, the slaves were technically freed from bondage and ascended to the status of timawas, free men who were mostly poor but who counted among them some rich families who excelled in commerce. The datus technically no longer had slaves (alipins) but in practice still had them because the people who owed them money had to repay them through involuntary servitude.

The Spaniards were not willing to cross the datus because they needed those datus as allies against foreign invaders such as the notorious Chinese bandit, Limahong. This was the reason slavery persisted even after the Catholic Church mandated the abolition of slavery in the Philippines and other Spanish colonies.

The alipins, as an institution in the Philippines' social structure, have been formally absent since the 17th century, but in reality many Filipinos functioned as alipins until the the Land Reform Act in the 1960s was passed. Prior to Land Reform, many tenants of the biggest landlords were virtual slaves, working off debts to the landlords - for medicines, for rice seeds (palay), for operating capital for their small farms.

Until political correctness became fashionable, the treatment of housemaids and houseboys in the Philippines hearkened back to that earlier period in the country's history, when whole generations of pre-Spanish "Filipinos" were functioning as slaves.

The Spaniards as a ruling class have of course disappeared. They have been absorbed into the great mass of educated elites. Economically, the rich Chinese have replaced the Spaniards. Unlike the Spaniards, the Chinese tend to be as pliant and adaptable as the bamboo and have blended seamlessly into Philippine society. The Chinese are rich and powerful, but they are decidedly Filipino. They have never once hinted that they are superior to the local population the way the Spaniards saw themselves as being.

Going back to Philippine slaves. Slavery in the Philippines still exists today in the Filipino people's psyche. Many of the dirt poor people in the provinces behave as though their rich, landed patrons owned them.

The quality of Philippine democracy rests on the backs of people who have never known true independence and freedom. The masses who vote in Philippine elections - most Filpinos who are of voting age vote - are not voting their consciences but are voting choices dictated by their patrons and virtual masters.

This is how the powerful in the country retain power. The rich and influential people align themselves with their chosen candidates and generally deliver the votes in their spheres of influence.

The leftists in the 60s referred to Philippine democracy as de-mock-cracy. It was and still is a mockery, since most people in the provinces who cast their votes are not casting votes for their choices. They are mere clones of their patrons at the voting booths.

People talk about the utang na loob institution. Add to that the slave complex as a social institution.

The few who rule over the local economies and the local corridors of power are allowed to choose their candidates, while the great mass of the people echo those choices. This is why there are so many political dynasties in the Philippines. It is an important reason why the same people keep running and winning political offices in the Philippines, regardless of their abysmal records of service. Known jueteng and drug lords continue to be re-elected. It's always the same families, the same political groups, the same corrupt politicians that keep winning political offices there.

The rich and powerful decide who should retain or ascend to political power, while the great mass of political slaves make sure that the will of the rich and powerful is enforced in the ballot box.

The obvious question from all this discussion is this: if the great mass of voters in the Philippines act as ideological slaves of their padrinos (patrons) and not as independent agents who vote their consciences and according to their own ideologies and convictions, is true democracy possible in the Philippines?

Would the Philippines not be better off under the rule of a benevolent dictator? True, we tried this with Marcos and were greatly disappointed. Marcos was, in the language of today's youth, a bad, mean dude, but not every man or woman in the Philippines is a potential Marcos. Absolute power need not corrupt absolutely.

If Noynoy does what he promised to do in the campaign and the Philippines becomes a much better place and country, Filipinos should start thinking of keeping Noynoy as president for the long-term. He cannot be a Lee Kwan Yew if his term is limited to six years. The constitution would have to be amended to allow Noynoy to succeed himself for another term and after that for still another term, so don't hold your breath.

So far, Noynoy despite his glaring mistakes in judgment and execution is following through on his promises. The country is becoming stronger economically and slowly gaining admirers as a modern state. The world, especially the U.S., is eating out of Noynoy's hands. If he keeps this up, the country may find itself in its first golden age.

It is beginning to look like the masters and the slaves found someone who would lead the Philippines for the benefit of all, not just the masters. We will watch the developments in the Philippines in the coming months and years while keeping our fingers crossed.