The Politics of Desperation

There’s a dear old friend of mine, a former Marine, who forwards me emails that he gets from his conservative friends. Just to “light you up,” as he puts it. I oblige with rebuttals, Fisking the mostly fantasy-based talking points.

Recently he sent me a wild one, which got me thinking about the politics of desperation. This last email purported to be a summary of a couple of national television appearances (Face the Nation, in one case) by the Obamas. I’ll spare you the bulk of it, but one bit was about Obama wanting to change the national anthem to “I Want to Teach the World to Sing” and another bit was about Michelle admitting to attending flag burnings. The Onion could do no better. I mean, even if someone could conceive of the Obamas approving of those things, could anyone think that they were so lacking in political awareness that they would admit to these things on national television? It goes beyond being unhinged into not believing in hinges.

As other political observers have noted, it’s as if history began in January of 2009. President Obama does things that previous presidents have done and advocates for policies that previous presidents have advocated, but somehow his acts are cast as uniquely undignified, lazy, disrespectful, or misguided. Visit Snopes.com, the urban myth debunking site, and put “Obama” in the search bar for some entertaining mythology. The email rant barrage gives Nigerian prince scams a bad name.

It reminds me of a talk I attended earlier this summer, given by Dan Fenn. Dan is an old family friend, a longtime political observer, and perhaps the last surviving member of the Kennedy Administration. Although in his early nineties, he is still sharp and vital, working as a management consultant. He was speaking on the subject of the presidency, its relationship with congress over the years, and the difficulties experienced by the Obama administration.

One point that Dan emphasized was the outright heels-dug-in obstructionism of the Republican House and the filibustering Republican minority in the Senate, combined with a staggering lack of interpersonal respect from Republican members of Congress. Dan spent a few minutes on the source of that disrespect. It is racial, of course.

His point was about demographics. We are still a majority white country. I should note here that the definition of who is “white” has expanded over the past hundred years as various immigrant groups became more numerous and gained political power. The people who would now still be considered non-white are gaining numbers and it looks as if the people we now call white will no longer be a majority in 2050. It’s an inexorable demographic trend, and a certain subset of white people is panicking.

As Dan put it, if they could see Barack Obama as a one-off non-white president then he would only have to put up with run of the mill racism. In 2016 it would be back to middle aged white guys forever. This would be reassuring for both overt and covert white supremacists.

But no, what demographers know and white racists either know or sense is that this is not an aberration. The era of middle aged white guy dominance is slowly passing. This is a source of desperation that drives the absurd and vicious attacks on our first mixed-ethnicity president. Although I’m not a fan of his many Bush 2.0 policies, I have sympathy for him in this case.

Sidebar on covert racism: In a 2003 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, resumes with white-sounding names got 50% more callbacks than similar resumes with black sounding names. In another job hunting study by a sociologist at Northwestern University, young white men with felony convictions got more callbacks than young black men with equal qualifications and no criminal records. Being white was equal to eight extra years of experience. Welcome to post-racial America.

I’ll leave you with the Minor Heretic’s Law of Email Probability. The number of recipients of an ad hominem email concerning a major political figure equals the number of nines in the probability that it is false. One email address equals a 90% probability of bullshit. Two addresses equal 99%. Three addresses equal 99.9%, and so on.

SOTU 2014

Might as well join the herd and weigh in. I told myself that I wouldn’t watch the State of the Union Address, but with the same kind of twisted motivation that makes people poke at a sore spot, I did.

I only caught the last 20 minutes or so. I read the text and then watched it partly with the sound on and partly with the sound off.

With the sound off, it was interesting to watch President Obama in top form – smooth, with familiar conversational gestures and expressions. It was also interesting to see him framed between the faces of VP Joe Biden and House Speaker John Boehner. Biden was the faithful Ed McMahon to Obama’s Johnny Carson. He was attentive and both mirrored and reacted to his boss as reinforcement. Boehner sat there with a restrained look of disbelief, a sort of perpetual “Jesus H. Christ, what is this shit?” He was restrained, nevertheless, with no eye rolling and appropriate applause when Obama trotted out the usual patriotic references.

Easy to miss: At one point Biden palmed a mint or candy into his mouth with nearly the deftness of a sleight of hand artist. Nearly. Points for on-camera audacity.

