Politics: National

Robert Gates, by all accounts, is as fine a public servant as can be found in Washington today, almost a throwback to a better time. He recently said at West Point that "any future Defense Secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,' as General MacArthur so delicately put it." Americans should have their heads examined if they think they can sustain the massive military establishment of today or the self-serving military-industrial complex behind it. As teachers are fired, infrastructure remains decades behind our competitors and the middle class is told it must bear the brunt of austerity, this is an urgent issue.

It's worth understanding the context in which President Eisenhower coined the term. In his farewell address, the retired five-star general said:

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction…

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.

First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me. — Martin Niemoller

Soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, I attended an Aspen Institute event for government officials and "businessmen" of the new Russia. At night, we went drinking, me tagging along with the legendary foreign editor of the Rocky Mountain News, Holger Jensen (imagine when great metro newspapers had such assets). Over copious amounts of vodka, caviar and smoked salmon, a Russian told this joke: The devil came for three souls, an Englishman, a Frenchman and a Russian. He told each he could have one day to enjoy his greatest earthly pleasure before being taken to perdition. The Englishman chose to walk the grounds of his estate, trailed by his loyal hound, reading Byron and Keats. The Frenchman, naturally, decided to spend a day in enchanting debauchery with his mistress, Madeleine. "And what about you?" the devil asked the Russian. "What would give you the greatest pleasure?" Without hesitation, the Russian replied: "Watching my neighbor's barn burn down."

I once told this story and added, "well, you had to be there." No more. If nothing else, the vicious attack on public employees and their unions illustrates that many Americans have achieved a special Slavic level of desolate envy and hatred. As the character says in the film, Moscow on the Hudson, "I love my misery…" This is on display in Madison, Wis., where unionized government workers are fighting to keep their collective bargaining rights, even as they try to compromise and give back on pensions. Yet polls show most Americans hate unions (although a new one indicates they support collective bargaining rights). Short-attention-span America can't recall a time when collective bargaining, unions, pensions and health-care benefits for workers and retirees were standard in this country. Purchased with union blood, they became the baseline for all workers, unionized or not. Now, as Americans get screwed with their 401(k)s, they either don't remember, or simply hate the workers who still enjoy these foundations of the middle class.

The problem with the "austerity" con can be stated simply: Governments in the richest nation in the world may be "broke," as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker puts it, but the pain and sacrifice for righting this situation will not be shared, much less shared equally. This is the first recession in modern record keeping where the rich actually increased their share of wealth; average Americans continue to see their wages stagnate or erode — if they're lucky enough to have a job. Corporations have achieved their highest profits ever, but they're not hiring as unemployment remains at its worst levels since the Depression. The world capital markets are awash in dollars, largely being used to make more dollars via gambling ("trading") rather than to invest in productive, job-making enterprises, especially in the United States. So rich are the rich, and so detached are they from reality, that two American couples aboard a yacht have been murdered by Somali pirates, into whose clutches they heedlessly sailed as part of their blissful "lifestyle." When the pirates killed them, the U.S. Navy — that would be part of the commons of which the rich have such contempt — was negotiating to save them.

As Paul Krugman has masterfully pointed out, the Wisconsin battle is less about economics — for the state's finances are hardly as dire as Walker makes them out — as about power. The collective bargaining rights and pensions held by public workers there, which Walker, the Republicans and their puppet-masters such as the Koch brothers want to gut, were once foundational elements of the American middle class. Only 30 years of union busting and big lies about labor have caused most Americans to believe these teachers, firefighters, police officers and other civil servants are the enemy: Money-grubbing, overpaid parasites on the tax dollars of real hard working folks.

In fact, decades of tax cuts, especially for the rich, have a great deal to do with our present deficit troubles, whether at the state or federal level. But even the millions of low-wage workers who pay no federal taxes are part of the problem: They should be required to pay at least some, even symbolic, income taxes as the price of citizenship. Another big problem: The vast resources corporations put into tax-haven schemes, which means many of them pay no taxes at all, even as they benefit from the commons. Another big reason behind the deficits: The Great Recession and lack of real growth, partly because the economy has become more about making money from money and sending jobs offshore than producing dynamic growth in this country. Then there are two wars that have lasted longer than World War II — and does anyone wonder why we have a federal deficit that's a larger share of the economy than at any time since 1945 (e.g., the end of World War II, and tax rates on the rich were above 90 percent in the '40s and '50s to help pay that off). Meanwhile, what about hundreds of billions in corporate welfare? All this has helped government spending grow, along with average Fox-viewing Americans' insatiable appetite for government sevices. And yet none of this is part of our national conversation.

We need to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world.

So said President Obama in his second State of the Union address, amid a seating-chart of good feelings but no era of good feelings. When Speaker Boehner wasn't looking bored or, when the president lauded him, weepy, he was no doubt figuring out beneath his tanned pate how to defeat every Obama initiative. Boehner thought bubble: "Post-partisan, my ass…" I am so far from our national zeitgeist that I'm sure this speech soared for most Americans, just as they loved him for the Tucson pep rally. So forgive me, but I found it uninspiring. Worse, it bordered on the delusional. This is his chance to talk to the largest audience of the year and it ended up sounding like a Who Moved My Cheese corporate seminar given before your entire department is outsourced to a "third-party vendor" in Bangalore. He even said, regarding globalization, "The rules have changed."

Ronald Reagan's best speeches can still move me, in spite of myself. Mr. Obama, who outraged the Clintons by saying he wanted to be a "transformational" president like Mr. Reagan, just doesn't connect, but as I write, I'm sure it's just me. But when Dutch spoke he was changing minds and persuading Americans to make a hostile Congress do his bidding (often to destructive long-term consequences, but effective nevertheless). Behind the scenes, Reagan was using executive orders to dramatically change the nation's course. The results behind the rhetoric are just as telling for Mr. Obama.

