Rogue Columnist

As others have noted, the 'ground zero mosque' hysteria, whipped up by the white-right and the corporate media, is this year's version of 'death panels' and other nonsense that sandbagged Democrats last August. What's remarkable is that the party keeps falling for it. A party so cowardly doesn't deserve to remain in "power," if you can call their recent run being in power — a minority of lockstep Republicans have managed to block most meaningful legislation. A party so stupid doesn't deserve to survive, when it could run on the rhetoric of Harry Truman or FDR or its few contemporary real Democrats (Rep. Alan Grayson, Sen. Bernie Sanders et al). But it won't. That it could fall for the same play over and over, again and again. The president has given a few good speeches, including this one in Seattle earlier this week. Unfortunately, the Obama magic has fallen into a credibility gap with an administration run by Wall Street and Clintonites.

I know all this is true. I just hate to consign our nation to more of the same right-wing governance. On and on until…what? Perhaps the Democrats must go the way of the Whigs. Yet an America that has lost its lead in college degrees — lost the ability to value education and thinking in the age of Sarah Palin and suburban arrogant-ignorance — won't embrace a progressive agenda. Will it? We may never know because the major media outlets are themselves either compromised or terrified. Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox "News" and the Wall Street Journal, is openly giving money to the Republicans as well as tilting coverage. This is just the opening salvo in corporate money that will gain even more control over our government thanks to the "conservative" Supreme Court. (Do the Democrats think it was wise, say, to have two presidential nominees in 16 years from Massachusetts?)

Yet this is neither 1994 nor even 1988, when Michael Dukakis was punked by the late Lee Atwater, the political daddy of Karl Rove. The list of differences would be long and almost all are alarming and risky. The most immediate and volatile is unemployment. America has never seen a jobs crisis like this since the Great Depression — and then we were still the world's largest creditor nation and enjoyed the most powerful industrial base. Now we have at least 16 percent real unemployment and no prospect of recouping those lost jobs. Indeed, highly profitable companies are cutting jobs, freezing wages and, in one high-profile case, demanding pay cuts. In any other time, this would be the making of social and political strife. Don't assume that flat-screen TVs and Wal-Marts will keep the peace forever.

So how will it go down, this mess we're in? Dysfunctional empires can last a long time (Byzantium) or not (the Soviet Union). We've been more violently divided, in 1861, and yet the nation survived, albeit with more than 600,000 killed. America suffered worse governance and severe big-business malfeasance in the decades after the Civil War, but the damage was limited by the decentralization of cohesive small towns, farms and close families, the opportunity of the frontier, rising living standards and finally was reversed by the rise of the Progressive movement. The nation saw worse unemployment and economic collapse once before in modern times, but finally the federal government led by Franklin Roosevelt responded with vigor and effectiveness. And yes, a big war helped. We were mired in Vietnam and finally gave up and still America sailed on, passing two centuries.

Times now are tough and alarmist sentiments are easy. We can always muddle through, can't we? One observer has written glibly about how we'll add another 100 million people in suburban bliss. Most Americans can't imagine a future that's not pretty much like the recent past, maybe with a few wind turbines and solar panels added. Still, I can't think of a moment in history quite like what we now face.

The stock market is swooning again. One reason is sobering enough: Fear of slower growth in China, which has taken the spot held by America for a century, as the nation expected to lead the world out of recession. But the market has been in a secular bear for a decade. The real American economy is a wreck in its fundamentals — something very different from the crises listed above. Before, we were always an economic powerhouse, a petro superpower, and each generation was guaranteed a better standard of living than its parents. No more. Another banking crisis is very possible, as is a new bubble in Treasury bonds. We make so little here now that we can't undo the huge imbalances of debt. The Ponzi scheme has collapsed. Long-term unemployment is a human tragedy and political nitroglycerin. What of the commons has survived the Reagan Revolution is now falling apart. We're mired in two wars that are only the most obvious pieces of untenable military overstretch.

And we know some things. We know the Democrats are unwilling to put together an effective progressive agenda and sell it to America. How could they when so much of the government is now controlled by corporate interests? We know Wall Street and the big banks have gotten away with it, and they will be cooking up new trouble for the economy and expecting the taxpayers to once again pay for their swindles gone wrong. Addressing climate change, building 21st century transit and rail systems, retrofitting suburbia for a peak-oil future, rebuilding our educational, research and manufacturing dominance — nope. Confronted with historic discontinuity and unsustainablity, our course will remain unchanged. The solutions are there — we refuse to undertake them. The confluence of business, political and even cultural interests and forces will make it so. The elites, even in the media, are well paid, live in fine cities and are educated in the conventional wisdom. They are paid to not get it. We know all this.

