A Colossal Wreck
Page 45
After his death the TV played over and over the clip with Russert’s interview of Dick Cheney, where the latter said US troops will be greeted as liberators. Russert didn’t say, “What do you mean Mr. VP? People historically despise occupying armies. Bombing historically does not win people to your side.” It was a softball moment for Cheney. Russert was part of the Amen chorus.
July 9
He went to the big armory in the sky a few years ago, but on the evening of June 26, here in Petrolia, I could almost hear the joyful salvoes that my neighbor, Curly Wright, half a mile down Conklin Creek Road, would have loosed off into the hillside the other side of the Mattole.
June 26? For millions of Americans the political highpoint of 2008 is now behind them. The precise day is forever inscribed in their hearts as one of glorious ratification of America’s core freedoms: the day the US Supreme Court for the first time affirmed by a narrow majority of 5–4 the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”
The last time Joe Paff (co-pilot of the indispensable Goldrush Coffee) and I visited Curly, then in his early eighties, his strict constructionist reading of the Second Amendment was visible in every cranny of his home. Without twisting my head as I sat on the couch I think I counted around thirty long guns disposed about the premises. Tucked between the cushions of the couch itself and in a planter or two there were small handguns available for swift deployment. Curley was an unregulated militia all on his own.
The US Supreme Court’s decision was a frightful blow to the gun controllers. “This is a decision that will cost innocent lives, cause immeasurable pain and suffering and turn America into a more dangerous country,” wailed the New York Times in an editorial. “A frightening decision and a return to the days of the Wild West,” said Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, a city to which gunfire has been street muzak for many decades.
The Court’s decision was written by its peppery ultra-conservative, Justice Antonin Scalia, who became positively lyrical in his paean to the handgun: “There are many reasons that a citizen may prefer a handgun for home defense: It is easier to store in a location that is readily accessible in an emergency; it cannot easily be redirected or wrestled away by an attacker; it is easier to use for those without the upper-body strength to lift and aim a long gun; it can be pointed at a burglar with one hand while the other hand dials the police. Whatever the reason, handguns are the most popular weapon chosen by Americans for self-defense in the home, and a complete prohibition of their use is invalid.”
Thinking of Curley’s well-defended home, I remain astounded by the tiny number of weapons allegedly seized by the Feds in their recent execution of twenty-nine search warrants in Humboldt county, commencing on June 24. Only thirty firearms seized in SoHum! Mr. McGregor probably had better home defense against Peter Rabbit.
If that’s all that a passel of alleged cultivators can muster in Southern Humboldt, heaven help us when the Chinese declare World War III. They could land at Shelter Cove, and scythe their way through the woods to Garberville with only token resistance from pacifists bunkered down in their plastic greenhouses flourishing watering cans. The red flag would be flapping over Willits by sundown, and San Francisco right down 101 waiting to drop into the hands of the Commie-Capitalists like a ripe plum.
Europeans, snootily aghast at America’s fifty million households holding about 250 million guns, usually miss two important points. “Home defense” is a phrase with profound reverberations. How much it all had to do with killing Indians is for you to decide. And the gun lobby has been successful in anchoring their cause in the notion of a basic “freedom,” in an era when Americans correctly feel that freedom—against unreasonable searches and seizures, or to a speedy trial—is being relentlessly eroded by government.
August 23
“Change” and “hope” are not words one associates with Senator Joe Biden, a man so ripely symbolic of everything that is unchanging and hopeless about our political system that a computer simulation of the corporate-political paradigm Senator in Congress would turn out “Biden” in a nano-second.
The first duty of any Senator from Delaware is to do the bidding of the banks and large corporations that use the tiny state as a drop box and legal sanctuary. Biden has never failed his masters in this primary task. Find any bill that sticks it to the ordinary folk on behalf of the Money Power and you’ll likely detect Biden’s hand at work. The bankruptcy act of 2005 was just one sample. In concert with his fellow corporate serf, Senator Tom Carper, Biden blocked all efforts to hinder bankrupt corporations from fleeing from their real locations to the legal sanctuary of Delaware. Since Obama is himself a corporate serf and from day one in the US Senate has been attentive to the same masters that employ Biden, the ticket is well balanced, the seesaw with Obama at one end and Biden at the other dead-level on the fulcrum of corporate capital.
Another shining moment in Biden’s progress in the current presidential term was his conduct in the hearings on Judge Alito’s nomination to the US Supreme Court. From the opening moments of the Judiciary Committee’s sessions in January 2006, it became clear that Alito faced no serious opposition. On that first ludicrous morning Senator Pat Leahy sank his head into his hands, shaking it in unbelieving despair as Biden blathered out a self-serving and inane monologue lasting a full twenty minutes before he even asked Alito one question. In his allotted half hour Biden managed to pose only five questions, all of them ineptly phrased. He did pose two questions about Alito’s membership of a racist society at Princeton, but had already undercut them in his monologue by calling Alito “a man of integrity,” not once but twice, and further trivialized the interrogation by reaching under the dais to pull out a Princeton cap and put it on.
