Clark's 100 year vision is nothing but platitudes. [View All]

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Patrolling Clarks web page, I began sniffing around for any kind of position on any thing. Their is in fact NOTHING! He has no stated position on any issue. Zip, nada, squat, zero, ziltch! By god, even the ineptitude of Leabermen has brains to set out his platform. I have seen harder firmer stances taken by Arnold. Reading his web page reads like a vanity love feast where its harder to tell whether Clark loves himself more than his own fans. If this doesn't change, and change quickly, than Clark's numbers are going to head south, really quickly.

So I thought I might take a look at Clark's 100 year plan. After all, I am trying to find a reason to support this guy. And all I found was two pages of platitudes in small type that stung my eyes to try and read. Even more worrisome is the fact that the below article doesn't even denote an author. It seems to imply that it came from Clark, but there is no way of knowing. No doubt because he wants to distance himself from this empty drivel.

Here are some examples of, well, of nothing.
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The 100 year vision.
http://www.clark04.com/vision.php

Paragraph 1.
Looking ahead 100 years, the United States will be defined by our environment, both our physical environment and our legal, Constitutional environment. (1) America needs to remain the most desirable country in the world, attracting talent and investment with the best physical and institutional environment in the world.(2) But achieving our goals in these areas means we need to begin now.(3) Environmentally, it means that we must do more to protect our natural resources, (4a) enabling us to extend their economic value indefinitely through wise natural resource extraction policies (4b) that protect the beauty and diversity of our American ecosystems - our seacoasts, mountains, wetlands, rain forests, alpine meadows, original timberlands and open prairies. We must balance carefully the short term needs for commercial exploitation with longer term respect for the natural gifts our country has received. (4c) We may also have to assist market-driven adjustments in urban and rural populations, as we did in the 19th Century with the Homestead Act. (5)

Translation & Comments.
1. "Looking foreword, we must look back."
2. "America is #1, and we aim to stay that way."
3. "To stay #1, we need to start now."
4a. Obligatory bow to the environmentalist. But...
4b."We must protect our natural recourses, so that they may be exploited later." But...
4c. "We must balance 'development' with preservation." Red Flag here! "Development" is often a code word for exploitation.
5. "We must help the markets move people from point A to point B." Red Flag here! What the heck he taking about here? This is code speak for something.

Paragraph 2.
Institutionally, our Constitution remains the wellspring of American freedom and prosperity. We must retain a pluralistic democracy, with institutional checks and balances that reflect the will of the majority while safeguarding the rights of the minority.(1) We will seek to maximize the opportunities for private gain, consistent with concern for the public good.(2) And the Clark administration will institute a culture of transparency and accountability, in which we set the world standard for good government.(3) As new areas of concern arise - in the areas of intellectual property (undefined), bioethics (undefined), and other civil areas - we will assure continued access to the courts, as well as to the other branches of government, (4) and a vibrant competitive media that informs our people and enables their effective participation in civic life.(5) And even more importantly, we will assure in meeting the near term challenges of the day - whether they be terrorism (6) or something else - that , we don't compromise the freedoms and rights which are the very essence of the America we are protecting.(7)

Translation & Comments.
1. Bow to Constitution & America
2. Bow to capitalism.
3. "Breath of fresh air." Open government.
4. Tort reform. Red Flag here! Too many unknowns here. What dose he mean by "intellectual property" and "bioethics"? Is this code speak that he will back the music industries law suites asses to the courts, as well as the bio-companies right to sue patent violators?
5. Bow to the conservative news establishment. Red Flag here! Note the use of the word "competitive media." Micelle Powell used similar language to justify further deregulation to allow more media consolidation. Others argue that what is needed is not a "competitive" media, but diverse one.
6. Bow to the war on terrorism.
7. Bow to freedoms.

