A Colossal Wreck (60 page)

This year economic crisis demanded an early real election, designed to fend off the admittedly very remote possibility—Robert Rubin is Obama’s close economic advisor—that Barack Obama, victorious in
the November 4 election, might arrive in power, claim a reformer’s mandate, and seek to prize loose the stranglehold of Wall Street financiers on the economy.

In this real election, dissent dwindled rapidly in the press as the Accredited Commentariat, from George Will on the right to Paul Krugman in the center, declared the bailout odious but necessary. The rebellion of the House Republicans was an unexpected bump in the road and they were stigmatized as “irresponsible” along with the ninety-five Democrats who joined them.

Paulson’s draft bill was originally three pages long, a terse classic in the annals of coup d’états, seeking to render the bailout safe from the sanction of any elected body or US court. As it passed to the Senate it swelled to over 700 pages, most of them recording bribes to legislators. The Senate—Obama, Biden, and McCain in the vanguard—duly voted Aye.

At this point the last, best weapon of the Real Electioneers sidled onto the stage. On October 2, Rep. Brad Sherman, a California Democrat and opponent of the bailout, stated in the House that “there would be martial law in America if we voted no.” By a pleasing coincidence amid these dramatic events, the
Army Times
had reported on September 30 that the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team, lately in Iraq, would be deployed on October 1 on US soil under the day-to-day control of US Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command. This new mission, wrote the
Times
’ Gina Cavallaro, marks “the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom.”

As the Senate voted, Obama once again affirmed publicly that he accepted the verdict of the real election. He told reporters in Clearwater, Florida, last Wednesday that “issues like bankruptcy reform, which are very important to Democrats, is [sic] probably something that we shouldn’t try to do in this piece of legislation.” In addition, he said that his own proposed economic stimulus program “is not necessarily something that we should have in this package.”

But hold! you cry. Obama may enter office with a secret plan. Even FDR campaigned in 1932 for a balanced budget. And anyway, Obama and Biden will have saved us from Sarah Palin, Alaska’s answer to
Eva Peron! My friends, Palin is a distraction from the uncomfortable truth. After the October coup, the November ballot is merely a coda.

October 24

Every politician, good or bad, is an ambitious opportunist. But beneath this topsoil, the ones who make a constructive dent on history have some bedrock of consistency, of fidelity to some central idea. In Obama’s case, this “idea” is the ultimate distillation of identity politics: the idea of his blackness. Those who claim that if he were white he would be cantering effortlessly into the White House do not understand that without his most salient physical characteristic Obama would be seen as a second-tier Senator with unimpressive credentials.

As a political organizer of his own advancement, Obama is a wonder. But I have yet to identify a single uplifting intention to which he has remained constant if it has presented the slightest risk to his advancement. Summoning all the optimism at my disposal, I suppose we could say he has not yet had occasion to offend two important constituencies and adjust his relatively decent stances on immigration and labor-law reform. Public funding of his campaign? A commitment made becomes a commitment betrayed, just as on warrantless eavesdropping. His campaign treasury is now a vast hog-swallow that, if it had been amassed by a Republican, would be the topic of thunderous liberal complaint.

In substantive terms Obama’s run has been the negation of almost every decent progressive principle, a negation achieved with scarcely a bleat of protest from the progressives seeking to hold him to account. The Michael Moores stay silent. Abroad, Obama stands for imperial renaissance. He has groveled before the Israel lobby and pandered to the sourest reflexes of the cold war era. At home he has crooked the knee to bankers and Wall Street, to the oil companies, the coal companies, the nuclear lobby, the big agricultural combines. He is even more popular with Pentagon contractors than McCain, and has been the most popular of the candidates with K Street lobbyists. He has been fearless in offending progressives, constant in appeasing the powerful.

So no, this is not an exciting or liberating moment in America’s politics such as was possible after the Bush years. If you want a memento of what could be exciting, I suggest you go to the website of the Nader-Gonzalez campaign and read its platform, particularly on popular participation and initiative. Or read the portions of Libertarian Bob Barr’s platform on foreign policy and constitutional rights. The standard these days for what the left finds tolerable is awfully low. The more the left holds its tongue, the lower the standard will go.