So, how's it going to go down?

In the fever swamps of the white-right, the conversation is about whether President Obama is a socialist, a fascist or a communist — as if they even knew what these critters are. The more on-point provocative question is whether the rich hate the American middle class and have declared war on it.

I know, I know: This is going way over the top, Talton. The crisis enveloping average Americans has been building for decades and comes from complex sources, not a conspiracy, for goodness sake. The capital markets may produce some destructive results, but it's not part of a master plan devised over cigars and cognac in the VIP suite at the Oval Room. True enough. And there are some inspiring examples of some wealthy people giving to worthy causes. This is a complex issue, which makes it beyond the talk radio- and television-addled masses. Still, it must be addressed. It doesn't take a conspiracy to create a community of interests that produces a similar result. Phoenix and Arizona are a textbook example with the Real Estate Industrial Complex.

Somebody pushed for questionable trade agreements, job offshoring, union busting, monopolistic industrial concentration, the shredding of pensions and benefits, a financialized economy, deregulation, big government welfare for corporations and the lowest taxes on the rich in generations. Somebody continued to expand these policies even after their destructiveness was well known. Somebody profited hugely. Now, with the Great Recession, the long and growing estrangement between the elites and the rest of us has snapped. Corporate America sits on $1.8 trillion cash while millions face years of unemployment and most see years of wage stagnation. Two Americas, indeed.

Zonie readers will have to forgive me. I've reached a point where Arizona's cruelty, narrow-mindedness, magical thinking and self-destructive policies are … boring. I promise to snap out of this fugue state next week.

John Boehner already is measuring new draperies for the speaker's office and Republicans seem confident of at least retaking the House, if not the whole enchilada in 2010 and then 2012. Their policy prescriptions haven't changed: military adventurism, deregulation, slashing and blocking important domestic investments — now justified by the deficit they ran up — and, especially, tax cuts. Nothing is more Reaganesque than cutting taxes.

According to Republicans, this accomplishes two goods: It raises more tax revenue for the government because it lures capital from shelters into productive uses, and, it encourages more capital formation that creates jobs. Everybody wins. George H.W. Bush derided the first part as "voodoo economics" and Paul Krugman wrote a most convincing takedown in 2003. Even so, tax cutting has been American governing orthodoxy for 30 years. Just the possibility of letting the George W. Bush tax cuts expire or returning to the estate tax that has been in place for nearly a century provokes apoplexy.

The second part of the tax-cut argument had more resonance. Even I once believed that if you really wanted to stick it to the rich, reduce their rates enough to make it impossible for them not to want to invest. Some of that is bad history, of course. The American economy did very well with Eisenhower's 90-percent range top bracket for the wealthiest, and the greatest boom of the 20th century and first surpluses in decades came after Bill Clinton slightly raised taxes. But the final blow to the tax-cut argument came under George W. Bush, as taxes were slashed on the rich, major corporations got away with paying no taxes and the estate tax was whittled to nothing. Yet the Bush years saw a net gain of a mere 1 million jobs, wages stagnated and income inequality hit levels not seen since at least the 1920s. What went wrong?

I've been on a mission for several years to right the wrong done to Charles Erwin Wilson, the president of General Motors from 1941 to 1953. He later served as Defense Secretary under President Eisenhower, a man with a keen interest in the well-being of the military. You know Engine Charlie: He's the one who said, "What's good for General Motors is good for America." The very epitome of the selfish, imperious chief executive. Except he didn't actually say it. His real words were, "for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa." In other words, the interests of big business couldn't be divorced from the well-being of the nation. This represented the best ethos of our business leadership when America stood at its zenith.

James Cash Penney, founder of the department store chain, operated not by exotic swindles cooked up by his Ivy League MBAs, but by the golden rule. The vinegary head of National Cash Register, John Henry Patterson, turned his factories into boat-building plants to save residents of Dayton during the 1913 great flood. Henry Ford, crackpot and anti-Semite though he became, established his business on this foundation: "I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be large
enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and
care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men
to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can
devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary
will be unable to own one." In doing so, especially paying good salaries, he made one of the seminal steps to create the modern middle class. Ford also said, "A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large."

