No Point Complaining About Obama if We Don't Elect a Republican Congress
There is no point complaining about Obama and his Administration unless we are going to elect a Republican Congress this year.
It's obvious by now that not only does Obama not take the hint that he is overstepping his Constitutional authority, but that he actually revels in doing so, because he sees the Constitutional limits on his office as a ( Read more... )
It's obvious by now that not only does Obama not take the hint that he is overstepping his Constitutional authority, but that he actually revels in doing so, because he sees the Constitutional limits on his office as a ( Read more... )
Then who is, and what prevents the people in the offices from "determining the course," given that they are the ones actually authorized to issue lawful orders regarding that course? Yes, I know about the Evil Faceless Bureaurcats, but almost all the important agencies are Executive Branch, and the laws under which they operate are passed by the Legislative Branch and interprted by the Judiciary.
In particular, the President has hire, fire and/or assignment power over every single freaking person in the Executive Branch agencies: if Mr. Big Influential IRS or CIA executive does something the President doesn't like, that person may well find himself supervising agency functions in Little America, Antarctica. The claim that the President "really" has no control over them is useful FOR THE PRESIDENT when he's ordered them to do something illegal and wants to deny responsibility. But it's an obvious lie.
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Second is "big business". Yes, I am a capitalist. However, even Ayn Rand made massively clear that business interests can, in a corrupt system, purchase regulation to benefit themselves. And that when they do that, they obtain unsettling power disturbingly quickly. This has already happened. Crony capitalism is *everyone's* boogeyman, and is in full swing.
Third is the bureaucracy you mentioned. the institution itself, after a certain point, becomes a horrendous juggernaut.
Where does the sitting president fit in this? Well, as a long term, third order influence. In the case of Obama, one making all the very real problems much much worse.
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This is impossible by definition. "Primacy" means to be "primay, pre-eminent or most important." What's more, each of what you then name as an "organization" is so nebulous as to be incapable of acting in unison, let alone coordinating their actions as a trio. To wit:
First is "big labor". Public sector unions and other large-scale collectives have obtained almost dictatorial capabilities in many regions and control over many congress-critters.
There are many different unions, with many different objectives, and even through the AFL-CIO they are not really that well co-ordinated. However, they are better co-ordinated than is
... big business ..., which is comprised of literally thousands of different firms, which lack even as weak a co-ordinating mechanism as the AFL-CIO. Finally.
... bureaucracy ..., which is a nicely unitary term that covers the fact that you are talking about dozens of different agencies whose co-ordination is through the President himself.
The President is not a "long term, third order influence." Actually, he's a short to medium term influence, because he only serves 4-8 years at a time, and he's the primary decision-maker in the system, because he's the one who sets overall governmental policy.
There is no way for three disunited groups of agencies to set overall anything. The most they can do is create inertia in the system, because they pull AGAINST each other.
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It's hard enough if it's the President (who can actually command Big Bureaucracy, and exercise significant influence on Big Labor and Big Business, wants policy "H." It's downright impossible if it's just a subset of the leaders of those hundreds and hundreds of agencies who wants "H," while the President wants contradictory policy "I."
It's a general rule of politics that unity beats disunity. The most unified force in the American political system is the President, because he is one individual. When one adds that he can outright fire or reassign any individual in "Big Bureaucracy" and greatly aid or hinder any agency in "Big Business" or "Big Labor," he has an insuperable advantage, as numerous Presidents have demonstrated.
Intelligence does not mean instant agreement on a common goal, especially when many of the agencies in those three broad groupings are working at cross-purposes. Given disagreement on the goal, and the inability for any one individual in the system other than the President to meaningfully enforce his will on the others, only the most pitifully inept and lazy President fails to stay in charge.
In fact, it's worse than I said. Of the three groups of agencies you describe, the only one with significant power is Big Bureaucracy, and it is the one whose leaders serve at the will of the President and Congress.
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And you're assuming that communications are very poor between, say, "big labor" and "big bureaucracy". When in reality, their interests allign remarkable well.
Big labor wants more union dues. They therefore lobby for more areas of economic activity to be administered by big bureaucracy. Big bureaucracy, in turn, lobbies for the new agency to be a union shop. Conflict resolved.
You're simply wrong about the power balance. Big labor wields HUGE power, in the form of election funding. Public sector labor unions are a decisive factor in election funding. As are the others.
The president has, within his power, only the ability to arbitrate between the rather tightly aligned interests of the agencies I described. It's not so much a conspiracy, as a basic understanding of the strings of power.
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Indeed, in the alternate timeline where one man owned Big Labor and another man owned Big Business and a third man (who was not the President) ran Big Bureaucracy, the President's powers would be severely limited. In our time line there are hundreds of major labor unions loosely coordinated through the AFL-CIO, hundreds of major corporations not even loosely coordinated through dozens of industrial associations, and a Federal bureaucracy coordinated only by that very same President!
And you're assuming that communications are very poor between, say, "big labor" and "big bureaucracy". When in reality, their interests allign remarkable well.
It's not a matter of "communications." It's that two of the three entities you think you have created merely by calling themselves are categories rather than entities. There is no Big Labor run by one man who can talk to Big Business run by one man. Furthermore the only one man who coordinates Big Bureaucracy is the President -- beneath him there are dozens of major and hundreds of minor department and agency heads.
You're simply wrong about the power balance. Big labor wields HUGE power, in the form of election funding.
"Election funding" is not "power." It is wealth, used to buy influence, which in turn can affect the decisions of those who hold the power. The intermediate steps are crucial, and are on what most actual politics turnes.