October 30

Over the past two months the entire intellectual superstructure of the “conservative revolution” has collapsed, with conclusive and absolute finality, nicely illustrated by the ludicrous invective lobbed by McCain at Obama. A Republican Treasury Secretary from Goldman Sachs bails out the banks and all McCain and the right-wing talk-show hosts can do is howl that the rather conservative and economically right-centrist Obama is a “socialist.”

Nervous liberals are perennially terrified that the Brownshirts will soon be marching down Main Street. Now they worry that economic depression will spark to life a right-wing populist counterattack, headed by Sarah Palin who is already cutting herself loose from McCain and setting herself up as the Jeanne d’Arc of Republican Renaissance in the next four years.

On her current form, she’s not up to it. She’s just not smart enough to get beyond canned one-liners to the rubes. And how much of a constituency will she really have, beyond the born-agains? In the late 1960s Nixon’s speechwriters had the easier task of delighting a solidly confident blue-collar constituency, many of them with good union jobs, with their sallies against pointyhead professors, liberal judges, and unwashed hippy scum. That constituency is long gone, along with the jobs.

The best the Republicans can do at the moment is cling to the rigging, and then hope that President Obama will stick to his campaign promises, launch a wider war in Afghanistan and maybe Iran,
sacrifice all his domestic pledges on the altar of imperial maintenance overseas, and see his presidency wither and die, just as Lyndon Johnson did.

When the Republicans have pulled themselves together they’ll muster up some new demagogue of the right, to run a right-wing populist campaign of the sort Palin has been too dumb to mount. To counter this, what the Democrats should do, but won’t, is run a series of show-trial Senate hearings, with power of subpoena, into the economic meltdown. Get the Wall Street villains up there in the public eye, day after day, and feed with torrents of disgusting facts the huge public appetite for retribution.

November 4

The First 100 Days—Looking back over the record since FDR, the pattern is discernible: declare war on something, or at least kill people; or put a woman in the cabinet.

FDR: Day 1, declares war on fear; nominates Frances Perkins to be Secretary of Labor (the best we ever had).

Truman: Day 5, calls for Unconditional Surrender of Axis powers; Day 113, drops A-bomb on Hiroshima.

Eisenhower: Day 23, refuses clemency to the Rosenbergs; Day 72, appoints Oveta Culp Hobby as head of HEW.

JFK: Day 41, announces Peace Corps and thousands of young Americans duly learn to sit cross-legged on the ground, sowing seeds for bankruptcy of Medicare when knee replacements kick in forty years later. Day 88, launches Bay of Pigs attack on Cuba.

LBJ: Day 8, creates a mass employment program known as the Warren Commission. Within hours tens of thousands of Americans are hard at work, challenging the Commission’s proceedings and drawing maps of Dealey Plaza.

Nixon: Day 57, launches secret bombing of Cambodia.

Ford: Day 4, declares war on inflation, “public enemy number one.”

Carter: Day 2, pardons Vietnam draft resisters; Day 89, announces National Energy Plan, raising domestic coal production to reduce dependency on foreign oil. Yes, President Obama, we have been here before. Better not start talking about “malaise.”

Reagan: Day 66, declares war on corruption and inefficiency in government. This is going too far. Four days later Hinckley tries to kill him.

Bush Sr.: Day 38, goes live on Chinese TV; Day 47, bombs Baghdad.

Clinton: Day 3, allows clinics to offer abortion counseling and abortions; Day 6, appoints Hillary head of his Health Reform task force.

Bush Jr.: Day 3, ends funding of national centers offering abortion counseling and abortions; Day 40, declares big tax cuts for the rich.

November 28

Before Thanksgiving I drove down I-26 and then I-95 from Campobello, in the northwest corner of South Carolina, where a friend of mine owns a small trailer park. By the late summer, as local factories started closing, long-term tenants said goodbye and went on the road in search of work. The vacant trailers were soon filled by families walking away from mountains of mortgage debt and foreclosed homes. They live on budgets so tight my friend says that they can just make the $500 monthly rental, but $550 would put them under.