Paragraph 3.
If we are to remain competitive we will have to do more to develop our "human potential." (Labor market.)(1) To put it in a more familiar way, we should help every American to "be all he or she can be." (2) For some this means only providing a framework of opportunities (3) - for others it means more direct assistance in areas such as education (4), health care (5), and retirement security (6). And these are thirty year challenges - educating young people from preschool until they are at their most productive (7), helping adults transition from job to job and profession to profession during their adult lives (8); promoting physical vigor and good health through public health measures (9), improved diagnostics, preventive health, and continuing health care to extend longevity and productivity to our natural limits (10); and strengthening retirement security, simply because it is right; first for our society to assure that all its members who have contributed throughout their lifetimes are assured a minimal standard of living (11), and secondly to free the American worker and family to concentrate on the challenges of today. Such long term challenges must be addressed right away, with a new urgency. (12)

Translation and comments.
1. "If we are to remain #1, we have to build the labor market."
2. Free jingo – Insert theme music here.
3. "Framework of opportunities?" (I have no idea.)
4. Bow to education
5. Bow to health care.
6. Bow to elderly.
7. Another bow to education.
8. Bow to job retraining. Red Flag here! The problem is not job retraining, but the lack of jobs to be had.
9. War against fat. (Health care.)
10. More health care.
11. Bow to elderly.
12. No meaning. Just a bunch of words strung together.

Paragraph 4.
We have a solid foundation for meeting these challenges in many of the principles and programs already present today. (1) They need not be enumerated here,(2) except to argue for giving them the necessary priorities and resources. (3) We can never ensure that every one has the same education, or health care, or retirement security, nor would we want to do so.(4) But all Americans are better off when we ensure that each American will have fundamental educational skills and access to further educational development throughout their lives; (5) that each American will have access to the diagnostic, preventive and acute health care and medicines needed for productive life, (6) as well as some basic level of financial security in his or her retirement.(7)

1. We already have the programs we need in place. Red Flag here! Is he talking about the current Bush programs?
2. "They need not be enumerated here," They don't? When will you think they need to be enumerated?
3. They need to be fully funded. Red Flag here! Could this be code speak for Bush's "no child left behind" act? Educators are openly critical that the act itself is bad education policy, so fully funding it may do even MORE damage. But it is a classic DLC strategy to ignore the points of the act, and focus strictly on the sound bite, that "Bush isn't even funding his own initiative." The DLC is then tricked into supporting the full measure of the GOP's agenda, without considering the implications of the law itself.
4. "We can't insure equality. Nor would we want to insure equality."
5. Bow to education.
6. Bow to health care.
7. Bow to elderly.

Paragraph 5.
To do this we will have to get the resources and responsibilities right. (1) In the first place, this means allocating responsibilities properly between public and private entities. Neither government nor "the market" are universal tools - each must be used appropriately, whether the issues be in security, education, health or retirement. Then we must reexamine private versus public revenues and expenditures. (2) We need to return to the aims of the 1990's when we sought to balance our federal budget and reduce the long term public debt. (3) Finally, it means properly allocating public responsibilities to regulate, outsource, or operate. (4) This means retaining government regulation where necessary to meet public needs, (5) and balancing the federal government's strengths of standardization (undefined)(6a) and progressive financing (undefined) with greater insights into the particular needs and challenges that State and local authorities bring.(6b)

1. "Put the recourses into the right hands."
2. "Deregulate, or re-regulate?" Looks like he could go either way.
3. Balance the budget and reduce the national debt. Green Flag here! Yes, I have green flags too.
4. Federal vs States rights. (Not sure what he means by this.)
5. "Deregulate, or re-regulate?" Red Flag here! Note that he doesn't seem to include NEW regulations, only retaining current ones.
6a. Standardization only really comes into play when it comes to technical issues. They have to do with cell phones and such, but can also apply to accounting practices.
6b. Much of this depends on what he means by "progressive financing." (I will have to bug the guys down in the economics room so see if this rings any bells, or alarms.)


Paragraph 6. (The home stretch, yay!) Note: This paragraph has some material that requires more in depth explanation. So I will switch formats here.

As we work on education, health care, and retirement security we must also improve the business climate in the United States. This is not simply a matter of reducing interest rates and stimulating demand.

This is where things get ugly. Reducing intrest rates and stimulating demand are concepts of "supply side" economic. And has about as much bases to real economics as creationism has to do with biology. The problem is that Clintion was also a supply sider, just a little smarter about it.

