'A pen warmed up in hell' | Reality-based commentary about Phoenix, Arizona, and the nation.
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1A vague sadness hangs over the Ohio countryside, even though the trees hang on to their last vestiges of summer green. I flew into Cleveland’s airport last week. This was once one of America’s largest cities, and even though the airport remains a hub for Continental Airlines, the place has the feel of a small, regional terminal. The nice part is that people are nicer in a less crazed and crowded setting, but I keep asking myself, "this is Cleveland?"
Yes. I can see the changes as we drive out of town, on the way to my conference at Kent State University. Buildings that held large businesses a decade ago sit empty. The big Ford plant sits looking vulnerable. While I was there, Eaton, the city’s largest Fortune 500 headquarters, announced it was leaving downtown for the suburbs. This is a downtown that has revived itself well and is a transit hub. Yet the Eaton bigs seem oblivious to the future of higher gas prices, as well as shameful as stewards of their hometown. Everybody talks about how bad the economy is, with high unemployment and job insecurity. The change in the vibe of this state from a decade ago is so real and raw you can’t miss it. No wonder Ohioans threw out the Republicans — the party that wrecked America — in 2006. And yet, McCain has an edge if the polls are to be believed, and one wonders.
Still, Ohio is a state synonymous with white flight and de facto segregation. Apart from some successful downtowns and a few still-lovely upper-class neighborhoods, the big cities are heavily black, while their numerous suburbs are white. It’s a class thing, but it’s also a race thing. And it may well be that Ohioans won’t vote for a black man. How they think Republican John Sidney McCain III, continuing the policies of 25 years of "conservatism," will help them is beyond me. But these are emptional responses beyond the reach of rational persuasion.
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1I’ve been traveling this week as the American financial markets came as close to collapse as at anytime since 1929. And make no mistake: this disaster is real, it will unfold in unexpected ways, and it won’t be an event that is over quickly such as in 1987 — or even the S&L scandal. Some early takes:
–It would be ironic if Republican John Sidney McCain III were elected and George W. Bush left one positive legacy by stabilizing the meltdown — the "let the markets rule" so-called conservatives, who saved the day thanks to mechanisms put in place by Woodrow Wilson, FDR and successive liberals. If we didn’t have tools such as the Fed, FDIC, SEC, etc. — this could have been a calamity on the order of the "panics" of the 19th century, with worldwide contagion.
–This event should totally discredit the deregulation, market-religion ideas pursued over the past 25 years — it is the direct result of these policies. But maybe not. The administration may use unprecedented intervention to save capitalism, and then go back to their Milton Friedman sock-puppet talking points. And the duhs and ignos won’t care — Obama’s black, remember?
–Gee, remember when W intended to "spend his political capital" privatizing Social Security into the toxic investment bank dumps that are now failing? Republican John Sidney McCain III still wants to do this.
3Sarah Palin is trying to play the small-town card. Her handlers even had her quoting the infamous hater and anti-semite columnist Westbrook Pegler: "We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity." The point, of course, is that she was a "small-town mayor," an "average folks" product of a "small town." Just like you folks hurting in Ohio and other battleground states.
Trouble is, Wasilla, Alaska, is not really a small town in the Disneyland Main Street USA way she’s trying to conjure. This railroad camp turned into an exurb of Anchorage with all the attendant flotsam: big boxes, no downtown, car dependent, sprawling. It’s also in a state that is America’s welfare queen of federal handouts. So we’re not talking Harry Truman’s Independence here.
She’s trying to conjure the town that has been largely destroyed by sprawl, Interstate highways, economic and cultural shifts, and the predatory, monopolistic practices of Wal-Mart. As Thomas Frank pointed out in his new Wall Street Journal column, policies that kill small towns have been an intregal part of the Republican Party of John Sidney McCain III.
Yet the exurb vs. small town issue doesn’t stop there.
4Republican John Sidney McCain III is trying desperately to back away from his "fundamentals of the economy are strong" line, even going so far as to say he meant American workers. But not so fast. In fact, it is the fundamentals of the American economy that are in dangerous trouble. Let us count the ways. I’m going to have to give you some straight talk, my friends:
1. Debt. The nation is deeply in hock to creditors worldwide. We used this line of credit to finance the housing bubble, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, tax cuts to the richest Americans, rebate checks that went into the ether and the privatization of hundreds of billions of dollars in government services. It’s paying for the bailout of Bear, Sterns and it stands to take a devastating shock from Freddie and Fannie. From government to business to consumers, Americans are debtors, and most of the debt has been pissed away on war, sprawl, speculation and corruption, as opposed to building something for the future.
As the economist Nouriel Roubini has pointed out, the current account deficit in the ’90s came back as investment in private innovation, but for the past eight years it has been used to finance deficit spending and debt. Moreover, now much of this debt is held by nations that do not necessarily wish us well, including China and the petro-states such as Saudi Arabia.
This situation dangerously limits our options in foreign policy. It makes it a near certainty that living standards will take a big hit as we have to pay it back. Remember, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the first people in the door were the bankers, wanting to be repaid for the debt the Bolsheviks defaulted on after the 1917 revolution.
