Posted inUncategorized

Breaking the greed compact

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial
monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism,
sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a
mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by
organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Sound familiar? Those were Franklin Roosevelt's famous speech in 1936, where he also said, "Never before in all our history have these forces been so united
against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their
hate for me, and I welcome their hatred." In reality, FDR always had to backtrack to keep from antagonizing capital too much. On the other hand, he led a nation in the 1930s that was on the verge of repudiating capitalism for what then seemed viable alternatives of fascism or communism.

Early 21st century America is reveling in easy populist anger over bonuses paid out to the very AIG executives who did so much to collapse the economy. But I wonder if they have Roosevelt's understanding of these "old enemies of peace"? And what will they do about it? If things really change, it will be because Wall Street did something far worse than break the social compact. It broke the greed compact.

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Posted inUncategorized

At the interchange

In the arresting prologue to his book, The Crisis of the Old Order, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. describes America on the day of the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt — an economy nearly shut down, people starving, machine-gun nests around Washington, opinion-makers taking of the need for dictatorship, capitalism given up as dead, even the March sky dark and foreboding. Pace today's revisionists such as Amity Shlaes, FDR indeed restored confidence and began an economic recovery that was only tripped up when he reverted to his instinctive desire to balance the budget and back away from stimulus. If it makes them feel better, many of the New Deal's successes built off the programs first established by Herbert Hoover, the often unfairly maligned onetime progressive. Yet those policies had not been pushed with the energy or scale demanded by FDR.

Many liberals and progressives want to see the current economic phase of the Great Disruption as a Depression-like opportunity. Meanwhile, conservatives such as Ms. Shlaes — and the reactionary thugs who consider even Social Security, as they would phrase it, SOCIALISM!! — use the Depression and New Deal as a foil. The reactionaries back then wanted to raise taxes to balance the budget. Otherwise, today's right is little changed intellectually from its predecessors.

And yet as I watch us move along the leading edge of history every day, I doubt many of the Depression analogies. We are not yet, most of us, on our backs. We have lost a huge amount of wealth — more than we realize, when one factors in the 25 years of destructive mergers, deindustrialization, deunionization and unwise trade deals. The floodwaters intrude on our peripheral vision — a friend laid off, a "depressing" news story. Otherwise, life goes on. American Idol goes on. A new release of Grand Theft Auto. Watchmen brings to the screen "the greatest graphic novel of all time" (was Sad Sack a graphic novel?). Talk radio continues to stir up the faithful. We are entertained, distracted, agitated, yet sleepwalking. Hoping for the next bubble. The next "Flip this House" casino economy moment. We don't realize how gone it all is, gone with the wind.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Oh, yeah? Well, your mama’s a socialist!

With all the screams of "socialism" by the McCain camp, a thoughtful electorate might shake its heads and move on, or perhaps use this as a teaching moment. I have yet to believe we have such an electorate, but who knows?

If you are of a certain age, when history was still taught in American schools, you know that socialists believed that the "means of production" should be owned by the people, not by private interests. Railroads, mines, utilities, banks, insurers — it's a very 19th and early 20th century concept (unless you're the Bush administration and Hank Paulson). Real socialism also never took hold in America, not even in the Great Depression. For one thing, it was co-opted by the Progressives and the New Deal. Socialists weren't communists. The two detested each other.

Europe saw the evolution of social democracy, which combined a large welfare state and activist government with democratic freedoms — this is pretty much the governing model in much of the EU today. In America, you could probably fit all the true socialists into a mid-sized tavern or faculty lounge.

No, when wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III and his running mate, the unqualified and dangerous Sarah Palin, yell that Obama is a "socialist," they're not giving a history lesson. They're engaging in soft McCarthyism.

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Posted inPolitics: National

On the convention: Will Obama be FDR or Bryan?

Let me begin my convention observations by saying: I don’t trust the media. Whatever the Democrats and Obama do, it will be "the wrong thing" per the corporate media narrative. He still hasn’t "sealed the deal" and "closed the sale." He "lacks specifics" — a lie — and if he provided more, they would be instant red meat. If 75,000 people in the stadium hear one of the great speeches of our time — as happened in Philadelphia on the race issue — it will be swept away by the coiffed broomheads of television pundits.

As Michelle’s speech confirmed, the Obama’s have done everything the "conservatives" demand of black folks — and they’re still "foreign." He’s a celebrity — that’s bad. Americans "don’t know who he is" — as if they know who the hell John McCain is. He’s "not one of us" — as if that has any meaning in an America of diverse life paths, or that a former POW, longtime right-wing capo and rich consort of a beer heiress is "one of us." "One of us" is a stupid person, as the media would have it — because, after all, education and the ability to speak in complete sentences = elitism.

The best way to watch the convention is on CSPAN, so you hear all the speeches, not merely the prime-time ones that are filtered and "interpreted" by the bubbleheads. Of course, most Americans don’t do this. So they watch the prime-time spectacle as the Democrats try, again, to figure out how to beat the Republicans. Somehow eight years of misgovernment on an unprecedented scale isn’t enough. Nor is the obvious failure/scam that is "conservative ideas" in action. The right has wrecked the country and yet the presidential polls, if they are to be believed, show Obama struggling to stay even.

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