The Republican Party: Mean to the bone

By Bob Gaydos

Trump signs a bill allowing the shooting
 of bear cubs ... as they hibernate.

In much the same way that a broken clock is correct twice a day, so did our narcissist-in-chief (NIC) stumble into a truism the other day when he described a “health-care” bill approved by the Republican-dominated House of Representatives as “mean.”

Why did our clueless leader suddenly think a bill he had only recently pushed for and extravagantly celebrated at the White House was “mean”? Surely not because almost everyone who knew anything about it except for Tea Party Republicans thought it was mean. That’s never bothered him before.

I suspect it had more to do with the fact that he needed the Senate, also run by Republicans, to also pass a health-care bill so he could brag about it again and he just happened to be in the room, sitting there like a broken clock, when someone said if there was any hope of getting a bill through the Senate it had to be different from the House bill, which was, as he subsequently repeated, “too mean.”

Those are the kind of simple words the NIC understands. Big. Great. Best. Bad. Fat. Lousy, Mean. He likes to use them. A lot. Mean is not good. It’s bad. People don’t like mean things. How is the bill “mean”? Nuance is another matter.

Well, the bill that was presented to the Senate by a 13-member, all-white, all-male, Republican-only task force was apparently only a tad less mean than the GOP House bill, which means most of the country still thinks it’s awful policy, as do a handful of Senate Republicans. Actually, a lot of Senate Republicans think it’s not mean enough. In fact, not enough Republicans like it for Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to bring it to a vote that would carry, so he put it off to allow for arm-twisting and bribing.

As he apparently demonstrated at a ballyhooed arm-twisting meeting with all the Senate Republicans at the White House, the NIC doesn’t know -- or even care -- how the bill works. He’s apparently confused about the difference between Medicare and Medicaid, stuff like that. No matter. Mean or not, he just wants a health care bill passed so he can have another Rose Garden celebration and thumb his nose at Barack Obama. That’s pretty much the entire Trump policy.

McConnell, for his part, resorted to his favorite weapon --- bribery -- to try to get 50 Republicans to buy in to the bill. That comes in the form of billions of dollars in local projects for Republican senators who might face difficult reelection if they vote for the still-mean health care bill.

Tell me that’s not an awfully mean way to conduct public policy. And to no purpose other than to give tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans so they will continue to fund campaigns and vote for Republican candidates who promise to cut taxes even more, to eliminate pesky regulations that force businesses to be accountable for any harm they do, and to remove all those “deadbeats” Rush Limbaugh rails about from the Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment and welfare rolls.

In other words, Republicans have totally lost the concept of governing for the public good. They have been against everything for so long they don’t know how -- or seem to even care to try -- to work with Democrats on creating useful legislation. I’ve been trying to figure out when “mean” became the Republican go-to word in policy. Maybe it was Ronald Reagan’s phony trickle-down spiel. The middle class and poor are still waiting for the first nourishing drops. A lot of them -- many Trump supporters -- are those supposed “deadbeats” of Limbaugh’s. Of course, they did have to suffer through a major economic disaster brought on by those rich individuals and corporations, who apparently didn’t have enough stashed away from the tax breaks so they had to simply cheat people out of their money. And they got away with it.

By the way, Republicans just voted to do away with an Obama regulation that required people dealing with other people’s money -- brokers -- to tell their clients what was in their best financial interests, not the brokers’. Bad idea, according to Republicans. Mean, I say.

Mean is slashing hundreds of millions from Medicaid, which pays for health care for 20 percent of Americans, including seniors in nursing homes, simply to cut taxes for those who don’t need it -- the one percent. The very wealthiest Americans. Mean is cutting funding for Meals on Wheels and food stamps. Mean is promising coal workers that their dying industry will be revived while creating no jobs for them, but allowing coal companies to dump their waste into streams from which the workers get their drinking water. Mean is putting the Environmental Protection Agency, which protects Americans from such things as water pollution, under the direction of someone who wants to eliminate the agency.

Mean is looking to do away with hundreds of regulations that protect people from health and safety risks posed by unscrupulous cost-cutting minded corporations looking to improve their standing with shareholders. If Republicans want to take an object lesson about such short-sighted governing, they need only to look at the recent Grenfell Tower fire in London that killed 79 people.

The fire is believed to have been started by a faulty refrigerator and spread rapidly up the high-rise, fueled by a highly flammable exterior wrapping, called cladding, that is banned for use on high-rises in the United States, but which its maker is allowed to sell in places where regulations aren’t as stringent. In the aftermath of the deadly blaze, Arconic -- formerly Alcoa -- said it would no longer sell the cladding, which has a polyethylene core, for high rise projects anywhere in the world. The company makes a more-expensive, fire-resistant cladding. Grenfell is a public housing project whose residents had complained for years that there were no fire alarms, no sprinklers, no safety tests and only one stairwell.

