TRUTH, JUSTICE and the new american way

On October 16, Barack Obama joked, a bit haltingly, “I was actually born on Krypton and sent here by my father Jor-El to save the Planet Earth.” He was addressing the long-running and politically crucial Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in New York City, where candidates in white tie put aside electioneering, and perform with dry, big-city wit. Little more than 48 hours later, full-color guerrilla art posters appeared on Melrose, Vermont, and other trendsetting Los Angeles avenues showing Obama as Superman, pumped like the Man of Steel, and decked in patriotic red, white, and blue.

It’s a tall building to leap, with our nation and our world in just the place for which movement conservatives have been begging whilst twirling their mustachios like Snidely Whiplash. For years, conservative activist Grover Norquist has been advocating running up debts and decifits so we would bankrupt ourselves, and hence be unable to provide for our common welfare. He called for his fellow travelers to “starve the beast” of government until it was “shrunk so small you could drown it in a bathtub.”

After eight years of profligate wars and falsely low interest rates – maintaining the appearance of wealth, as people bled their illusory home equity dry – they have succeeded, and we are there.

The luxury liner of consumerism has smacked into the iceberg. Sarah Palin can cry “socialism” and let slip the dogs of McCarthy – the Bush family still sneers about the “socialism” of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom to this day they call “that man” – but Republicans have burned even their most flimsy credibility.

And yet President-Elect Obama is just a man. Can he actually save a grateful nation?

‘Greed Is Good’

Exactly one week after the Al Smith dinner, 82-year-old Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman and Ronald Reagan appointee who had once presided over the longest economic boom in history, faced the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to explain the economic crisis. Intensively questioned by relentless L.A. Democrat Henry Waxman, the former Fed chair admitted his faith in the self-correcting powers of the free market had been misplaced. “This crisis has turned out to be much broader than anything I could have imagined. […] Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.” Later he would acknowledge that free-market economics had failed. “The whole intellectual edifice collapsed.”

For the man who was once hailed as the “Maestro” to make a televised confession that it all went wrong means only one thing: It all went wrong. Since the Reagan Revolution in the early 1980s, we have trusted our fate to the mythic power of the market, and the good intentions of corporations. And the combination of the two – to put it crudely – screwed the pooch. The private sector has run its course. Gordon Gekko-style self-interest has brought us to the brink of disaster.

The collapse of Greenspan’s “intellectual edifice” is also the collapse of the entire Reagan Revolution and all who sailed in it. The hard times facing the nation are complex, but their causes are simple. The private sector has not served the American people. For them to hold onto their homes, feed their families, and receive medical care has become an impossible challenge. The safety nets of the New Deal, which saved the country during the Great Depression but were so gleefully gutted by Reaganites, neocons, and Bill Clinton, must be revised and restored. No alternative to government intervention remains. Corporate America already knows this as it waits for handouts like a wino with a cardboard coffee cup.

Let them demean “redistributionists” and a progressive tax code, and then let them gnash their teeth in the electoral wilderness for a long time to come. They wanted to prove government was the enemy, and so they gave us a FEMA that let a city drown. The time for modest readjustment is long past.

Those Who Forget History

The first New Deal saved the nation in 1933. Through the Roaring Twenties, the Titanic of capitalism had also been greed-driven to the ice, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt came to office in barely the nick of time. The ship was sinking, the third class passengers had no lifeboats and were already drowning. That era’s “whole intellectual edifice” had collapsed on Wall Street’s Black Thursday (October 24, 1929). It became impossibly worse on the Black Monday and Black Tuesday that followed. And then a terminal, monthlong market panic ushered in the Great Depression.

Paul Krugman – Princeton professor, Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, and winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economic Science – described the inevitability of a downward and destructive economic spiral that will eventually dive to disaster as primarily psychological. “Bad news begets bad news, and the circle of pain just keeps getting wider,” he wrote, but Krugman was further moved to quote some classic lines of poetic despair. “Economic data rarely inspire poetic thoughts. But as I was contemplating the latest set of numbers, I realized that I had William Butler Yeats running through my head: ‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer / Things fall apart / the center cannot hold.’”

In 1928, the president who failed to hold the center was one-term Republican Herbert Hoover. Hoover was a prime contender – until the advent of George W. Bush – for “worst president ever,” and his successor, Franklin Roosevelt, affirmed, “There is nothing inside the man but jelly!”

The stock market was in a state of panic, financial institutions cruised close to insolvency, credit was paralyzed, an epidemic of foreclosure swept the country, and threats of business closures, corporate layoffs, and serious unemployment reared and resounded. In addition to this truckload of economic woes, FDR faced a peripheral catalog of problems created by the Volstead Act and alcohol prohibition that, in addition to causing social upheaval and a spreading disrespect for law and order, had already laid the foundations and provided the bath-tub gin capital for organized crime as we came to know it through the rest of the 20th century.

