The emperor is dead all hail the emperor.

Weblog: 9th November 2008
Jozi

In my blogpiece “Joe the plumber” [see: earlier blog] I referred, among other things, to our newly beloved emperor of the Firmian planet, President elect Barak Obama, as a “plausible idiot”. I also suggested, you may remember that John Mc Cain was hovering on senility; and could die before the end of his term and did we really want to be lumbered with ‘that [ignorant] woman’. But neither of the latter got to be president and BO did.

I received some flak for that from people who felt I was too harsh. So: I have no issues with the man, my response was related to his performance in the debate: he had an opportunity to land a heavy blow that would stand him in good stead this time next year when everyone started hating him [maybe]and he ‘dropped it’. Did he drop it out of choice or by design or…quite possible … because... as a man who is not an economist, and quite frankly has other things on his mind, he, and his advisors simply do not understand the problem? …. Seems odd but we have learned our lifetimes that what we often thought was impossible turned out to be not only possible but prosaic.

So before I start I would like to add my congratulations to BO on his great achievement and note that he beat 12 other people for the job including some other black persons. He got 52 %of the vote and the other 12 people [some women] shared the other 48%. It is also possible that only an idiot would take on this job knowing that the deck is distinctly troublesome.

One other thing before we continue. Apparently some 53% of eligible voters in the United States of America [Firmia] voted; of whom marginally more than half voted for BO, the new President to be. So 52% of 53% is not a huge amount. It is not as if he achieved anything that remarkable [for all that he was the first black man to be elected President ] given all the hype and action… unprecedented in a nation awash with, and accustomed to, hype and action. Obviously his achievement does have a particular significance but that does not detract from how I perceived him.

So 47% of people did not think enough of the man to vote at all, and only slightly more than half preferred him to the “Addams family”.

The ‘Titanic’ is sinking. It has vast momentum to keep it lumbering for a good time but is taking water way above what it should. The two major parties in the USA are simply two sides of the same coin. They are a yin yang construct. Their purpose: To maintain and preserve the superstructure of the Vessel: the bank-debt contrived global financial illusion. Or if you prefer, the basic casino structured environment called the global financial system which is at heart, an illusion..

Please understand that in saying this I am not indicating disapproval. This is the system that works… or rather worked. The fundamental ‘self interest’ based motivation, of which Adam Smith wrote, has however mangled itself on an ocean of new distrust; and trust between humans once broken takes a long time to heal: far too slowly for a world predicated on instant communication and electronic money transfers that happen at the speed of thought.

The State now moves to centre stage in this new era, and has to take the place of the distrust, and it must become the guarantor of trust… the private sector, in the form of the so called “Cattle herder’ category [the financial services sector of the economy] has so completely screwed up their relationships, that they cannot even trust themselves nor each other. That they have lost a significant amount of credibility is inevitable. The State has now to become the guarantor of their trust and Mr Obama could be the man to exploit that advantage to a degree almost unimaginable even now.

But: back to the idiot thing and what it was that BO missed and why it revealed a gap in his expectation. Bear in mind that my comment was in the context of a debate. As [ I hope] we know, the essence of debate is rebuttal and counter argument.

Mr John “Vietnam Joe” Mc Cain raised the idea that Mr Obama was intending to raise taxes. You all heard him repeat this at rallies. Now he said it in the debate. Mr Obama did not use a riposte or a rebuttal but rather, skirted around the issue. This is understandable; it is a thorny issue and he is going to raise taxes: he has almost no choice. That is… none if he remains locked into the ancient, now punished, paradigm. Some margin exists if he takes the opportunity posed by the orders in disarray. He could take his party's original Jacksonian Revolution motivation: and give it steam it never had before, but uniquely does have now. Barak Obama is in a 'never before' position to bring a revolution to fruition that will totally change everything we have ever done.

So he was, to me, an idiot for passing up the essential rebuttal. Since you probably don’t remember what it was it should have gone something like this:

Vietnam Joe: I’m this tough American hero who’s been in the trenches and I say you [BO] don’t create wealth you redistribute it… You are going to steal Joe the Plumber’s wealth You’re a gonna raise them taxes.
BO I see: You do realise don’t you that your party… the so called party of ‘small government’ and ‘keep the taxes down’, just this month landed the country with a one trillion dollar back tax charged on all the goodies of your era, in arrears… So before you say that I’m [maybe] going to do the deed in the future let us not forget [respectfully] that it has already been done.