Visual and political differences aside, always remember: The man on the left was selected by millionaires. The man in the middle was selected by millionaires. The man on the right was selected by millionaires.

The President tucked it to the Republicans a few times, which was amusing. He mentioned the 40 votes against the Affordable Care Act in the House. That was a three-fer, nailing the GOP for obstructionism, wasting time, and impotence. He also pegged them on the minimum wage with a classic “When did you stop beating your wife?” line.

“In the coming weeks, I will issue an Executive Order requiring federal contractors to pay their federally-funded employees a fair wage of at least $10.10 an hour – because if you cook our troops’ meals or wash their dishes, you shouldn’t have to live in poverty.”

Oh, the troops, riiiight. Let’s face it, in our present climate of military-worship you could tag the word “troops” onto the concept of eating dogshit on toast and people would at least consider it. Attached to “Let’s give America a raise!” it’s a winner. POTUS wins a prize for irrefutable emotional rhetoric. And, surprisingly enough, a good idea.

He gave a special hoist-with-your-own-petard shout out to ultra-conservative Senator Marco Rubio (R, FL) on the Earned Income Tax Credit, agreeing with Rubio that it should be expanded to give more assistance to single workers with no children. The camera switched to Rubio, who maintained what must have been the most difficult poker face in recent political history. Getting caught by surprise bipartisanship will hurt him with the knee-jerk base.

Much of the rest of the speech struck me as the usual blah-blah. He promoted his policies with the standard assortment of inspiring individual stories.

My heart did go out to Sergeant Cory Remsburg, who was nearly killed by an IED in Afghanistan. He is undergoing the slow and painful process of rehabilitation. At the SOTU he was also undergoing use as a stage prop. There’s a fine line between being celebrated and being exploited, but yes, the White House went over it. Solid bipartisanship here, though. The Republicans have been shamelessly waving “the troops” in our faces since the dark ages. What truly frosts my heretical ass, though, is that Sgt. Remsburg could have stayed home.

My ultimate response to all the hoopla is this, and journalists take note: A press conference (or speech) means being lied to in public. “Access” means being lied to in private. At least with access you get to expense out a meal.

Shooting an Elephant

A famous essay that happens to be about President Obama and his proposal to bomb Syria.

Shooting an Elephant

By George Orwell

In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.

All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically – and secretly, of course – I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been Bogged with bamboos – all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty.

One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of imperialism – the real motives for which despotic governments act. Early one morning the sub-inspector at a police station the other end of the town rang me up on the phone and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do something about it? I did not know what I could do, but I wanted to see what was happening and I got on to a pony and started out. I took my rifle, an old 44 Winchester and much too small to kill an elephant, but I thought the noise might be useful in terrorem. Various Burmans stopped me on the way and told me about the elephant's doings. It was not, of course, a wild elephant, but a tame one which had gone "must." It had been chained up, as tame elephants always are when their attack of "must" is due, but on the previous night it had broken its chain and escaped. Its mahout, the only person who could manage it when it was in that state, had set out in pursuit, but had taken the wrong direction and was now twelve hours' journey away, and in the morning the elephant had suddenly reappeared in the town. The Burmese population had no weapons and were quite helpless against it. It had already destroyed somebody's bamboo hut, killed a cow and raided some fruit-stalls and devoured the stock; also it had met the municipal rubbish van and, when the driver jumped out and took to his heels, had turned the van over and inflicted violences upon it.

The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me in the quarter where the elephant had been seen. It was a very poor quarter, a labyrinth of squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palmleaf, winding all over a steep hillside. I remember that it was a cloudy, stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains. We began questioning the people as to where the elephant had gone and, as usual, failed to get any definite information. That is invariably the case in the East; a story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes. Some of the people said that the elephant had gone in one direction, some said that he had gone in another, some professed not even to have heard of any elephant. I had almost made up my mind that the whole story was a pack of lies, when we heard yells a little distance away. There was a loud, scandalized cry of "Go away, child! Go away this instant!" and an old woman with a switch in her hand came round the corner of a hut, violently shooing away a crowd of naked children. Some more women followed, clicking their tongues and exclaiming; evidently there was something that the children ought not to have seen. I rounded the hut and saw a man's dead body sprawling in the mud. He was an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he could not have been dead many minutes. The people said that the elephant had come suddenly upon him round the corner of the hut, caught him with its trunk, put its foot on his back and ground him into the earth. This was the rainy season and the ground was soft, and his face had scored a trench a foot deep and a couple of yards long. He was lying on his belly with arms crucified and head sharply twisted to one side. His face was coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an expression of unendurable agony. (Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.) The friction of the great beast's foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins a rabbit. As soon as I saw the dead man I sent an orderly to a friend's house nearby to borrow an elephant rifle. I had already sent back the pony, not wanting it to go mad with fright and throw me if it smelt the elephant.