On the eve of the State of the Union, Carol Browner, the president's point person on climate change, announced her resignation. Nothing has been done over the past two years to address the greatest threat of our time. Nothing. The corporate capture of the Oval Office is complete with GE's Jeff Immelt replacing Paul Volcker as wise man, William Daley of JPMorgan Chase as chief of staff, and Gene Sperling, lately of Goldman Sachs, heading the economic council. The report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission was leaked, and it properly detailed the risky business, regulatory laxness and swindles that led to the Great Recession. Republicans on the commission promptly disowned the report, issuing dissents (minorities getting liar loans caused the worst panic since the Great Depression, don't you know). The big finance playerz are back to business as usual, saved by the taxpayers. Nobody from Bear Stearns, Lehman, Washington Mutual, Goldman, etc. has done a perp walk. No high-speed rail line has opened or is even abuilding. We got a repeal of DADT, a big and overdue act of social justice and common sense. But the imperial adventures that underlie that need for manpower are as operative as during the Bush/Cheney years. We got "health care reform" but Americans are still in the clutches of the for-profit insurance industry. Mr. Obama transformational? Trust, but verify, as the Gipper would say.

Mick Jagger is not a Baby Boomer. Barack Obama is. Complicated, no?

Making generalizations about the Baby Boomers is even more perilous than about most generations. This huge demographic birth wave ran from 1946 to 1964. But it is the most sweeping-statement generation in history, trailed perhaps only by the so-called Greatest Generation, their parents. It caused a USA Today moment last week when the first of 77 million Boomers started to turn 65. The kids are not all right. They never were. They were blamed for every societal ill growing up, exploited with the commercialized youth culture, despised by their elders and younger people as self-centered and pampered. Now they will be cast as slothful takers from the republic as they seek to withdraw what were once considered solemn promises of pensions, 401(k)s and Social Security.

I was born in 1956 and always thought I was dealt the worst hand. Too young to get in on the drugs, sex and rock 'n' roll. Too old to pretend to be a Gen Xer. Too young to have fought for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, or honorably fought in it and been vilified (the spitting incident is a myth). Too old to avoid the disco era and the years of mid-calf skirts. Still, I always hung out with the older ones, including the former combat medics from 'Nam, by then hippified and adamantly anti-war/anti-establishment, who taught me my craft on the ambulance. So, as I age, I feel a certain kinship with the stereotype of My Generation.

"With the stroke of a pen, President Obama on Friday enacted the largest tax cut in nearly a decade and, in the process, took a big step toward reinventing himself as a champion of compromise in a politically fractured capital." Thus began a news analysis by one of the leading sources of elite opinion, The New York Times. Nevermind that the "tax cut" is really an extension of a rate reduction that failed to either propel growth or job creation after 10 years in place, and must be borrowed from our friends, the Red Chinese. The point, you see, is that Mr. Hoover has learned his lesson from the famous mid-term "shellacking." The Times reports, "the president who has emerged appears increasingly more confident than chastened, eager to revive his campaign image as a postpartisan leader who can work across party lines even at the cost of alienating his own supporters."

Many problems confront this scenario. One is that the Republicans are too smart, and the plutocracy behind them too powerful, to allow another Clinton triangulation. No amount of groveling before CEOs or the U.S. Chamber will cause them to like President Hoover. The plutocracy owns the Congress, and now, clearly, the Supreme Court. This is not the 1990s. It is a new Gilded Age with cheap trinkets from Asia to keep the proles distracted. And what did we get for Bill Clinton's vaunted triangulation anyway? Deregulation that killed millions of good jobs and set us up for the financial crash. Impeachment. A wasted presidency.

The deeper dilemma facing the president's strategy comes down to this: What is the center in America today? Does it even matter?

As I write this, President Hoover is once again negotiating against himself, this time on extension of the Bush tax cuts. In exchange for a two-year extension on the Bush cuts, Mr. Obama will get, supposedly, a continuation of benefits for the unemployed and a reduction in payroll taxes. In another world, this would set up 2012 as a referendum on historically low taxes on the rich (and virtually no taxes on perfectly legal tax evasion by major corporations). But that world would require a Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, which no longer exists outside of a few members of Congress and underfunded advocacy groups. The American future is found, once again, in Arizona, which has attracted national attention for the Legislature's slash-and-burn approach to Medicaid. It's a program the state never would have adopted without a court order. Now, cuts to the program are a death sentence for transplant patients. Remember the hysteria during the health-care debate over "death panels." It's happening now, under Republican control, where the rich are protected and devil take the hindmost.

Expect more of the same, and not just in Medicaid. Our infrastructure is decades behind that of our competitors, and what we have needs $1.6 trillion just to get into good condition, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. Most of our schools are underfunded, most of our teachers underpaid. American dominance in research and development is slipping. This is what happens when federal taxes are at a 60-year low, even as the demands (and, yes, appetites) of a complex, urbanized nation have grown. The inadequacy of tax revenue, along with the cost of empire and the recession, have put the deficit at 10 percent of GDP and debt nearly 93 percent of GDP. Yet the answers, from Mr. Obama's own commission, are to slam the middle class and start to welsh on Social Security, just as states are doing on their solemn pension obligations. Nevermind that conservative presidents and policies are most responsible for the red ink. Your tax cuts at work. At stake is whether we will still have a civilization, a meritocracy, a commons — or merely be a market for the Chinese and a looting ground for the rich playerz.