A Delaware newspaper made deadly fun of him for his awful performance, eliciting the revealing confession from Biden that “I made a mistake. I should have gone straight to my question. I was trying to put him at ease.”
Biden is a notorious flapjaw. His vanity deludes him into believing that every word that drops from his mouth is minted in the golden currency of Pericles. Vanity is the most conspicuous characteristic of US Senators en bloc, nourished by deferential acolytes and often expressed in loutish sexual advances to staffers, interns, and the like.
Why did Obama chose Biden? One important constituency pressing for Biden was no doubt the Israel lobby inside the Democratic Party. Obama, no matter how fervent his proclamations of support for Israel, has always been viewed with some suspicion by the lobby. For half the life span of the state of Israel Biden has been its unswerving acolyte in the US Senate.
September 17
Last Monday morning, amid the financial rubble of the weekend disasters, John McCain said he thought the economy was fundamentally sound. Hours later, maybe after a phone call from the Palins, he changed his mind. The man who wants less government now wants a government enquiry. He doesn’t know what’s wrong but he’s bothered.
It would take the pen of Swift to depict a scene more ludicrous than the recent Republican convention, featuring thunderous denunciations of big government a few hours before Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson rushed to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the largest nationalization in history, privatizing the profits and nationalizing the losses, sticking the taxpayers with a $300 billion tab. On Tuesday AIG got the same treatment.
Even Swift could not depict the brazen effrontery of McCain offering himself as the foe of the special interests when his prime, albeit technically unofficial economic adviser is former Senator Phil Gramm. In 1999 John McCain’s friend and now his closest economic counselor, then a Senator from Texas, pushed through the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. It repealed the old Glass-Steagall Act, passed in the Great Depression, which prohibited a commercial bank from being in the investment and insurance business. President Bill Clinton cheerfully signed it into law.
Somewhat stained by the Enron debacle, Gramm quit the Senate in 2002 and began to enjoy the fruits of his own deregulatory efforts. He became a vice-chairman of the giant Swiss bank UBS’s new investment arm in the US, lobbying Congress, the Federal Reserve, and the Treasury Department about banking and mortgage issues in 2005 and 2006, urging Congress to roll back strong state rules trying to crimp the predatory tactics of the subprime mortgage industry. UBS took a bath of about $20 billion in write-offs from bad real-estate loans this year.
Acknowledged for years as one of the most mean-spirited men ever to reach Congress, utterly charmless (he managed to win only eight delegates in a hugely expensive bid for the Republican nomination in 1996), Gramm kept close contacts with the man dubbed McNasty when he was at the Naval College in Annapolis. Aside from their affinities in viciousness of character Gramm had access to big campaign funders in Texas, necessary for McCain’s 2008 bid. He became McCain’s campaign chairman and chief economic advisor.
Gramm is exhibit A in any list of the architects of the current economic mess. At the behest of the banking industry he wrote the laws that enabled the huge balloons of funny money debt that exploded this year. His deregulatory statutes prompted Wall Street’s looting orgy in the subprime thievery.
After Gramm declared that America was suffering merely a “mental recession,” and was becoming “a nation of whiners,” McCain had to reposition him as an unofficial economic adviser, but he still remains close to the candidate and has even been touted as a possible Treasury Secretary in a McCain administration. If McCain does win and picks someone else for that job, then maybe Gramm’ll chair the commission charged with figuring out what went wrong.
October 7
Election Day is officially November 4. A month earlier voters started mailing in their ballots. We can expect the usual uplifting essays, extolling the spectacle of millions of Americans peaceably exercising their democratic rights, so unlike Cuba or North Korea. Unusually early, the real election day in the United States this year fell on October 3, the day the US House of Representatives finally approved the bailout bill already passed by the US Senate two days earlier.
Real elections mostly come after the symbolic Election Day. They are staged, sometimes protracted events, designed to remind voters that no matter what they may have thought they were voting for when they went to the polls, no matter who the victor or what his pledges, reality is in charge. Examples vivid in my memory include the arrival in Britain of a Labour government in the fall of 1964 after thirteen years of Conservative rule. Prime Minister Harold Wilson had a slim majority of five. Hopes were for sweeping change in accord with Labour’s socialist program.
The real election then took place, dragging on for a couple of years. Lord Cromer, governor of the Bank of England, told Wilson that there was a financial emergency: the international integrity of the pound sterling was being compromised in their eyes by the all-important international financial community, known colloquially in those days as “the gnomes of Zurich.” Cromer advised the Prime Minister that Labour’s plans for economic and social reform must be abandoned forthwith. Wilson told Cromer that this was a challenge to democracy. It was, and across the protracted “real election” it succeeded. Labour’s bold promises withered. Cromer and the Gnomes carried the day. Britain was set on the course it has held to this day.