And, if all of the above wasn’t enough, a huge environmental disaster was brewing in the American heartland. A combination of prolonged drought and over-cultivation by ill-informed and inexperienced farmers had created what became known as the Dust Bowl. In Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas, topsoil turned to dust on a hundred million acres of what had previously been waving fields of grain, and was swirled into the sky by prevailing winds to form apocalyptic dust clouds. Some of these storms blew as far as New York and Washington DC, and dumped Kansas dirt into the Atlantic Ocean. The dust storms even deflected the jet stream, worsening the drought. The actual U.S. food supply was threatened, and thousands of families, the backbone of the still highly agricultural U.S. economy, were forced by the sheer need to survive onto two-lane poverty trails to California and Oregon. Dubbed “Okies” – and described in the novels of John Steinbeck and the songs of Woody Guthrie, and photographed by Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans – they quickly discovered, in insanitary migrant camps, picking fruit for starvation wages, that the West Coast was no Eden.

The popular fallacy was that Hoover compounded the chaos following the 1929 Wall Street crash by blithely relying on the market to cure the malaise. Hoover feared federal intervention would encourage an unhealthy reliance on government, but, ultimately, he was forced to intervene. He raised taxes on corporations and the rich, attempted to persuade the banks to adopt voluntary self-regulation, and speeded up federal building projects, but this was too little, executed too late, although many of FDR’s staunchest New Dealers admitted Hoover had laid the foundations for what would come to be known as FDR’s First Hundred Days.

Hoover, however, made other moves that alienated the working people of America. He authorized the arbitrary deportation of more than a half-million Mexican migrant workers, and then, when thousands of unemployed World War I veterans set up shantytowns in Washington DC in June 1932, demanding payment of the Adjusted Service bonus they had been owed since 1924, Hoover sent in troops under General Douglas MacArthur – and junior officers Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton. Hoover initially ordered MacArthur not to use force against the vets, but the general ignored him, claiming he was fighting “communist revolution.” Hundreds of men, women, and children were injured as troops burned the symbolic “Hooverville,” but the president, although furious, refused to reprimand MacArthur, and, by that refusal, Hoover historically defined himself as the enemy of veterans and the working class.

‘I Will Sell It’

The world that confronts Barack Obama is radically different than the one that faced FDR in 1933. In some respects it is less starvation-desperate – until climate change brings about an American famine – but it is an incalculably more extensive and dangerous landscape, and infinitely more complex. In 2008 we have instant global communication, and – like it or not – a globalized economy. We also have the specter of nuclear proliferation. FDR did not inherit two ill-conceived and ruinous wars – one hemorrhaging money and the other rapidly turning Fort Apache – or an Islamic radicalism, conditioned by its own leaders and goaded by the Bush administration to believe jihad is the final solution. Twenty-first century USA does not have a dust bowl, but China is coming close, with dark clouds of pollution crossing the Pacific to obscure our view of the Hollywood sign.

Roosevelt’s primary strength was that he always looked to the brightest. The advisors who designed his rescue programs and the managers who made them reality were outstanding in their respective fields. There were no crony jobs for Michael Brown. A typical example was FDR’s hiring of Hugh Hammond Bennett, the country’s leading soil erosion expert, to reverse the horrors of the Dust Bowl. FDR gave him an agency and a free hand, and the Midwest breadbasket was saved. Barack Obama has already made the same pledge to consult only with the best. In his barn-burning, last live appearance with Bill Clinton, outside Orlando last week, he vowed, “Tell me what’s needed, and I will sell it.” This is the most important campaign promise he needs to keep, and of which he must be regularly reminded.

Big Oil

When Franklin Roosevelt sold his New Deal programs to the American people, he couched many in terms of national security. The New Deal agencies borrowed streamlining techniques from the mobilization for World War I, and FDR rejected the conservative concept that national security was only about military might. America was at risk if its people were hungry, homeless, sick, or wandering the back roads looking for work. He defended his agricultural subsidies on the grounds that the U.S. must never be held hostage to a dependence on imported food, and made it clear that the farmers who fed the country could not be efficient without reliable electricity.

National security must also be integral to the Obama pitch, and he must likewise surround himself with the best and most imaginative. The new American president has already promoted the need for a Manhattan Project, hammer down to energy independence, renewable fuel sources, and environmental protection. This is another promise to which Obama must be held. Energy is homeland security. It impacts everything from foreign relations to children with asthma.

The oil barons had their way with George W. Bush any time they wanted. They were even allowed to borrow the U.S. Army for their grim adventures in the Middle East, and they have yet to return it. Under Barack Obama the oilmen must learn their fun in the sun is over. They can take their profits, and their mantra of “drill-baby-drill,” and get themselves hence. If they don’t like them apples, they can always be nationalized – just like in Venezuela. But Obama also has to avoid the trap of bureaucracy. Energy policy cannot become a labyrinth of Fed agencies staffed by former oil company hacks, giving tax money to T. Boone Pickens for his natural gas. A snake-oil rush for cheap nuclear power and let-the-government-take-the-waste must also be prevented. Government involvement in gasoline refining capacity, which the private sector has so shamefully neglected, would be an early and visible curbing of Big Oil, who will be looking to turn the new president to the dark side from his very first day in office.

