Humble Enough to Admit Them

During this election season we have heard a lot of blame. It comes from both sides and no side has really done more or less considering the positions candidates have been in up to this point in the campaign season. They have blamed members of their own party for their faults and positions – some that have contributed to where we are right now. They have blamed members of the other party for all manner of things various and sundry.

However, what's much harder to come by are admissions of wrongdoing on the part of the candidates for missteps, mistakes and more they have been responsible for themselves. There are very few admissions regarding where things went wrong for them politically and owning up to the fact they had culpability. It goes for people wrapped up in debates and people still free from having to face their opponents. But when the country is headed in the wrong direction, eating a little humble pie in front of the nation might be a good thing right about now.

People may be worried that they would be giving their opponents ammunition with which they may be fired at and attacked. But when we look at the top two Republican candidates, as of right now, both the establishment pick and the establishment wild card and the overall establishment pick already in place on the other side, which of them would be immune from being fired on? Is there really one among them that doesn't have a laundry list of things they would rather not have to fight back against?

What about the president? All a person has to do is go back to his list of promises from the 2008 campaign season and look at how many he's even attempted to pass so far, and then how many he actually did the exact opposite on. There's ample ammunition to go around for all, and it will be on the table. Things that have not yet been thought of or talked about will also be leaking out and thrown around by special interest groups, PAC's and other concerned interests however true or untrue – fair or unfair.

Right now we are trying to recover from two wars, one of them unnecessary and now that we know the truth, unjust, the other just, but which could have been over had we stuck to the mission before abandoning it right before the case for an invasion of Iraq was made. (http://articles.sfgate.com/2002-03-14/news/17535761_1_nuclear-weapons-bi...) We are trying to recover from an economy that soured after a decade of economic expansion - “the longest economic expansion in our history” (http://clinton5.nara.gov/WH/Accomplishments/eightyears-03.html)

One of the lies that has been abundant among candidates on one side that almost all of them have trumpeted is the idea the Bush tax cuts helped the economy. Let's look at that a litle. An article quoted in the book “That Used To Be Us” (Farr, Strauss and Giroux, 2011) that was originally published in the Washington Post notes, “For most of the past 70 years, the U.S. economy has grown at a steady clip, generating perpetually higher incomes and wealth for American households. But since 2000, the story is starkly different. The past decade was the worst for the U.S. economy in modern times, a sharp reversal from a long period of prosperity that is leading economists and policymakers to fundamentally rethink the underpinnings of the nation's growth.

“It was, according to a wide range of data, a lost decade for American workers. The decade began in a moment of triumphalism -- there was a current of thought among economists in 1999 that recessions were a thing of the past. By the end, there were two, bookends to a debt-driven expansion that was neither robust nor sustainable. There has been zero net job creation since December 1999. No previous decade going back to the 1940s had job growth of less than 20 percent. Economic output rose at its slowest rate of any decade since the 1930s as well.” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/01/AR201001...)

This is further underscored in the same book when the authors quote economist Paul Krugman from a political discussion on ABC in 2009 when he said, “we should have been paying for these wars to begin with, right from the beginning. I mean, this was, if you want to talk firsts for Bush, this was the first time in American history that a president took us into a war and cut taxes.” (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/nov/30/paul-krug...) By cutting taxes when we were adding over a trillion dollars to the amount we spent on defense, which already eclipsed every other nation in the world each many times over, we effectively put ourselves over a trillion dollars more in debt at least. We took on huge expenditures without paying for them and worse at a time when we and reduced our income. If the head of a household did that in the real world they would be considered an irresponsible parent to say the least. How did those tax cuts help us again?

Another thing that keeps getting thrown around and blamed on one side is what is referred to as “cap and trade.” Cap and trade is a system created to try and control carbon emissions that pollute the environment and threaten global stability environmentally. The same book notes this about cap and trade and its history, “The basic premise of cap-and-trade is that government doesn't tell polluters how to clean up their act. Instead, it simply imposes a cap on emissions. Each company starts the year with a certain number of tons allowed—a so-called right to pollute. The company decides how to use its allowance; it might restrict output, or switch to a cleaner fuel, or buy a scrubber to cut emissions. If it doesn't use up its allowance, it might then sell what it no longer needs. Then again, it might have to buy extra allowances on the open market. Each year, the cap ratchets down, and the shrinking pool of allowances gets costlier. As in a game of musical chairs, polluters must scramble to match allowances to emissions.

“Getting all this to work in the real world required a leap of faith. The opportunity came with the 1988 election of George H.W. Bush. EDF president Fred Krupp phoned Bush's new White House counsel—Boyden Gray—and suggested that the best way for Bush to make good on his pledge to become the 'environmental president' was to fix the acid rain problem, and the best way to do that was by using the new tool of emissions trading. Gray liked the marketplace approach, and even before the Reagan administration expired, he put EDF staffers to work drafting legislation to make it happen...

“John Sununu, the White House chief of staff, was furious. He said the cap 'was going to shut the economy down,' Boyden Gray recalls. But the in-house debate 'went very, very fast. We didn't have time to fool around with it.' President Bush not only accepted the cap, he overruled his advisers' recommendation of an eight million-ton cut in annual acid rain emissions in favor of the ten million-ton cut advocated by environmentalists...

”Almost 20 years since the signing of the Clean Air Act of 1990, the cap-and-trade system continues to let polluters figure out the least expensive way to reduce their acid rain emissions.” (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Presence-of-Mind-Blue-Sky-T...) So over the objections of some in that party it was the very party deriding the system that actually put it in place, and by a former president from their own party no less. Never hear that being admitted to. Yet, they keep blaming the other side for it.

The current president also has his own list of things he really needs to clarify and finally be honest about. His record shows that in many ways he did not turn out to be the man he claimed he was. He needs to say how that came about and why without just blaming everyone else. He needs come clean about his real views on wars and the Iraq War and why we are staying in Afghanistan although the 'mission' of finding justice for what happened on 9/11 is over.

He needs to come clean on why hardly any of the stimulus was used to put people to work on things like infrastructure, even though our current infrastructure is lagging behind many nations when it was once the wonder of the world. The ASCE has called it a disgrace and gives it the kind of grades you would ground your children for. (http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/) It needs repairs regardless of the unemployment rate, but the two do happen to coincide. Yet all the money has gone to people in the financial world primarily, most of whom have not paid it back, and that held on to it without moving on the kinds of loans so necessary to stimulate a recovery. The word was without giving them money so they could give out loans, we would have collapsed. They didn't give them out, and we didn't collapse. That needs to be explained.

There is much from both sides. Perhaps the president will be honest about this as he has let down and disappointed so many since his overwhelming election in 2008 when he promised hope and change. He needs to explain why he's been so stingy with both.

To read about my inspiration for this article go to www.lawsuitagainstuconn.com.