The election of Jimmy Carter in 1977 was also a season of hope, that a new era was dawning, particularly in the arena of foreign policy and the cold war. “If, after the inauguration,” Carter’s campaign manager, Hamilton Jordan, told the press, “you find Cy Vance as Secretary of State and Zbigniew Brzezinski as Head of National Security, then I would say we failed. And I’d quit.” Carter wanted George Ball as Secretary of State but in the backstage maneuverings of the real election the Israel lobby vetoed Ball. Carter was forced pick to pick Vance as Secretary of State and the cold war fanatic Brzezinski as national security advisor. Jordan did not quit. Such “non-resignations” are symbolically important because they indicate that the mandate of the real election is recognized and loyally accepted by all.
The real election in Bill Clinton’s case took place across three months after his election. After victory at the polls, he swiftly indicated surrender by making Goldman Sachs Robert Rubin his Treasury Secretary. By March he had announced his total submission to the Wall Street banks and the end of any pretense—thin from the get-go—of economic change or social reform. The left opposition inside his cabinet, headed by Labor Secretary Robert Reich, stayed on board.
This year economic crisis demanded an early real election, designed to fend off the admittedly very remote possibility—Robert Rubin is Obama’s close economic advisor—that Barack Obama, victorious in the November 4 election, might arrive in power, claim a reformer’s mandate, and seek to prize loose the stranglehold of Wall Street financiers on the economy.
In this real election, dissent dwindled rapidly in the press as the Accredited Commentariat, from George Will on the right to Paul Krugman in the center, declared the bailout odious but necessary. The rebellion of the House Republicans was an unexpected bump in the road and they were stigmatized as “irresponsible” along with the ninety-five Democrats who joined them.
Paulson’s draft bill was originally three pages long, a terse classic in the annals of coup d’états, seeking to render the bailout safe from the sanction of any elected body or US court. As it passed to the Senate it swelled to over 700 pages, most of them recording bribes to legislators. The Senate—Obama, Biden, and McCain in the vanguard—duly voted Aye.
At this point the last, best weapon of the Real Electioneers sidled onto the stage. On October 2, Rep. Brad Sherman, a California Democrat and opponent of the bailout, stated in the House that “there would be martial law in America if we voted no.” By a pleasing coincidence amid these dramatic events, the Army Times had reported on September 30 that the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team, lately in Iraq, would be deployed on October 1 on US soil under the day-to-day control of US Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command. This new mission, wrote the Times’ Gina Cavallaro, marks “the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom.”
As the Senate voted, Obama once again affirmed publicly that he accepted the verdict of the real election. He told reporters in Clearwater, Florida, last Wednesday that “issues like bankruptcy reform, which are very important to Democrats, is [sic] probably something that we shouldn’t try to do in this piece of legislation.” In addition, he said that his own proposed economic stimulus program “is not necessarily something that we should have in this package.”
But hold! you cry. Obama may enter office with a secret plan. Even FDR campaigned in 1932 for a balanced budget. And anyway, Obama and Biden will have saved us from Sarah Palin, Alaska’s answer to Eva Peron! My friends, Palin is a distraction from the uncomfortable truth. After the October coup, the November ballot is merely a coda.
October 24
Every politician, good or bad, is an ambitious opportunist. But beneath this topsoil, the ones who make a constructive dent on history have some bedrock of consistency, of fidelity to some central idea. In Obama’s case, this “idea” is the ultimate distillation of identity politics: the idea of his blackness. Those who claim that if he were white he would be cantering effortlessl
y into the White House do not understand that without his most salient physical characteristic Obama would be seen as a second-tier Senator with unimpressive credentials.
As a political organizer of his own advancement, Obama is a wonder. But I have yet to identify a single uplifting intention to which he has remained constant if it has presented the slightest risk to his advancement. Summoning all the optimism at my disposal, I suppose we could say he has not yet had occasion to offend two important constituencies and adjust his relatively decent stances on immigration and labor-law reform. Public funding of his campaign? A commitment made becomes a commitment betrayed, just as on warrantless eavesdropping. His campaign treasury is now a vast hog-swallow that, if it had been amassed by a Republican, would be the topic of thunderous liberal complaint.
In substantive terms Obama’s run has been the negation of almost every decent progressive principle, a negation achieved with scarcely a bleat of protest from the progressives seeking to hold him to account. The Michael Moores stay silent. Abroad, Obama stands for imperial renaissance. He has groveled before the Israel lobby and pandered to the sourest reflexes of the cold war era. At home he has crooked the knee to bankers and Wall Street, to the oil companies, the coal companies, the nuclear lobby, the big agricultural combines. He is even more popular with Pentagon contractors than McCain, and has been the most popular of the candidates with K Street lobbyists. He has been fearless in offending progressives, constant in appeasing the powerful.