Much of the criticisms aimed at Congress have involved the high-profile legislative stalemates on some issues involving filibusters and the like, that have stymied progress on those issues that did not involve the interests of the oligarchy. What all that hoop-la has obscured is a far more serious criticism, the fact that the government has stopped carrying out the most basic of its functions.

The most essential function of government is to make sure that its institutions function smoothly. At the very least, this requires that the government pass a budget that allocates money to those institutions so that they know what they can and cannot do. It is shocking to realize to what extent the Congress has abdicated that fundamental responsibility.

A quick investigation reveals that the appropriation process by which the government allocates money has a straightforward and logical sequence.

1. The President gives his State of the Union address at the end of January in which he lays out his general goals for the coming year.
2. He is required to submit to Congress by the first Monday in February a budget for the fiscal year beginning on October 1.
3. By April 15 the two chambers of Congress are supposed to pass a non-binding budget resolution that provides guidelines for taxes and appropriations for the next five years and this serves to provide a framework for both bodies to debate and allocate funds for the various agencies under their purview.
4. In Congress, the budget expenditures are divided into twelve major appropriations categories:
   • Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies;
   • Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies;
   • Defense;
   • Energy and Water Development, and Related Agencies;
   • Financial Services and General Government;
   • Department of Homeland Security;
   • Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies;
   • Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and
     Related Agencies;

   • Legislative Branch;
   • Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies;
   • State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs; and
   • Departments of Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies.

   The twelve appropriations committees in each body farm out the work to its own specialized sub-committees to work on the budget for their agencies and report back to the committees, which then has to vote to submit their appropriation package to the full House or Senate, which has the option of proposing amendments to the committees’ recommendations.

   (Technically, there is just one Appropriations Committee in the House and the above twelve are subcommittees of that body which have their own sub-sub-committees, but that gets confusing. There is also some difficulty in figuring out how money is allocated because the president’s budget proposal is specified according to agencies and not split up according to these twelve categories. They do not seem to provide a summary spreadsheet of allocations, with the closest that I could find being here.)

5. If the two chambers pass appropriation legislation that disagree (as often happens), a conference committee is set up to smooth out the differences and the jointly agreed-upon conference report is then sent to both chambers for voting. They two chambers cannot amend the conference report in any way but can only vote to accept or reject it. If it is rejected, it goes back to the conference committee for further work.
6. The 12 appropriation resolutions are supposed to be presented to both full chambers and approved by the August recess, so that a final budget bill can be sent to the president.
7. “After Congress sends the bill to the President, he has 10 days to sign or veto the measure. If he takes no action, the bill automatically becomes law at the end of the 10-day period… If the President vetoes the bill, he sends it back to Congress. Congress may override the veto by a two-thirds vote in both houses. If Congress successfully overrides the veto, the bill becomes law. If Congress is unsuccessful, the bill dies.”

This whole structure is set up so that all government agencies know well in advance how much money they have been allocated for the coming year and how it should be spent so that they can transition smoothly when the new fiscal year begins on October 1. It allows them to plan what new initiatives to undertake and what old programs to end.

In theory, this should result in a smoothly running government.

Tomorrow: How the reality compares with the theory.

This blog has been Sarah Palin-free for some time because I have little patience for the kind of obsession the media seem to have with breathlessly reporting her every utterance and tweet, however inconsequential. But for my own amusement I have been idly speculating as to whom she might choose as her running mate in the unlikely event that she becomes the Republican presidential candidate in 2012. Who could possibly match her in the looniness factor? Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachman is a possibility since she is surely nutty enough.

But we now have a clear winner! John Bolton is considering running for the nomination as well. Yes, John Bolton is so crazy that he thinks the country is looking for someone like him to lead it, which makes him a perfect match for Palin.

Palin-Bolton in 2012. Who could ask for anything more?

As expected, after much posturing about how much it pained them, Obama and the Democratic leadership joined with the Republicans and voted to give the oligarchy everything they demanded, while throwing some crumbs to the rest of us and deliberately inserting a Social Security bomb that will explode later. They even snuck in an extra goodie for the rich at the last minute in the form of more generous itemized deductions for high-income households that cost $20.7 billion. Yes, what rich people, who have smart accountants to find all manner of itemized deductions (legal and illegal) to reduce their taxes, really need are more deductions.

Did you notice how quickly action was taken to pass this legislation? How the so-called gridlocked Congress can act so rapidly when the oligarchy’s interests are involved? It is just like the lightning speed with which Congress passed the Wall Street bailout in 2008. But when it comes to matters that affect the powerless, like the Zadroga bill aimed at providing medical relief to those first responders after 9/11 who now have serious health issues, nothing gets done. Jon Stewart has been outraged by this and his entire show on Thursday dealt with this single issue.

The absurdity of the tax cuts given to the rich becomes even more obvious when we look at this graph from the Congressional Budget Office at how after-tax average incomes have changed since 1979 for the various income categories. Note the steep rise in the last decade for the top 1% after the Bush tax cuts (that were just extended) were put into place.

The top 1.0% of incomes have increased four fold in that period, while the bottom 60% has been pretty much stagnant.