The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and meanwhile some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was in the paddy fields below, only a few hundred yards away. As I started forward practically the whole population of the quarter flocked out of the houses and followed me. They had seen the rifle and were all shouting excitedly that I was going to shoot the elephant. They had not shown much interest in the elephant when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it was different now that he was going to be shot. It was a bit of fun to them, as it would be to an English crowd; besides they wanted the meat. It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no intention of shooting the elephant – I had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary – and it is always unnerving to have a crowd following you. I marched down the hill, looking and feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growing army of people jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you got away from the huts, there was a metalled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a thousand yards across, not yet ploughed but soggy from the first rains and dotted with coarse grass. The elephant was standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards us. He took not the slightest notice of the crowd's approach. He was tearing up bunches of grass, beating them against his knees to clean them and stuffing them into his mouth.

I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant – it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery – and obviously one ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully eating, the elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I think now that his attack of "must" was already passing off; in which case he would merely wander harmlessly about until the mahout came back and caught him. Moreover, I did not in the least want to shoot him. I decided that I would watch him for a little while to make sure that he did not turn savage again, and then go home.

But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives," and so in every crisis he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing – no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.

But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was not squeamish about killing animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow it always seems worse to kill a large animal.) Besides, there was the beast's owner to be considered. Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly. But I had got to act quickly. I turned to some experienced-looking Burmans who had been there when we arrived, and asked them how the elephant had been behaving. They all said the same thing: he took no notice of you if you left him alone, but he might charge if you went too close to him.

It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I ought to walk up to within, say, twenty-five yards of the elephant and test his behavior. If he charged, I could shoot; if he took no notice of me, it would be safe to leave him until the mahout came back. But also I knew that I was going to do no such thing. I was a poor shot with a rifle and the ground was soft mud into which one would sink at every step. If the elephant charged and I missed him, I should have about as much chance as a toad under a steam-roller. But even then I was not thinking particularly of my own skin, only of the watchful yellow faces behind. For at that moment, with the crowd watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary sense, as I would have been if I had been alone. A white man mustn't be frightened in front of "natives"; and so, in general, he isn't frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.

There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine and lay down on the road to get a better aim. The crowd grew very still, and a deep, low, happy sigh, as of people who see the theatre curtain go up at last, breathed from innumerable throats. They were going to have their bit of fun after all. The rifle was a beautiful German thing with cross-hair sights. I did not then know that in shooting an elephant one would shoot to cut an imaginary bar running from ear-hole to ear-hole. I ought, therefore, as the elephant was sideways on, to have aimed straight at his ear-hole, actually I aimed several inches in front of this, thinking the brain would be further forward.

When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick – one never does when a shot goes home – but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time – it might have been five seconds, I dare say – he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.

I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me across the mud. It was obvious that the elephant would never rise again, but he was not dead. He was breathing very rhythmically with long rattling gasps, his great mound of a side painfully rising and falling. His mouth was wide open – I could see far down into caverns of pale pink throat. I waited a long time for him to die, but his breathing did not weaken. Finally I fired my two remaining shots into the spot where I thought his heart must be. The thick blood welled out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die. His body did not even jerk when the shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued without a pause. He was dying, very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further. I felt that I had got to put an end to that dreadful noise. It seemed dreadful to see the great beast Lying there, powerless to move and yet powerless to die, and not even to be able to finish him. I sent back for my small rifle and poured shot after shot into his heart and down his throat. They seemed to make no impression. The tortured gasps continued as steadily as the ticking of a clock.

