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.
Free speech is no longer a right. Stand alongside the route of a presidential cavalcade with a humble protest sign, and the Secret Service or local law enforcement will hale you off to some remote cage, labeled “Designated protest area.” Seek to exercise your right to dispense money for a campaign advertisement or to support a candidate, and you will at once fall under the sanction of McCain/Feingold, otherwise known as the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002.
In the case of public expressions of protest, we may expect particular diligence by the Secret Service and other agencies in the Obama years; while, perhaps, Obama’s reneging on a campaign promise to accept only public financing has stopped campaign finance reform in its tracks. Liberals, joyously eyeing Obama’s amazing $150 million haul in his final weeks, have preserved a tactful silence on this topic, after years of squawking about the power of the corporate dollar to pollute democracy’s proceedings.
Worse than in the darkest days of the ’50s, when Americans could have their passports revoked by fiat of the State Department, citizens and legal residents no longer have the right to travel freely even inside the nation’s borders. Appearance on any of the innumerable watch lists maintained by government agencies means inability to get on a plane and probably even Amtrak, whose unmolested passengers already risk being stranded sine die in some remote siding in the southwestern deserts for weeks on end.
Americans no longer have the right to vote, even if of appropriate age. The Indiana statute okayed by the Supreme Court requires under Indiana’s voter ID law, that persons lacking “proper” ID can only make a provisional vote, with a bureaucratic apparatus of subsequent verification. In some states, anyone carrying a felony conviction faces a lifetime ban on the right to vote.
Fourth Amendment protections have gone steadily downhill. Warrantless wiretappers had a field day, and Congress re-affirmed their activities in the FISA bill, for which Obama voted, in a turn around from previous pledges. Vice-President-elect, Joe Biden, can claim a significant role here since he has been an ardent prosecutor of the war on drugs, used since the Harrison Act of 1914 (and even before then with the variable penalties attaching to opium, as used by middle-class whites or Chinese) to enhance the right of police to enter, terrorize and prosecute at will. Indeed, the war on drugs, revived by President Nixon and pursued vigorously by all subsequent administrations, has been as powerful a rationale for tearing up the Constitution as the ensuing war on terror. It’s like that with all wars. Not far from where I live in northern California, the war on drugs was the excuse for serious inroads in the early 1990s into the Posse Comitatus statutory inhibition on use of the US military in domestic law enforcement—another constitutional disaster of the Bush years.
In the past eight years, Bush Jr. has ravaged the Fourth Amendment with steadfast diligence, starting with his insistence that he could issue arrest warrants if there was reason to believe a non-citizen was suspected of implication in terrorist activity. Seized under this pretext and held within America’s borders or in some secret prison overseas, the captive had no recourse to a court of law. Simultaneously, the “probable cause” standard, theoretically disciplining the state’s innate propensity to search and to seize, has been systematically abused, as has the FBI’s delirious use of the “material witness” statute to arrest and hold their suspects. Good-bye, habeas corpus.
Federalism and the rights of states have been relentlessly eroded, often amidst liberal cheers at such excrescences as the No Child Left Behind law. Government’s power to seize property under the canons of “eminent domain” received particularly sinister buttress by the US Supreme Court. Have there been any bright patches in the gloom in Bush time? I salute one: the vindication of the Second Amendment in the Supreme Court’s majority decision, vigorously written by Justice Scalia. I’ve no need to tell you what liberals and leftists thought of that one.
Part 3
2009
January 9
Madoffgate is proof of the old rule: the more elegant the tailoring, the more handsomely silvered the distinguished locks, the more innocently rubicund the visage, the more likely the hand covertly fishing for one’s wallet.
Uncle Sam is the biggest Ponzi operator of all. Bernie had to constantly replenish his fund with new deposits; so does Uncle Sam, wheedling more money out of the Chinese, the Indians, the Japanese, and poor Third World nations forced to pony up at the point of a gun. But in the end Uncle Sam has one huge asset denied Madoff, who seems to have stopped short of the straightforward forgery allegedly practiced by Marc Dreier, the Manhattan lawyer arrested in Canada for trying to sell nonexistent bonds to the tune of $380 million. Uncle Sam has the printing press to run off the necessary dollars. He’s certainly going to need lots of fresh new bills. You can set your clock now for the alarms scheduled to go off all the way through Obama-time: credit card debt, commercial real-estate implosion, option-ARM financing.
Maybe Madoff, trolling for suckers in the Palm Beach Country Club and the Jewish charitable foundations, will become the sacrificial symbol of Wall Street thievery, sent off to the penitentiary in lieu of the real big-timers.
January 23
So many ghosts crowded the inauguration dais that it’s not surprising Chief Justice Roberts flubbed his lines and had to be corrected by the man he was swearing in. Over there on the right! That jowly fellow with the five o’clock shadow and the long upsweeping nose. It’s Richard Nixon on January 20, 1973. He’d swept every state in the union in November’s election, except for Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. Listen to him: “As we meet here today, we stand on the threshold of a new era of peace in the world.” Yet American B-52s were still bombing Cambodia, as they had virtually throughout his administration. One and a half years later he resigned, rather than face impeachment.
Why look! Nixon’s smiling. He’s just heard Obama call for “a new era of responsibility.” He’s remembering more lines from his second inaugural in ’73: “A person can be expected to act responsibly only if he has responsibility. This is human nature. So let us encourage individuals at home and nations abroad to do more for themselves, to decide more for themselves.”
Obama offered a mild version of blood-sweat-and-tears. “We understand that greatness is never a given,” he said. “It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted—for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of
riches and fame.” I hope we don’t get too much sermonizing about seeking the pleasures of riches. The word “responsibility” from those set in authority over us usually means compulsory belt-tightening and onslaughts on Social Security and Medicare, which Obama more or less promised the Washington Post five days before the inauguration.
Each time a new President strides forth, flourishing his inaugural menu of change, one feels the same gloom at these quadrennial displays of leader-lust. Eight years of complaining about George Bush’s arrogation of unconstitutional powers under the bizarre doctrine of the “unitary executive” and here we have the national audience enthusiastically applauding yet another incoming President rattling off the I-will-do’s as though there was no US Congress and he was Augustus Caesar.
The founders, whom Obama invoked in his opening line, produced a Constitution that gives the President, to quote Dana Nelson’s useful new book Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People, “only a thin framework of explicit powers that belong solely to his office: for instance, the power to grant reprieve and pardons, and to fill any government vacancies during any Senate recess. His other enumerated powers are either shared … or secretarial and advisory.” Enough of the Commander in Chief! All we need is a decent pardoner and a good secretary.
But credit where credit is due. On his second day in the White House Jimmy Carter amnestied Vietnam draft-dodgers and war resisters. On his second day Obama said Guantanamo and the CIA’s secret prisons must close within the year and said that his administration will be on the side of those seeking to end government secrecy rather than those wanting to enforce it.
February 1
There’s been no exciting surprise or originality in Obama’s opening engagements with the reeling economy. His team is flush with economists and bankers who helped blaze the path to ruin. He’s been selling his $819 billion stimulus program on the Hill, with all the actors playing their allotted roles and many a cheering Democrat not entirely confident that the House Republicans may not have had a point when, unanimously, they voted “No” on the package
A Colossal Wreck Page 46