The president has, within his power, only the ability to arbitrate between the rather tightly aligned interests of the agencies I described.
Truly that would be pathetic, were it not for the fact that in reality he can hire or fire the agency chiefs, set policy and punish those who fail to implement it, in the only organization which is actually united as you describe, the Federal Government -- and that the other two "agencies," Big Business and Big Labor, have absolutely no direct power (only wealth) and are internally disunited.
You are, ironically, making the exact same categorical error committed by Karl Marx when he defined "social classes" and then imagined that his act of definition created real entities that could then act in unison. You've just defined different classes.
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Big business has the power to alter the trade balance, employment profile, and economic status of the nation. Big business, in turn is also led by a small number of individuals. Again, 10 individuals have an inordinate amount of sway here. And those 10 DO golf with the 10 that control big labor.
"Big bureaucracy" is more nebulous. It doesn't exist in the same way as the others granted. It isn't led, or controlled by anyone. It's more like a glacier or force of nature than a body politic. But it does mean that anything that tries to alter or reduce it involves incredible energy expenditure, will be incredibly unpopular (mostly because big labor has a strong vested interest in expanding big bureaucracy, and big business a weaker, but still positive, interest).
In reality, they ARE coordinated. Big labor wants more regulations and controls, so that they can employ people who work in big bureaucracy to implement them. Big business wants more regulations and controls to prevent competition. Big bureaucracy wants more regulations, so that they can expand their feifdoms and powers.
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The problem is that you are here conflating influence and wealth with power. If, say, John Bigman, the Chairman of the Board of Mega Corp, Inc. wants Bill Smallerman, the CEO of Bigco, to cooperate with some planned policy, he has to persuade Smallerman that it's in his interests, because Bigman doesn't have any direct means of enforcement as in "send over the death squad," he instead must bribe or threaten to break business ties with Smallerman. Which means that the policy has to cost Smallerman less than the anticipated costs of non-cooperation.
Taking your example of Big Business "power" (actually, wealth in each case)
Big business has the power to alter the trade balance, employment profile, and economic status of the nation.
To "alter the trade balance" means it can move producing or service facilities in or out of the country. If Bigman tells Smallerman "move your factory to Scuzzistan," then presumably if he has to tell him this it was something Smallerman wouldn't already have done. Smallerman had reasons for not doing it before, reasons that had to do with the anticipated costs of production in Scuzzistan as opposed to Minnesota. Bigman must overcome Smallerman's original reason for not doing this by offering him some incentive, or threatening to withdraw some benefit that was previously being provided.
This costs Bigman. He can't just wave his magic Wand O'Executiveness and have it done, he has to divert some of his resources to accomplishing this end.
The same thing goes even more so with "employment profile." Suppose that Bigman tells Smallerman "Hire more people" or "Fire people" or (worse) just what sort of people to hire or fire. Smallerman was presumably already trying to run his firm at the microeconomic sweet spot of personnel hires. Hiring employees he doesn't need, or firing ones he does need, will cost Smallerman. If Smallerman is to remain profitable, he needs an incentive to do so. In this case, he needs a continuing incentive to do so.
What's more, this isn't an easy thing for Bigman to monitor in terms of compliance, especially if it's a matter of employment profile. Does Bigman have a legion of corporate spies watching the internal details of every smaller firm? If he does, how does he have the profit to, you know, run his actual business?
Mr. Unionboss has it a little easier than Bigman, because there's an actual formal structure under which unions can cooperate. However, even though unions are linked to organized crime and are themselves mildly criminal organization, there's a limit to what they can do in terms of enforcement when other unions don't want to cooperate with them. They don't have the kind of power, even criminal power, needed to flat-out massacre rival unions, or even rival union leaderships, and if they tried they would bring down dangerous amounts of police and Federal heat on their heads. Labor's wealth is much more important than its power, a point often missed because it goes against the conclusions of Marxist theory.
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What you see with "big bureaucracy", "big business" and "big labor" are a harmony of interests -- in some cases. This is not the same as the coordination achieved by actual unitary leadership, because it is not as agile. That doesn't make them more powerful than the actual heads of the Federal government, though, because the President and Congress have power over the bureaucracy, labor has only some power, and business has almost no power at all.
If you're astonished at that last statement, it's because you're committing the common error of conflating wealth, influence and power -- a conflation originally invented by Karl Marx because it was necessary to make his dumb theories work. When you learn to stop doing that, you'll find the political world much more comprehensible.
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You're both right and wrong inre the power of big business. In a capitalist country, you'd be right. We don't live in one. Instead, we live in a country where money and influence can be and frequently are, directly applied through government force to violently coerce smallerman to do what bigman wants.
What I meant about moving production is:
Bigman talks to senator projobs. He explains that he is in negotiations to close his plant in senator projobs's jurisdiction IF senator projobs votes against the $200,000 permitting process that is preventing smallerman from opening his factory. Senator projobs knows that that plant is the lifeblood of his community, so he votes for the permit fee, and smallerman never gets to build his plant. Bigman has wielded power and it cost him *nothing*.
Yes, the varied interests are... varied interests, and they're not very agile, but they are, between them, incredibly POWERFUL. Particularly when their interests align.
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No, Projobs has wielded "power." Bigman has weilded wealth and influence. If Bigman had the power, he never would have had to bother to talk to Projobs in the first place.
These are more than terminological issues. If Senator Projobs strongly disagreed with Bigman's proposition, all Bigman could do is support his opposition and hope for a more agreeable successor. Bigman can hurt Projobs only by shifting his financial support; Projobs can hurt Bigman (or Smallerman) directly by legislation.
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