In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later that it took him half an hour to die. Burmans were bringing dash and baskets even before I left, and I was told they had stripped his body almost to the bones by the afternoon.

Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

Birther Skeet

Sometimes I think that president Obama might be having a little fun.

Perhaps you have seen the utter waste of air time and column inches that concerns Obama’s skeet shooting habits. In a January 27 interview for the magazine New Republic, the interviewer asked the president whether he had ever fired a gun. He responded, “Yes, in fact, up at Camp David, we do skeet shooting all the time.” This is a plausible claim, depending on one’s personal definition of “all the time.” It shouldn’t have caused a ripple in the media pool.

Of course, humanity being what it is, there was an eruption on the right. It was a ballistic version of the birther nonsense. Did the president really shoot skeet? Where were the photographs of him shooting skeet? Where was the evidence? The president’s press secretary was asked about it and gave a vague answer referring back to the president’s original statement. Fox “News” and Right Blogostan were in a spittle spraying frenzy, mocking and accusing.

Not one, not two, not three, not four, but five days later the White House released a photo on Flickr of the president firing a shotgun, presumably at a flying clay pigeon.

So then the Photoshop accusations began. The whole thing smells highly of birtherism, a concept acknowledged by administration allies.  From the New York Times: “Attn skeet birthers,” David Plouffe, the former White House senior adviser, wrote on Twitter as he posted a link to the photo. “Make our day — let the photoshop conspiracies begin!”

 Here’s my general take on these things:

 Obama: "I breathe air."

Conservative Screech-fest: "Show us the videos! Why are there no videos?"

Obama: "Here's a video of me breathing."

Conservative Screech-fest: "You're just moving your stomach in and out."

Obama: "A panel of scientists has attached air flow meters to my mouth and nostrils to show that I am breathing. Happy now?"

Conservative Screech-fest: "They were paid off to fake the results."

Obama: "Look, I've got an executive branch to run. Breathe into a paper bag until you stop hyperventilating and then find a therapist, ok?"

The question of why the White House waited five days to release the skeet photo reminds me of the long lag time between the beginning of the birther idiocy and the White House releasing the president’s long form birth certificate. (The authenticity of which, I should note, was then questioned by the same birthers.)

I’m thinking that Barack Obama ignored the birther movement at first because he rightly regarded it as trivial and foolish. Then he ignored it because he enjoyed watching his staunchest opponents stake their reputations on an obvious falsehood and then foam at the mouth about it on national television. Finally, right when most Americans were getting rightly sick of them, he snapped the rug out from under them.

With the skeet shooting thing, I can imagine him rolling his eyes and then saying to Jay Carney, “Say something vague and we’ll wait a few days. When the conservative pundits have enough drool on their ties, release a photo. Just one.”

There is a class of moronic bigots who wouldn’t believe that Obama was born in Hawaii if you showed a film of him emerging from his mother’s birth canal on Waikiki Beach, with hula dancers in the background and Don Ho standing next to her singing “Tiny Bubbles.” These same moronic bigots, and the servants of the arms manufacturers, are now crying “Photoshop!” I think Obama is more than ok with this. I think he’s smiling a little smile as his opponents dig themselves deeper.

Obama and the Blazing Saddles Strategy

Do you remember that scene in Blazing Saddles where the new black sheriff (Cleavon Little) is surrounded by the angry white townspeople? He puts his gun to his own head and says, “Nobody move or the n----r gets it!” The idiot townspeople drop their guns and the sheriff leads himself away at gunpoint to safety. (Clip below for benighted souls who have never seen the movie)

Well, it worked in the movies. President Obama is doing essentially the same thing in the debt limit debate, except that the Republicans are ok with him pulling the trigger.

Politically speaking, the sitting president owns the economy. The president gets reelected (or not) on the state of the economy. If Congress doesn’t raise the debt limit and the government defaults, a cascade of economic failure will follow. Our ability to borrow will be damaged for the foreseeable future and interest rates will rise. Rising interest rates will raise the cost of everything, dragging our economy down and raising unemployment. Government workers will get laid off or furloughed, raising unemployment even more. It goes on, but I’ll stop there. The end result in political terms is a tougher reelection fight for Obama and Democrats in general.