Public housing. No safety features. Total disregard for safety regulations. Cheaper construction material. Years of complaining with no response from British politicians more concerned with helping businesses save money rather than protecting people’s lives. Mean.

Since Republicans took control of the White House and both houses of Congress, they have eagerly worked to erase safety regulations issued late in the Obama administration, including rules to keep coal companies from dumping waste in streams and denying federal contracts to dangerous companies. And it’s not just people who are the target of Republican callousness. The NIC recently signed a bill to allow the shooting of bears and wolves -- including cubs -- as they hibernate. Heartless.

This list could go on and on and undoubtedly will so long as Republicans, once the proud party of Lincoln, now seemingly a collection of mean-spirited individuals lacking in compassion and tolerance, have access to power. Trump is not really even a Republican, but party leaders have been cynical enough to try to use him to advance their cruel agenda.

It is an utterly depressing state of affairs that calls for new Republican leadership or a new party entirely. If you’re a Republican and are offended by any of this, that’s your problem. The rest of us are appalled. It’s your party. You are responsible for what is being promulgated and promoted in the seats of power in Washington. Your silence is tacit approval.

Like the clueless one said, “Mean.”

bobgaydos.blogspot.com

Bosons and bankers: What's up, God?

By Bob Gaydos

Sometimes, having to have an opinion on any topic that comes down the pike actually requires a bit of work. Usually, it’s when you don’t have the foggiest idea what people are talking about, but they all appear to be smart and they all say that what they are talking about is very important, or significant, or shocking, or historic.

And so this week, I give you two of potentially the most important stories of the year, which I feel safe in saying most of you -- being American, like me -- also don’t know much about and have heard very little about from what passes as our news media these days:

• Higgs boson, or, as it has been dubbed, the “God” particle.
• LIBOR, or as I see it, the God complex.

In fairness, some of the media did try to explain Higgs boson (illustration) and its potential significance -- explaining the origin of the universe and the nature of the matter, stuff like that -- but most, in my experience, bogged down in an energy field of scientific mumbo jumbo whose mass could only be contained by the Internet, but certainly not my brain.

Still, the fact that scientists in Geneva, using a $10 billion atom-smashing super-collider, say they have found a subatomic particle that would not only validate “The Big Bang Theory” on television, but in real life, is literally mind-boggling. As I understand it, the boson particle (named after Scottish physicist Peter Higgs) is kind of like a universal sticky particle to which other sub-atomic particles, such as quarks, “stick” as they whiz around wherever. The more such particles that stick, the more bosons involved, the more mass the particles eventually have and, with gravity added, the more weight. They become something.

No boson, no sticking, no universe. Nothing. With bosons, we have planets and primordial ooze and dinosaurs and humans and science and evolution and rock and roll and super-colliders and big banks, all neatly aligned as if some higher power had cleverly laid out the whole plan to explain the Big Bang.

If you guessed the big banks reference was a hint on LIBOR, good for you. You are promoted to honors economics. LIBOR stands for London Interbank Offered Rate. It is the average cost of borrowing at which Britain's banks lend each other money. It is calculated daily, based on information supplied by those banks and is used worldwide to set prices on trillions of euros and billions of dollars worth of derivatives and other financial products.

And yes, there’s that word derivatives again. What’s happened is that a bunch of too-big-to-fail big banks, playing God with other people’s money, got together between 2005 and 2009 and rigged the rate to keep it low. They lied about their financial health and conspired to make each other look better than was true, thereby luring unsuspecting customers to invest even more in worthless mortgages, loans and, ugh, derivatives. The big difference in this story is that, while the big banks in America pretty much got away with their deceit and theft, the Brits are getting tough on them.

The chairman of Barclay’s has resigned and the bank, apparently claiming it thought it had received the OK to lie from the Bank of England, Britain’s central bank, has agreed to pay a $450 million settlement. It also agreed to cooperate with police authorities and Parliament, which are looking to hold major banks and their executives legally responsible for this massive scandal.

That’s a lot different from the cloying welcome Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, got in the U.S. Senate recently in explaining his institution’s loss of $2 billion in customers’ money through synthetic derivatives and other risky bets. Chase, along with Citigroup, HSBC, RBS, and a half dozen other banks are involved in the LIBOR conspiracy.

The U.S Justice department has all the evidence uncovered in the LIBOR investigation (which is reportedly extensive) and appears to be letting Britain take the lead in prosecution for now, which is just as well, given how many American bankers have been prosecuted to date for throwing the world economy into crisis.