Now we have a different breed of cat running our largest companies. Their model is not J.C. Penney or even Henry Ford, but Jack Welch and the moguls of Wal-Mart. And they may be on a mission to sabotage the chief executive of the United States.

So this is where we stand: The financial doomsday machine, equal parts the creation of feral greed and deregulation, has been saved by taxpayers and IOUs on our future living standards. With its billions to lobby, it has avoided the prosecutions and re-regulation that followed the laissez-faire-caused crash of 1929. So it continues to gamble with dangerous play money called derivatives and other financial "innovations." Billions more from big business ensure corporate control of a broken government. All of these entities live to send jobs offshore or engage in job-killing mergers, as industries become more consolidated than at any time since the Robber Baron Age. Income inequality has returned to that era, too. And for the first time in history, most of the next generation will see worse prospects than those of their parents.

Twenty-six million workers are unemployed or forced into part-time jobs when they want full-time positions. Five unemployed workers are chasing every available job, and yet the Republican minority, aided by Sen. Ben Nelson of the populous state of Nebraska, continue to deny an extension of jobless aid. Schools, transit, parks, libraries and assistance to the most vulnerable are crumbling. For the first time in a century, the world does not look to the United States to lead the world to recovery. Instead, Asia powers ahead while this shadowy thing called "the markets" holds guns to the heads of Western governments, with elite commentators saying all the public foundations that make an advanced civilization must be ruthlessly slashed. Who are these "markets"? And how do we explain that the zenith of American might was built on much higher taxes for the wealthy and corporations, as well as capital markets that raised money for productive, job-creating businesses? Meanwhile, America is bogged down in endless wars, making more enemies through our military adventures and appetite for oil. Oh, oil. The Gulf of Mexico is perhaps irretrievably damaged by a BP spill that has fallen off the front page. Expect more such events.

After all this, voters seem poised to return control of the House of Representatives, and perhaps the Senate, to the Republicans, the party that wrecked America. Speaker Boehner. It will mean the end of President Obama, a man who somehow has managed to squander America's best and perhaps last chance to right itself. The genuine hope and relief of January 2009 is long gone. In its place is a sentiment I heard from many as the Bush years dragged on — including, in private conversations, from people of national prominence. Their words were always the same: "For the first time in my life, I am afraid for my country."

Anyone who thinks our economy and the rest of America is in a familiar cycle, with perhaps different music and new electronic gadgets, hasn't been paying attention. Unfortunately this includes much of the media and the economic experts they choose to quote. It's like 1981-82. Well, no, even though in severity that event was the worst up to that point since the 1930s. Jobs were shed in this recession at a faster and deeper rate than since statistics began to be kept in the late 1940s, and by this time after the start of the 1981 downturn we had regained virtually all the lost jobs. Now we have nearly 26 million unemployed or underemployed (temps who want full-time work) Americans. Thanks to Republicans in Congress, 2 million have lost their unemployment insurance. In any event, that was a Fed-caused recession to defeat inflation, and the underlying American economy was strong and diverse, with the middle class at its zenith and Wall Street a dowdy joint tasked with raising capital for real productive, job-creating enterprises. None of that is true in this disaster.

It's like the Great Depression. That was an economic collapse fueled by financial speculation and fraud, high leverage, laissez-faire, and extreme income inequality, too. Unfortunately, there the parallels end. America was the world's largest creditor nation, manufacturing exporter and oil producer/exporter, with state-of-the-art factories and a skilled workforce just waiting for an upturn. Government was much smaller at the start of the Depression, allowing FDR plenty of room to experiment; he was not weighed down in the 1930s by two endless colonial conflicts and defense spending greater than all other nations combined. The bad was worse: Unemployment was estimated at 25 percent; poverty was much more widespread; the country was still heavily rural and small-town. And, importantly, the "old order" that brought on the crash was discredited and, for the next several decades, shut out of political power.

It's just a normal business cycle being made worse by government. When people say this, they don't mean that the government has made inadequate and poorly targeted stimulus or helped prop up the Wall Street casino prepping us for another panic. They mean Obama is a "socialist/fascist/communist" and America needs to let the "free market" rule, while slashing "wasteful" government spending. This would be dark comedy if it were not fervently believed by so many voters. It is most definitely not any kind of business cycle we've seen. But this dangerous minority may well get their way come November — they're already getting much of it, with painful consequences.