He pointed to one where an older man had just arrived from Michigan, 650 miles north up Interstate 75, heart of the US auto industry and already in economic ruins long before the major auto companies went begging for bailouts in Washington, DC, in the last couple of weeks. States in the industrial heartlands, like Michigan or Ohio, have been reeling for years as the factory owners redeployed to China, but others like New York or California or Washington and Oregon in the Pacific Northwest now face budgetary implosion and cuts in services of up to 25 percent.

This is the first time since I came to America in 1972 that I’ve heard almost every day of well-off people sounding somewhat distraught at the money they’ve lost. From this richer crowd one hears daily stories of portfolios worth half or less of their value three and four months ago, of people losing high salary jobs, often only months shy of long-scheduled retirement on full benefits.

Amid the plunge in the nation’s economic fortunes, as in any hospital ward, gloom alternates with determined good cheer. Flying across the country last week I could hear snatches of optimism in airport lounges from the TV sets blaring CNN news bulletins. The market “may have hit bottom.” The bounce back after the Citibank bailout was “the quickest two-day climb” up the graphs since the recovery from the crash of ’87.

Walking down Las Vegas Boulevard, I watched five huge cranes just south of the Bellagio and Caesar’s Palace busy servicing an enormous new hotel-casino complex about halfway to completion. The sponsoring party here is MGM Mirage, the owner of Bellagio, New York-New York and MGM Grand and other properties, and the project is the sixty-eight-acre “CityCenter,” scheduled to include more than 6,000 condo and hotel rooms, 165,000 square feet of casino space, and its own power plant based around a sixty-story casino and hotel. Its $7.4 billion budget schedules it to be the single most expensive privately funded project ever in the Western Hemisphere. All told, in Las Vegas right now, there are seven major projects budgeted at a total of $23 billion.

It’s hard to tell whether these huge gambles are being staked on economic quicksand. The local housing market certainly has been soft. The man at Dollar Car Rental, an Hispanic fellow, said he’d come to Las Vegas because he couldn’t afford the $400,000 or so a decent house in Los Angeles would have cost him. The house in Las Vegas he’d just bought had been advertised at $240,000 and he just signed on the dotted line for $165,000. He was happy.

December 2

Growing up in Ireland and Britain, I gazed with envy at the United States, with its constitutional protections and its Bill of Rights, contrasting with the vast ad hoc tapestry of Britain’s repressive laws and “emergency” statutes piled up through the centuries, as successive regimes from the Plantagenet and Tudor periods onwards went about the state’s business of enforcing the enclosures, hanging or transporting strikers, criminalizing disrespectful speech, and, of course, abolishing the right to carry even something so innocuous as a penknife.

Instructed by centuries of British occupation, my native Ireland, I have to say, took a slightly more relaxed attitude. My father once asked an Irish minister of justice, back in the 1960s, about the prodigious size and detail of the Irish statute book. “Ah, Claud,” said the minister equably, “our laws are mainly for guidance.”

We are thankfully near the exit door from the Bush years, after enduring appalling assaults on freedom, built on the sound foundation of kindred assaults in Clinton’s time—perhaps most memorably expressed in the screams of parents and children fried by US government forces in the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, and in Bill Clinton’s flouting of all constitutional “war powers” inhibitions on his executive decision to wage war and order his commanders to rain bombs on the civilian population of the former Yugoslavia.

Bush has forged resolutely along the path, diligently blazed by Clinton, in asserting uninhibited executive power in the ability to wage war, seize, confine, and torture at will, breaching constitutional laws and international treaties and covenants, concerning treatment of combatants. The Patriot Act took bits of the Justice Department’s wish list left over from Clinton’s Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which trashed habeas corpus protections.

The outrages perpetrated on habeas corpus have been innumerable, some of them relatively unpublicized. Take the case of people convicted of sexual felonies, such as molestation of children. Convicted and imprisoned, they reach the end of their stipulated terms and then find that they now face continued imprisonment without any
specified terminus, under the rubric of “civil confinement,” as fierce as any
letter de cachet
in France’s
ancien régime
.