As Yoda Sees Politics, the Economy and War

The nation feels to me like the clutch is in. Do any of you remember the old stick shift cars—where you disengaged the engine from the wheels by putting in the clutch with your left foot? There was that moment when you felt like nothing was happening.
More frightening were the old propeller driven passenger aircraft. At about what seemed like 50 feet off the ground, the pilot changed the pitch of the propellers. In effect, he put the clutch in. It felt for a second like you were hanging motionless in mid air—until the propellers re-engaged and pulled the airship forward.
Each time that happened I’d remember all the headlines I’d read about planes that got “about 50 feet off the ground” and crashed. That was always the white knuckle moment for me in flying. (Jets never quite did that.)
That’s how Washington, Iraq, Afghanistan, the economy, health care reform, the currency problems in Europe, our relations with China (and nearly everyone else) all feel to me. The clutch seems to be in. It doesn’t feel like anything is moving in any definite way.
Perhaps Yoda from Star Wars put it best: “The future, clouded it is.” One article says the economy is showing lots of silver around the linings—the next says we can count on a wave of foreclosures this year and major unemployment for three more years.
Each cites its expert sources. One says we are winning in Afghanistan; the next suggests that the ancient Afghan will to wreak vengeance isn’t going to go away just because we send in more troops and make nice to some village elders.
A single kid with explosives in his underwear makes flying an almost unendurable experience for many Americans. We are warned that international terror is as real a danger today as it ever was in 2001. But when was the last plane actually brought down?
On health care, we are told Obama has found the magic bullet. He will use an old Republican trick of getting the bill passed under the Reconciliation Process where only 51 votes are needed—instead of the filibuster busting sixty.
How many Democrats are looking at the polls (measuring how Americans feel about this particular 2000 page monstrosity of a porked out reform bill) and allowing the urge to survive move them toward a negative vote? Or just an abstention?
Nobody’s counting publicly. Pelosi has a margin of five votes to play with—are they all still with her? What are the chances for success if Congress does what a lot of people are calling for and starts all over again, with something people can understand?
What’s really going on in Iraq? Last week’s “Newsweek” reran the picture of Bush on the carrier with the sign, “Mission Accomplished”. Is it, finally—after seven bitter years? Or is there another joker or two in the deck like there was in 2003?
The DOW seems to be content to jiggle around in the mid-10,000 point range. A little up, a little down, even a bit sideways. Somebody says, “Boo” and down she goes; somebody shouts, “Hurrah” and up she jumps. What’s real?
I’m just sitting in my seat—like in the old airplanes—waiting for the props to start pulling air again. Even the Olympics didn’t seem as much fun as they used to. Does anybody have a clear idea whether we’re headed up or down?
“The future, clouded it is.”

Job Loss--No One's In Charge

In the hue and cry over lost jobs—especially those that have departed for foreign parts—one very real problem is being overlooked. It’s a problem that the United States faced before, and it took us the better part of a century to get a handle on it the first time.
True, a lot of the difficulty with jobs going overseas and major corporate misbehavior is greed, desire to avoid taxes political ineptitude, etc. But there is a significant factor that is merely a consequence of continued growth, almost an evolutionary thing.
Let’s look at the first time we faced this situation. Back when the Constitution was written, in 1787, the United States had almost no industry whatsoever. The largest business in the country may well have been no bigger than a general store or an independent hardware store.
It never crossed anyone’s mind that there might EVER be a need for federal interference with or regulation of a business behavior. About all the Constitution says about regulating business is that no state may charge tariffs or tolls on goods from another state. Any regulation of business itself was left to the state it was in. That worked for a few years.
Then Jefferson embargoed goods from France and England, and we were forced to build our own factories. Shortly after that someone invented something called a railroad and it became possible to ship goods from a business in one state to outlets in a dozen others.
The railroads themselves quickly became too big for any one state to control. How could the state of Indiana, for instance, exercise effective control over the behavior of a railroad that originated in New York and ran through it to Illinois? It couldn’t.
American business entered a period of more than half-a-century in which literally no one exercised any control over its behavior. (Nelson Rockefeller was once asked if his grandfather, Standard Oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, ever broke any laws.
Nelson, himself a governor and a Vice President, thought for a moment. “No,” he said, “grampa didn’t BREAK any laws—but they sure made a lot of laws BECAUSE of him.” John D. enforced his oil monopoly with, among other things, sticks of dynamite applied none to gingerly to a competitor’s stocks of crude oil.
“Commodore” Vanderbilt created his monopoly over ferry boats in New York harbor by dynamiting any competitor who wouldn’t sell out to him. He pretty much ran his railroads the same way, making the famous comment, “My God, John, you don’t think you can run a railroad according to laws of the State of New York, do you?” He didn’t bother.
Banker Pierpont Morgan could contemptuously dismiss a presidential complaint by suggesting, “You send your man (the Secretary of Treasury) to see my man (his personal secretary), and they can work it out.” He saw a president as merely an equal, if that.)
It took decades of creating commissions (like that Interstate Commerce Commission—which for years was completely powerless), passing laws, and finally stocking the Supreme Court with men who thought it might be okay for the Federal Government to exercise some control over business and banking. It was a long, bitter political fight.
Finally, it took the collapse of the markets in 1929, and a loss of half the national product over the next four years, to give Washington real powers of regulation over business coast to coast. But business has continued to grow. Now it doesn’t just run through Indiana unregulated, it spans foreign continents with no state or national power having the jurisdiction to make it behave.
It can send jobs where it likes, where they are cheapest; it can move its plants to places that have the lowest tax rates—across oceans. Once again, we have “railroads”, “banks” and “oil monopolies” too big and too wide spread for any one governmental entity to control them.
No one tax code applies, no set of regulations. They can be a law unto themselves.
So how do we get them back under control? The United Nations? A single World Government? An absolutely appalling thought. But come up with another one that works. Until then, just hope some Commodore Vanderbilt isn’t mad at the ferry you happen to be riding. At the very least, he might ship your job to China.