You’d think that this level of cruelty and cynicism would be beyond even the most callous and ideologically driven Republicans. You’d be wrong. There is a sizable group in the GOP that would rather see our economy fail than Obama succeed. The President is throwing the Republicans every bargaining chip he has, and with each one they say “more.” They are giving him nothing because they don’t have to. So what can he do?

With a Republican majority in the House and a filibuster-vulnerable majority in the Senate he can’t do much legislatively. That leaves the executive and judicial options.

He can pursue the 14^th Amendment option. Section 4 states, in part, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.” Defaulting on our debt is unconstitutional. Hence, the debt limit that congress is debating so vigorously can’t actually be enforced without violating the 14^th Amendment. Legal scholars can debate this, and they will, but it gives the President the option of calling the game on the debt limit. That leaves the Republicans with no hostage to kill.

He could also try a peripheral move that would partially solve the problem and distract the GOP from their present focus. I’ve written about the $70 billion or so that we lose in tax revenue each year to millionaire tax cheats offshoring their income. Obama could call a press conference with Attorney General Holder and some IRS officials at his side and announce the formation of a special task force to track down these wealthy cheats, extract the money they owe, and pitch them in jail. That would lower the deficit while striking at the heart of the GOP funding base. He could even offer a kind of amnesty. If the cheaters in question offer themselves up for audit voluntarily before the end of the year and pay what they owe (plus penalties and interest), then they won’t get prosecuted and imprisoned.

Likewise, he could propose a law to change the way certain intellectual property assets are valued when a corporation licenses them to a subsidiary. That sounds wonkish and abstract, but what it means is that a company such as Google rents its special search software to its subsidiary in Ireland for a fraction of the realistic price. Google pays U.S. taxes on the tiny amount it gets and shunts the foreign profits through the Netherlands to Bermuda, and thence to the shareholders’ pockets. Making companies charge their foreign subsidiaries market-rate licensing fees would add another $90 billion a year to tax revenues. The Republicans can, and will, come up with some bizarre rationalization as to why this is a bad idea, but it will at least shift blame to them.

No new taxes so far, just enforcing the law and closing a stupid loophole, and we’re up $160 billion annually.

How about those multi-million dollar executive salaries? Remember, every million dollars in salary and bonus that a company pays an executive is 20 median wage jobs going in one man’s pocket. Did you know that these mega-salaries are deductible for the company? Here’s a one-two punch: Make any salary/bonus/perk combination over five times median wage non-deductible. Anything over $250k stays on the company’s taxable side. That bumps up tax revenue and discourages that giant sucking sound of executive compensation bloat. Bill Clinton tentatively floated this and got screamed at by the CEO crowd.

Meanwhile, add a buck to the federal minimum wage. Most major corporations are sitting on cash, cash they won’t spend on expansion or hiring because they see no demand. 72 million Americans make hourly wage. Only about 3.6 million actually make the minimum, but an increase in the minimum tends to raise the bar for everyone. An extra buck an hour would mean they would gross $2,000 more each year, most of which they would take home and spend. It would end up as an annual $125 billion (roughly, after taxes) demand for goods and services. Demand and spending raises both employment and tax revenue. Again, CEOs will scream and the GOP will wail, but ordinary Americans will say, “Yeah, I could use $2,000.” Conservatives will say that increased wages will cause increased unemployment. Peer reviewed studies (as opposed to Wall Street Journal editorials) show a slight boost in employment for states that raise the minimum. Even if we call the employment question a wash, the net effect in terms of consumer spending and quality of life is positive.

I’m just fantasizing here. Barack Obama needs the approval of millionaires to raise the money for his reelection campaign. They would never allow this kind of thing. This is the hair tearing part of it: Obama doesn’t really care that he has no leverage with the Republicans. He’s cool with giving away everything. He’s looking at the GOP lineup for 2012 and seeing halfway rational people like Mitt Romney who have no chance with Republican primary voters and head cases like Michelle Bachmann who have no chance in the general election. Anyone to the left of Newt Gingrich will hold their noses, vote for him, and then go get drunk.

In terms of the Blazing Saddles metaphor, Obama is telling the mob “Ok, you got me.” He’s handing his badge and gun to the mayor and going to work for the banker. Don’t expect better.

Here’s the Blazing Saddles clip.