Where Republicans think you grow the economy through tax cuts and deficit spending, Clinton assumed you do this by balancing the budget and raining in spending. And to some extent, Clinton was right. Both of these things freed up capital for investment that would otherwise be soaked up by the government deficit.

What we did not know at the time was this gave rise to a bubble economy. A massive one. This freed up capital was mostly dumped into the stock market, and achieved the same effect as Bush dumping vast sums of money into the markets in the form of tax cuts and no-bid contracts. The economic foundation continued to erode, while the market inflated beyond wild expectations.

Clinton made predictions that his polices would produce positive changes, and they did, but in each case, the changes in the "economy" far exceeded his predictions. Clinton then rushed to press with these numbers, and crowed about how his economic plan was far better than what he estimated, but in scientific circles, such errors were never fully explained until recently. That Clintion's higher than expected number, was the inflation of the market place taking place.

Every year, this economy must create more than a million new jobs, just to maintain the same levels of employment, and to reduce unemployment to the levels achieved in the Clinton Administration, we must do much more immediately.

As I noted above, simply bringing the budget into balance by itself causes problems. If it weren't for the market bubble, all of that extra cash would most likely have deflated the economy. (The opposite of inflation.) And subsequent to the collapse of the market bubble saw some impressive deflation pressures starting to mount. Thank God Bush was there to soak up every thing through new deficit spending, putting us right back where we were before, back into the frying pan.

This is in part a matter of smoothing the business cycle, with traditional monetary and fiscal tools,

No it isn't. What is needed is a radical restructuring of American fiscal & economic policies. And of all the ideas I have seen floated to do this have always involved painful and potentially catastrophic correction to the US economy.

You see, that national debt is the equivalent of printing trillions of dollars in extra bills. And when you just print extra money, you have inflation. Money that is already in circulation, but only balanced out by the debt held by the government, and that leads to deflation. So currently, we are controlling inflation by exposing the economy with equal forces of deflation.

Think of it like this. Imagine a cliff. And over the side of this cliff is a giant bucket. At the top of the cliff is a tracker trying to pull the bucket up. But as the trackers wheals spin, it kicks dirt off the hill and into the bucket, making it heavier.

The bucket represents the debt, and the pulling power of the tractor represents the budget deficit. The faster you turn the wheals, the faster you fill the bucket. Of course meaning that the more money you spend from the budget deficit, the faster the debt will grow.

In steps the "traditional monetary and fiscal tools," which represents the cable connecting the two. As the debt grows, you need a stronger cable or "better fiscal tools needed to hide the debt." We call this Enron-onomics in the Economics room.

but as we improve communications and empower more international trade and finance, firms will naturally shift production and services to areas where the costs are lower.

Big Red Flag here!

Improved communication technologies is not the cause of jobs moving overseas. This is supply sider's rhetoric that comes strait out of the Carl Rove Talking points, care of the DLC. Jobs are moving overseas because corporations are exploiting slave labor in third world countries. Technology has nothing to do with it.

Clark has one step closer to making my list.

In the near term we should aim to create in America the best business environment in the world - using a variety of positive incentives (cough - bail outs, subsidies, and tax brakes) to keep American jobs and businesses here, attract business from abroad, and to encourage the creation of new jobs, principally through the efforts of small business.

Which is exactly what Bush is trying to do, only he is doing so through defect spending and tax cuts to the wealthy. Sounds like Clark is a supply sider as well, only trying to do trucker down through government subsidies and incentives target towards business.

These are not new concerns, but they must be addressed and resourced with a new urgency in facing the increasing challenges of technology and free trade. And labor must assist, promoting the attitudes, skills, education and labor mobility to enable long overdue hikes in the minimum wage in this country.

Translation: The unions need to help out with retraining, and THEN we will talk about raising the minimum wage.
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I will now turn over the floor to the Clark Cluckers with their inevitable charges of a smear campaign, and how I am really a secret CIA agent sent by Carl Rove, to prop up the Dean camp. :tinfoilhat: Or, something like that.