Today’s Topic: Mixing Adjectives is a Defective Policy Strategy
As the presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle continue this long 2 year process to gain their party’s nomination, I believe they are beginning to understand that one cannot have a set of policies that will survive the journey through time and reality.
All alternatives are not only in play, but always possible. Today can bring a new reality, but not necessarily one controlled by an administration nor even recognized in a timely manner by the president nor his advisors/controllers.
Tomorrow will bring yet another reality as someone outside of the direct flow of our country’s woes has the possibility of interacting within our system and thereby adversely affect all the "feel good" knee-jerk reactions of a group of elected officials with absolutely no forethought or even historical knowledge. 9/11 shows that we can be adversely affected by outside interests and provide 8 years of bad judgement in response.
Yesterday brought an email from a friend of mine wondering what I thought about some recent statements made by Jim Cramer and my thoughts are that his proposed $250 billion bailout of his Wall Street cronies would help end our generally accepted recession in short order.
At some point one must simply stop dancing with the one that brung ya if they slap you around.
First off, this administration has squandered two influxes of cash into the system to try to stave off a recession we have already entered. That won’t work, even if the initial $19 billion and the additional $38 billion helped maintain about a week’s worth of liquidity. After all, you don’t staunch the flow of blood with a Band-Aid, you use a tourniquet.
However, I’m not here to write about the consequences of this administration’s faulty economic policies, although I may well come back to it once or twice. Rather, I am talking about how the candidates fail the test of even understanding the question, much less their ability to offer specific solutions to wide ranging problems they are unqualified to determine.
And, of course, the language chosen to fool you into thinking that they have a handle on the situation.
First off, no one can offer a short-term solution for a long-term problem. There is no magic bullet for fiscal policy that bolsters business by ignoring proven history. You cannot throw money at corporations and think they will then trickle down those funds to their workers. The American economy was helped to evolve by those who used the people, in the people’s names, to further their own personal agendas.
For instance, directly after 9/11 President Bush threw $15 billion at the airline industry to keep them flying and keep the oil companies solvent, at the expense of the non-traveling public. There was no regard to the history of the industry that most were already in dire trouble with continuing and growing debt.
And the real problem why the American people swallow the bull is the way the information is presented.
Short term solutions for long term problems.
The above sentence defines the problem by the adjectives to describe the problem. You cannot use "short" in a sentence with "long" and directly relate them to each other.
For long term problems you need long term solutions.
For global problems you need global solutions.
For localized problems you find localized solutions.
If people need money, don’t give them money, give them a job.
If corporations need money, don’t give them money, give them more initiative.
If the government of this country needs answers, elect the people that actually have answers.
If a locality has a problem bear within a larger population, one that attacks the people of the community and destroys property, then the local solution would be to kill the bear (hopefully donating the meat to some local "soup" kitchen for the poor or homeless). But there need be no mass killings of bears, either locally or nationally or even internationally.
Both the latter of solutions (nationally and internationally) are of a scale which doesn’t match the scale of the problem. As stupid as the above scenario may seem, it is a perfect example of why things no longer work well for the people of this country. We have the equivalent of using a shotgun problem solving methodology in hopes of hitting something, when whatever we are hoping to shoot can’t be killed by a shotgun.
Scaling is the correct methodology for determining where resources can be applied and just how much expense those solutions incur.
For instance, a perfect example of inappropriately applied national scale to a localized problem is New Orleans. All the well to do in Mississippi had virtually no problems getting government funding to offset what our national insurance companies refused to pay, but in New Orleans the answer is to finally lay waste to thousands of people’s low income homes and build new houses with less than 1/3 of the previous low income housing available.
But this isn’t the only problem in the entire fiasco. After a lapse of 5 days and 1900+ dead people, including mercy killings at hospitals because no rescue was available nor anticipated, finally people, largely through the theft of a school bus by a young man, were getting moved to safer locations.
What most people don’t want to realize is that safe locations were available right in Louisiana but were denied to those being bussed. In fact, more than one person was arrested for wishing to get off the bus when the buss had reach a location where their family lived. These people only wanted to be with their family and not be a burden on the state, and yet the state decided these people should be arrested for resisting continuing on to their "new" location.
The last time we saw such a national solution to a localized problem we had Seminole Indians being forced to marched to "new" locations, even if it killed them.
I think it would be important to the people of the United States to have the information about how many people died after being relocated and never saw their families again. If this country were based on good solid family values, then even one family would be the one thing any solution should never tear apart. Certainly wide scale disruption of thousands of families was not the proper solution.
New Orleans families would have gladly become a part of the solution of rebuilding the city, but no, they were shipped off by the thousands even as thousands of illegal aliens were being shipped into Louisiana to work for slave wages and live in a level of squalor even the poorest of New Orleans residents hadn’t previously lived.
Even a greater example of incorrect scaling to a solution of a problem has been the inability of our internal militias to answer all the needs of our own people, much less become involved in a war on multiple fronts against a tactic such as terrorism. Now I am aware that Posse Commitatus is a part of our law, so I am talking about incorporating somewhere between 50 and 60 percent of our National Guard and Reserve units to fight in Iraq having consistently left our citizens vulnerable to internal and natural disasters.
Two circumstances come to mind in execution of national solutions to local problems, one again in New Orleans where private contractors from Blackwater were deputized to use deadly force in the streets when virtually all local services had been suspended. The other is the lack of the ability of California to adequately fight the most recent spate of Santa Ana fueled fires and "private services" organizations gladly went into fire ridden areas and protected their client’s property while watching the spectacle of our paid fire fighters and civic minded volunteers fought a losing battle.
America used to know this stuff. We had the ability to answer local problems or disasters with local solutions and the national government was requested to do only AS MUCH as necessary to contain the spread of the problem, not apply broad reaching and exorbitant measures that created even bigger problems without solutions.
However what we got was a national government whose very decisions in every facet of American life have degraded even the ability of the average American citizen to help another citizen with anything but money.
As I said, throwing money as a short-term solution doesn’t fix a long-term problem.
However, what we have with both our Republicans and the Democrats is a continuation of throwing short-term solutions at long term problems.
Mitt Romney suggests that he can get jobs back for the people of Michigan when he knows he cannot do any such thing. John McCain tells them that he will offer new training for new jobs he’s not going to be able to create.
Barrack Obama brings a piddling amount to the board on combating the loss of economic health, and the only difference between him and his two adversaries is the amount of money they are willing to throw at the problem. But they haven’t researched the problems much less come up with a reasonable solution.
So when people tell you that they have a solution to your problem, and your problem is that you don’t have jobs and can’t get proper medical care for your family and your government would rather split your family up rather than come up with solid solutions, just remember this.
If they use two diametrically opposed adjectives to describe their policy, that policy is failed from the start.
1:30:25 PM 
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