If you’re going to have an opinion, look for the links. The links between the Higgs boson and LIBOR stories, beyond their complexities and lack of attention in the United States, are obvious. Both have gravitas, in these cases, a combination of mass, gravity and universal significance. Both involve amounts of money most of us cannot comprehend. Both involve an incredible amount of teamwork among people within the same profession. One group effort, as noble an investment of money, time and brain power as is imaginable, seeks to explain why we are all here, at least in a physical sense. The other, money, time and brain power notwithstanding, only makes me wonder if we’ll ever figure it out morally.

bobgaydos.blogspot.com

.

It's none of my business, but ...

By Bob Gaydos

Time for my occasional stroll through the headlines, a la Jimmy Cannon:

Maybe it’s none of my business, but when did TV reporters start interviewing caddies at the end of major golf tournaments? Last week, Australian Adam Scott won the Bridgestone Invitational tournament, for his first World Golf Championship victory. Yet the post-tournament focus on CBS was on Scott’s caddie, Steve Williams.

For those who understandably don’t follow golf on TV (zzzzzzzzz), Williams was the caddie for Tiger Woods for many years. Carrying the bags for a dozen years and 13 major championships. Yet on Sunday, Williams was declaring Scott’s victory “the most satisfying win I've ever had, there's no two ways about it. The fans have been unbelievable. It's the greatest week of my life caddying and I sincerely mean that."

Well, gee, Stevie, that’s nice, but wasn’t Scott the one hitting the ball and putting it in the hole and weren’t you the one carrying the bag?

Williams is ticked off at Woods for firing him. The caddie says he wasted a couple of years of his life waiting for Woods to get his life and game on track again. Fine. But Williams has made a fortune carrying bags for Woods and earned more than Woods did on Sunday caddying for Scott, whom he never mentioned in the TV interview.

A word to CBS and Williams: The story is never about the caddie.

* * *

Speaking of ratings, maybe it’s none of my business, but doesn’t anyone think it’s odd that stock markets around the world are thrown into chaos because a credit rating company blamed for playing a large part in creating the worldwide economic recession issued a downgrade in the rating of the United States from AAA to AAplus? That downgrade, by the way, included a $2 trillion error and seemed to lean more on politics than economics in its conclusion.

Standard and Poor’s, which has nothing good to say about the ability of the U.S. to cover its debts, is the company that had nothing bad to say about all those worthless sub-prime mortgages that sent the same stock markets reeling when banks realized they were stuck with worthless paper, and lots of houses. Of course, if the checks on such ratings companies that were included in legislation passed by Congress in the wake of the recession had actually been put in place, we might have a clearer, more objective idea of what is really going on. But hey, who needs regulation? It’s only money.

* * *

I know this is really none of my business, but sometimes rioters are just hoodlums and thieves looking for an excuse to do damage. Which seems to be what much of the rioting in London and other British cities is about. It may have begun with anger over the shooting of a citizen by police, but the mobs of young people looting and burning businesses and attacking police have no apparent connection whatsoever with that incident.

* * *

The wide-eyed photo of Michelle Bachmann on the cover of Newsweek says a lot more about the steep, sudden decline of the magazine, with its new owner and editor, as a viable news weekly than of Bachmann as a viable presidential candidate. Neither is. Viable, that is. Of course, since I have canceled my subscription to Newsweek, this is none of my business.

* * *

I really wish no ill will of Jorge Posada and I appreciate those years of occasional key hits and trying to call games as a catcher, but when he strikes out looking every other at bat, I feel like it’s really my business, as a fan, to say swing or get off the bench.

* * *

OK, maybe this is nothing for me to be sticking my nose into, but he is my president, so I have to ask: Has anybody seen Barack Obama’s spine lately? (I wasn’t sure how to spell cojones, although I understand Sarah Palin apparently knows how and was wondering the same thing about Obama.)

* * *

By the way, happy 50th birthday, Mr. President. For all your difficulty dealing with Republicans in Congress, it looks like Republicans themselves are having as much trouble dealing with their new friends, the tea party people. If I were you, I’d keep encouraging every one of them to declare their candidacies for president. It may not be the most impressive way to get elected, beating a God-fearing, science-fearing, Muslim-fearing, education-fearing, Mexican-fearing, logically challenged, contraception-fearing, homophobic gun worshiper who loves the death penalty and hates Medicare and Social Security, but if you don’t mind, then I don’t either.

* * *

And finally, a report tells us that NASA-funded researchers have found DNA elements -- the building blocks for life -- in meteorites. Which suggests, strongly I guess, that the components for life on Earth may have originated in outer space. I guess that’s kind of everybody’s business. Even the tea party people.

Until next time.

bobgaydos,blogspot.com