Politics

OBAMA SAVES THE ECONOMY (and now horrified rank and file Republicans are his greatest asset) (July 31,2009)

In September most everyone was preparing for the crash of '27 all over again. Horrified by the villains of Wall Street, President George W. Bush started pumping them cash in unpredented quantities to give them a chance to....not make good, but get back on their Guccis. I was horrified, but my long-since chosen candidate Obama and John McCain (whom I also like) both backed him up on it.

(to be fair, not all Republicans did. Newt Gringrich wrote a scathing attack that deserved more consideration than it got, kind of, and deserves more consideration here....but first let me note that it reminds me of Jack Kemp's brilliant assessment of the Rodney King riots in which he so articulately spoke in terms of hopelessness, cycles of poverty, and milieus of despair...he totally had it nailed until he concluded that "the only way to correct this is by cutting the capital gains tax." In a similar vein Newt masterminded the unnecessary and sinful corporate greed, irresponsibility and largesse that had led to the immediate concern and concluded....no, I swear, that the way to the right the thing was through "abolition of the capital gains tax" so that corporations could "earn" more.)

So President Obama inherited a situation in which his Republican predecessor had allowed the economy to go to, almost literally, hell. He inherited an approach against which I harbor a particularly dark form of ambivalence, but he's made it work. Kind of.

No one's freaking out, as much, anymore. Consumer interest isn't so limp. Wall Street's getting a hard-on for the future. One would think, as champions of "trickle down" Reaganomics from what they perceive as time immemoral, no one would be happier about this than rank and file Republicans. But they're not, and that's a good thing, as I'm about to explain after this next digression.

As long-time readers of my analyses are aware, the Bush disaster (really the Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush disaster) was not readily amenable to any "bottom-up" solution....January was a time for prudence rather than revolution...

And so that's what President Obama did. He worked on strengthening the existing structures of the American economy, largely reflections of the Reagan & caretakers revolution. He did so in a manner only somewhat different than Bush junior, but at least demanding corporate accountability (rather than just throwing big bags of cash to the greedy and at fault) and...low and behold in a mere six months the terrible shadow has passed! That is to say that the darkest moment has passed...

Our jobs are safer and we've been bilked again! Of course most of the alternatives offered by the Reagan/Bushes/Clinton fiaso were a great deal worse, and Congress would never have approved most of the better ones. No jobs: if the corporate elite had tucked their bags and assets and intricate knowledge of the corrupt system they rule and headed to the border we could have really been screwed. Yeah, we're lucky to get out of it this well, and the truth of that is a reflection on how bad September, and everything over the past 30 years leading to it, really was, and where it was inevitably headed.

Now the Republican rank and file, ripped off for decades by their heroes and rather unaccustomed to applauding Democrats at all, and particularly African-Americans (other than maybe Cosby and the local cornerbacks)....and generally disinclined to change their ways in any manner recognizeable to normal humans...

The Republican Faithful, the ones who got conned by Reagan and continued to be conned by both Bushes, (see the writings of the Republican economist Kevin Jarvis on the class war of the past 30 years) and basically hated Clinton even though the pursued esentially the same policies....are now rabid at Obama.

Why? This is where it gets good. This will be a pivotal moment in 21 st Century American history if the Republican masses stay their course, which history suggests that they will (few voting blocs have ever demonstrated such a lack of inclination to change direction). Not a bunch of shrinking violent wallflowers or anything....not a herd easy to divert...

They HATE the bailouts. The bailouts that were necessitated by the policies established by Reagan and continued through Bush. I'm not saying that the crisis would have occurred had Reagan been awake for seven terms (though I suspect it would have been much, much worse), I'm just saying that no one including Clinton ever tried to slow down the locomotive, whereas conceivably Reagan might have. So love him if you have to, it didn't happen on his watch.

But if Republican main street can't be conned again, before the '12 primaries, into something as obviously against their own interests as Reagan's (at least) re-election was....we're going to see Republican candidates fighting for space on a spectacularly populist, and traditionally conservative (rather than irrationally and irresponsibly promoting international corporatism), Republican platform for the first time since....Goldwater or Eisenhower. In other words they'll still be going on about school prayer and abortion, but they will have cut the crap about tax breaks and welfare for people making ten times as much as they do.

This clearly plays into Obama's hands, assuming he can best the surviving lout. It would give him the mandate that he was denied in the '08 election. The clear mandate to make things better for the most of us at the expense of the few whom have fed off us like leeches for 30 years. It would give him the opportunity to change the culture of corporate greed (by at least making them feed off of each other, instead of us), just like he promised on the campaign trail, most articulately in Wisconsin.

If Obama and the Republican candidate fight out a general election by arguing who is going to give the least of our money away to the corporations most used to getting it, there aren't going to be a lot of compelling arguments left for any lobbyist trying to dip into the public trough in order to promote Big Macs in Shanghai.

Main Street has become-very belatedly but at last-suspicious and resentful of Wall Street. Defensive against the moneychangers. People may still trust banks to hold their money, but they're not inclined to pay higher taxes in order to continue the kind of wild and self-serving speculation that we've suffered from for nearly 30 years. I would suggest opening by creating two nationalized banks in response to newfound Republican concerns over economic elitism: one to be run by the Republicans, one run by Democrats. Let's see who charges greater interest and more bullshit fees. Let's see how Bank of California fares on a real open market. Down the road, a 99% tax bracket on all individual earnings over $5 million/year.

And yeah, that includes capital gains, but maybe at only 98.5%. $5 million a year? No one's worth more than that, no matter how many other people's jobs they cut.

Let's get those ill-gotten gains back from Wall Street conmen, to the Republicans in the diners of Kansas and New Mexico and Montana and Britney Spears' hometown of Hammond, Louisiana. I swear I see some common ground: same damn common ground I've seen since '81, but it looks like the Republicans are about to claim it as their own. 'Bout damn time, brah!

The highlight of the twenty years that I spent in and around law and politics in the states was undoubtedly Ken Kesey's speech at a 1992 Jerry Brown rally in Eugene.

The truth of the matter is that, in large part, we left the United States because we were saturated with the hypocrisy of the government. Not that the American government is necessarily that much worse than a lot of governments, more that it doesn't even vaguely try to live up to its own propaganda. And it has certainly perfected the art of self-aggrandizing propaganda. If you take the ideals of George Washington and Thomas Paine particularly seriously, it is a very sad and difficult thing to see them mocked and sold out every day.

Tony Blair was doing a decent job in the UK. I figured that I could just move here, vote for Labour for the rest of my life (as a dual national I also still vote absentee in Washington state, which I guess means that I haven't entirely lost hope), and turn my attention to more pleasant things, and things I can have more effect on. Unfortunately Blair sold out Labour ideals in much the same way that Clinton sold out Democratic ones, and Gordon Brown is only duller in serving the same process.