9John Sidney McCain III said today "the fundamentals of our economy are strong," sounding exactly like Herbert Hoover after the crash of 1929. The parallels are interesting. Republican policies largely caused the Great Depression. Hoover had done honorable and even miraculous work before the presidency (feeding World War I refugees). He was a progressive Republican but became a reactionary. The biggest similarity, besides "the fundamentals" lines, is that the world had passed both men by. The world had become too complex for their remedies or policies. They were/are overwhelmed. Except Hoover didn’t have Karl Rove, "the base" (which interestingly translates in Arabic as al Queda) and so many ignorant, easily led voters.
On the other hand, maybe the key word in McCain’s statement is "our" economy. As in the economy represented by his rich friends and supporters, the nationless corporate oligarchy and his Treasury secretary-to-be, former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm (also prime architect of banking and Wall Street deregulation). He of the "nation of whiners" and "mental recession." For them, the winners at a time when income inequality is worse than anytime since before the crash of ’29, the economy is strong. So maybe unlike his campaign of late, McCain actually spoke the truth.
The recession that’s all in our heads claimed two of the most powerful and influential investment banks in the world over the weekend. Anybody who claims to tell you what will happen next — much less that the worst has passed — is about as reliable as all those telephone mortgage chislers during the housing bubble. What is more clear is how it happened, and, perhaps, some of the ramifications.
2Many Democratic operatives are advising Obama and Biden to essentially ignore Palin. I don’t think they can. President-elect McCain (I use the term to focus your mind on the stakes here) has made her one of the most important issues in this campaign.
In choosing — or being forced to choose — a person with no national or international experience, whose government background is a few years as mayor of a tiny exurb and 18 months as governor of a state with 670,000 people (less than half the population of Phoenix), McCain should be giving the nation pause. Pause to wonder about his judgment, for if he chose her it was the kind of impulsive, irresponsible action for which he’s known. Pause to wonder who is really pulling his strings, considering she is the candidates of the hard-core evangelicals McCain once denounced, and the oil industry he claims to be willing to fight. Pause that he would make a shameless political move to energize his base even if it meant putting the country at risk. President Palin. Think about that.
One of the many outrageous things about the Palin affair is her refusal to hold news conferences or meet with reporters. Proper "deference" was demanded by the McCain campaign. Deference? Here, ma’am, the people rule — unless you are willing to proclaim us an authoritarian empire where the press is treated as it is in, say, China. It should be a deal-breaker in itself that she has been shut off like a celebrity.
What is McCain hiding? What is he afraid of?
2Here’s my advice to Obama supporters: Turn off the television. Put away the depression. Get mad and get active. The race is far from over unless there has already been a stealth coup in this country — a subject for a future column. The Republicans are the party that wrecked America — and McCain and Palin are Republican to the core. They’re counting on Americans to be stupid and easily manipulated. Obama is counting on us to be smarter than that, to be Americans, a people who once were never "easily led" by demagogues.
I don’t trust the corporate media, especially the electronic kind. I don’t trust the polls. They are trying to game the outcome. The "economic royalists," to use FDR’s term, were never going to give up power easily — nor was the military industrial complex. I never doubted that the conservative base would come "home" eventually, or that this would be a close election. And there’s the elephant in the room: will enough white Americans vote for a black man?
It’s interesting to recall that, unlike many other democratic countries, America once had two mass parties. Republicans and Democrats had liberal and conservative wings. In 1936, for example, Gov. Alf Landon was a liberal Republican challenging FDR, and might have made a race of it had not his campaign been co-opted by the reactionaries in the GOP.
Now only one mass party remains: the Democrats.
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3"Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half." — Gore Vidal
"The (Bush) aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the
reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe
that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible
reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment
principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the
world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and
when we act, we create our own reality.’ " — Ron Suskind
"This election is not about issues. This election is
about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates." — Rick Davis, McCain campaign manager
Unfortunately Vidal is probably wrong, considering that most Americans get their tiny bits of information from television. Davis may well be right, despite the critical issues facing the country, and that his campaign is running to continue the very Bush-Cheney "faith-based" policies that created the disaster of the past eight years.
This is the background you need to understand the successful McCain effort to cow the corporate media into submission in the final weeks before the election. Remember that McCain called the big-time media "his base" and there’s been a long love-fest between them. But the old fighter jock will now slap around and intimidate his love — and many Americans will approve. It will be the Rovian tactic that puts the race within stealing distance, if not produce an outright McCain victory.
1I’m late posting this morning on the takeover of Fannie and Freddie because I spent last night and part of today writing for the Seattle Times on the ouster of Washington Mutual’s chief executive. It’s not a far leap from one to the other, because both bags of trouble have their genesis in the collapse of the housing bubble. In the case of Fannie and Freddie, of course, the problem became so serious that it put the entire financial system at risk.
That’s right. Don’t be fooled by Hank Paulson’s "what this means to you" comments about how the federal takeover will make it easier for Americans to buy homes. The Bush Treasury was forced into using taxpayer money to back these two giant corporations to avoid a financial China Syndrome. And India, Japan, Britain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, et al. Here’s the chilling line buried in Gretchen Morgenson’s Sunday New York Times story:
The proposal to place both mortgage giants, which own or back $5.3
trillion in mortgages, into a government-run conservatorship also grew
out of deep concern among foreign investors that the companies’ debt
might not be repaid. Falling home prices, which are expected to lead to
more defaults among the mortgages held or guaranteed by Fannie and
Freddie, contributed to the urgency, regulators said.
Toes curled yet? This is what it means to be the world’s largest debtor nation. As the duhs and ignos rush to coronate McCain and Palin, there it little understanding of this predicament.
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