There are some variations on this … had he his wits about him “Cowboy Jack” Mc Cain would have [respectfully] pointed out that the de-regulation era began with that genius Clinton.

To which…

BO: Sure… but he left a 600 billion dollar surplus for the people and your guys stuck us for a trillion dollars worth of debt before October and now hit us with a trillion more this month.

He could then, depending on how he wanted to take the debate, have gone for the
kill shot whatever it was to be.

So like a coach who stands on the sidelines and watches his player fumble the shot
and hit the crossbar, my response, [derived from my decades of judging debates
around the region where I live], was ‘You idiot!’.

Debating is an intellectual contact sport and where the contenders are evenly matched, as they were, opportunities to land a telling blow are limited… his failure to take the opportunity
made him thus… an idiot.

Later of course I reviewed my response. He obviously skipped around the subject. He
was following a script. Of course [Smacks forehead: silly me!]: the entire show was
carefully scripted. ‘If he says this you say this; if he says that stay away from that:
that is a the fiery pit’. That is Tax. It is a fiery pit.

So does that make him a double idiot? a ventriloquist’s dummy?

What if neither he nor his handlers understood the nature of the curse that stands in his way ? BO has just inherited the most poisoned chalice ever received by any US President this past eighty years.

Right now I see a man being set up as a stooge by powerful vested interests. Does he take the opportunbity fate has provided or does he fumble the shot… much depends on who he asks to do his bidding. Do they [the minions] understand that we have reached one of history’s [our story’s] great turning points.

My hope, and that I am sure of all the rest of humanity, is that he proves them all wrong: and does actually bring change… Does contribute significantly to makeing this a more caring world. His margin for movement however, is so constrained as to make any attempt based on existing precedents at managing this type of economic change almost doomed to be stillborn: and in the holocaust of chaos that potentially awaits us in the wake of this current financial tsunami he could simply blow away on the wind and become a one term president… a ruined man.

Or he could do what a handful of his predecessors have done over the past two centuries. He could grasp the nettle with which he been provided and stun his enemies with it.

His formula would have to be counter-intuitive. This would mean he would have to do what no one expects… He would have to not only cut taxes but completely and radically change the entire philosophic base on which we consider tax.

He has two windows of opportunity right now that would enable a fast thinking, fast moving new president to act in an unprecedented manner.

1. The Government now owns a vast chunk of the financial cash flow system and can impose a
tough bargain.

2. Electronic money transfer is now a global reality.

The dramatic move would be to eradicate the existing concept of a tax on income, which breeds untold levels of corruption and creates so much distortion it is almost unfathomable and increasingly unmanageable.

It is only because we have a large body of opinion that sees the present progressive tax system as a way of punishing those who acquire wealth that we cannot see that it is an immensely inefficient way to raise the revenue needed to run societies. The blind revenge factor is high and while it used to be that there was no other way: that is no longer a valid argument.

Barak Obama could go down in history as the man who implemented the idea of replacing traditional income tax with a mini-micro levy on money transfers: going directly into the banking system, on which he now has a lien; and by taking a tiny drop of blood, and using the power of mass numbers, generate a routine regular stream of cash flow into the regulatory system that people will wonder why they never did that in the first place. [And you know they couldn’t because we did not run the world then on lightning fast electronic transfers.].

It is time to review Shambrook’s concept of the Total Economic Activity Levy as the inevitable evolution of the tax construct.

Now while i hope BO can deliver in this; my cynical observation is that he doesn’t understand it and that in the same way that he dropped the ball with his debate riposte, he will be diverted from the ball again by clever obfuscation, by economists with a vested interest in their present philosophies; and gradually my critics will have to reluctantly agree that the man was simply a ‘plausible idiot’.

For now of course we must give him sway… wait for an end to the hype and see what he can really deliver.

So for the moment we must believe in the hope that he says he believes in.

Cheers
The Blogospherian.