My prediction is that there will be a new ‘bipartisan’ effort to benefit the oligarchy even more. This one will be called tax ‘reform’. (You should always be on your guard when the two parties speak of ‘bipartisanship’ and the ‘reform’ of any institution that serves the general public.) This will be promoted by saying that the present tax code is too complicated and needs to be ‘simplified’. The servants of the oligarchy (aka the Democratic and Republican leadership) will agree that the changes must be ‘revenue neutral’, because it is now an article of faith that increasing taxes is the greatest evil in the world. But if there is to be no net gain or loss in net revenue, then any changes must mean that some will pay more tax and others will pay less. Guess who is going to win. And why? Because those who look after the interests of ordinary people will be excluded from the backrooms where the deal is hashed out.

David Stockman, budget director under Ronald Reagan and a consummate insider, points out how ordinary people get the short end:

It’s hard to achieve because the general taxpayer is busy every day taking care of his own needs, his family, his job. And he doesn’t have time to lobby for a broad tax base and reasonable rates. On the other hand, every special interest group has an economic interest in raising money through some kind of political action committee or education fund and then lobby for targeted, narrowly focused, sometimes even obscure language that they get either into the tax code on Capitol Hill or into the regulation.
…
So there’s a kind of an asymmetry of democracy, which there is no clean answer to. So until we really change the role of money in politics, I don’t know that we’ll ever address the question you raised.

During such debates, there will be a lot of talk about ‘fighting for the middle class’ and it is important to keep in mind the actual facts about family income, because politicians use the label ‘middle class’ vaguely to hide the fact that they only care about the rich. According to the US Census Bureau’s latest figures, the household income distribution by quintiles in 2009 was:

20% of households earn less than $20,450
20% of households earn between $20,450 and $38,530
20% of households earn between $38,530 and $61,800
20% of households earn between $61,800 and $100,000
20% of households earn over $100,000

The median household income (i.e., the 50% dividing line) is $50,221.

Only 5% of households earn over $180,000.

If we label the five quintiles as poor, lower middle class, middle class, upper middle class, and rich, then a narrow definition of the middle class would be the middle 20% earning between $38,530 and $61,800 and the broadest definition of middle class would be the middle 60%, those households earning between $20,450 and $100,000. Obama’s talk about ‘middle class tax cuts’ included households earning up to $250,000 which is ridiculous since that is five times the median income. People earning more than that constitute only 2% of all households. In a country with such enormous income disparities, how can anyone speak of 98% of the population as the middle class?

But such dishonest language comes easily to those politicians whose real agenda is different from their stated one. As George Orwell said in his classic 1949 must-read essay Politics and the English Language: “Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different…. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.”

A recent Tom Tomorrow cartoon targets the TSA’s invasive airport searches.

While everyone is up in arms about the TSA’s security methods, let us not forget the bigger picture, that such practices are enabled because we have passively let the government create a national security state that thinks it can abuse people at will.

The really serious abuses are happening elsewhere, in the denial of basic protections to preserve the life and liberty promised in the constitution. Paul Craig Roberts provides a horrific account of what the government did with Omar Khadr and to Dr. Aafia Siddiqui and her three young children who are now missing.

As Roberts says:

We have a Congress that has forfeited its power to declare war and sits complicit while the president not only usurps its power but uses illegitimate power to commit war crimes by launching naked aggressions on the basis of lies and deception.

We have a Congress that turns a blind eye to criminal actions by the president, vice president, and executive branch, including violations of US statutory law against torture, violations of US statutory law against spying on Americans without warrants, and violations of every legal protection in the Bill of Rights, from the right of privacy to habeas corpus.

The hallmarks of the remade US legal system, thanks to the “war on terror,” are coerced self-incrimination and indefinite detention or murder without charges or evidence.

We should not be satisfied with reforming just airport security, we should seek the dismantling of the entire national security state and restoring the democratic rights that are being stolen from us.

Repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”

Yesterday Congress finally repealed the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in the military. This move has both small and big implications.

It is small in the sense that it affects a small segment of the population (gay people in the military) and eliminating this rule will not cost any money or changes in the way the military is run or affect the nation in any noticeable way. It will not be long before people wonder (if they remember it at all) what all the fuss was about, why we had such an absurd rule in the first place, and why it was so hard to eliminate it.

But this change is big in a symbolic sense, and should give a boost to efforts to obtain full equal rights for gays in all areas of society. When the government condones discrimination in one of its major institutions, it gives ammunition to all the homophobes who want to deny gays their rights in other areas. So the long-term significance of this repeal should not be underestimated. It may well symbolize the beginning of the end for anti-gay discrimination in the US.

But this high profile debate illustrates another feature. The one-party oligarchic state that we have in the US cannot be too obvious about its monolithic nature. It needs hot-button issues that the oligarchy does not care about (sexuality, abortion, guns, religion, etc.) that the two factions can strongly disagree on and fight over, and which serve to give us the illusion that we have two opposing parties instead of two factions of the same party. This allows for heated fights and gives each faction’s supporters the impression that they are winning some battles and losing others, when in reality, the oligarchy is winning on all the major issues. So repeal of DADT gives supporters of the Democratic faction something to feel good about and to rally around their leaders.

But even allowing for that, the repeal of DADT is to be welcomed and congratulations extended to all those who fought so hard for it.