Big Health

The current health care obscenity in which the sick live or die according to their ability to pay is not just a scandal but also a threat to national security. In the early 1930s, health care was hardly an issue. The crash of 1929 came a single decade after the unstoppable influenza epidemic had caused more fatalities than World War I. Medicine was relatively primitive, and the primary reliance was on hardworking but poorly paid neighborhood doctors, mom-and-pop drugstores, rudimentary inoculation, and very basic patient hygiene. Poor families certainly found it hard to afford much-needed surgery, but Americans were not being routinely forced into bankruptcy by a cancer diagnosis or a chronically sick child. (They just died.)

The medical care nightmare of the 21st century is another unconscionable failure of the private sector. The unholy troika of drug manufacturers, HMOs, and insurance companies has victimized the poor and made preventive medicine derelict. Katrina proved the private sector has no adequate response to natural disasters, and certainly couldn’t cope with a major pandemic. When profit motive comes up abjectly wanting, where do we turn but to the government? Nationalized health care will not, of course, be easy. As Hillary Clinton learned in 1993, Big Health fights dirty when its stranglehold is threatened. Its surrogates will roll out their incongruous demonization of Canada, Sweden, the U.K., and France, and the equally bizarre belief that any government control is the precursor to a Soviet America.

For President Obama to implement a change from disgraced private enterprise to a future-now vision of full-coverage service, he will need to pick his battles carefully, and win some highly visible victories before the country fully falls in behind him. An early victory would be a reversal of some heinous Bush-era policies. Medicare and Medicaid have massive purchasing power that can and must be used to negotiate cuts in the pornographic profiteering on prescription drugs. A mess of public support can be bought with lower prices at the drugstore. But Obama also needs to ensure that government heath care functions with 21st century efficiency. Again the call is for smart people with ingenuity and organizational models to fashion the vision, and avoid the bureaucracy that snared traditional socialism.

Tony Soprano and the Taliban

The mess left by the culture wars also has to be bagged and removed. Obama does not have Prohibition to repeal, but he does have to address the never-ending War on Drugs. In just 15 years, Prohibition gave America the legendary crime families fictionalized in The Godfather and The Sopranos. For the best part of a century, billions upon billions of dollars have been poured into the Drug War to impose a similarly dubious intoxicant-morality on stoners in Seattle, speed-freaks in Montana, and junkies in New York City. The War on Drugs has brought nothing but abject failure, misinformation, incalculable costs in ruined lives, a nightmare penal system, and monstrous erosion of individual freedom.

It has culminated in a planetary network of power, money, and corruption that links graft-riddled Mexican law enforcement, both sides in the endless civil war in Colombia, child soldiers in Central Africa and – maybe most disturbing of all – the Taliban. The material supports of Al Qaeda are oil and opium, and for that reason alone drugs and their legality are another aspect of national security, not dictates of lifestyle. A credible Obama drug czar must embrace legalizing and taxing marijuana, an engagement between the Afghan poppy growers and the legitimate pharmaceutical industry, and domestic harm reduction and health care, rather than another escalation of crime and punishment.

Our Foreign Adventures

The grimmest national security cleanup will be national security itself. A cleansing scalpel must be applied to the concealed creations of Bush and Cheney and their War on Terror. In its endorsement of the new president, The New York Times demanded exactly that. “Mr. Bush has arrogated the power to imprison men without charges and browbeat Congress into granting an unfettered authority to spy on Americans. He has created untold numbers of ‘black’ programs, including secret prisons and outsourced torture. The president has issued hundreds, if not thousands, of secret orders. We fear it will take years of forensic research to discover how many basic rights have been violated.”

Early in the game, the president must move visibly toward resolutions in the Bush-legacy wars. It would take many strategic pages to examine the military mess, but, as with everything, it will be a matter of perception. If he can be seen strengthening Afghanistan, and also moving to a diplomatic endgame in Iraq, possibly with the help of re-engaged European allies and the U.N., an electorate who knew it wouldn’t be easy will accept that.

And Your Wallet

With the election a done deal, the bank liquidity bailout has to be renegotiated to something more plausible and evenhanded than the corporate welfare devised by George Bush and Henry Paulson. Foreclosures must be frozen as speculative paper is separated from Americans’ real homes. Care has to be taken, though, to balance deficit reduction with maintaining consumer spending as a short-term defense against the encroaching specter of deflation. The flak will undoubtedly fly, but the overwhelming evidence of corporate failure is the stick which beats back objections. They have failed. Now it’s our turn.

The second phase of the New Deal saw FDR embark on the big ticket items – massive blue-collar job-creation programs in which roads, bridges and dams were built and electrification grids were extended to rural areas under the auspices of the Public Works Administration (PWA), the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Tennessee Valley Authority, while the United States Housing Authority supervised ambitious slum clearance projects. The WPA also strengthened labor unions to prevent the bold rebuilding of the nation being derailed by exploitative employers, and the federal government made itself both the instigator of change and the arbitrator of conflicts.

On October 17, in The New York Times, Paul Krugman advised Barack Obama to take a page from FDR’s New Deal playbook. “This is also a good time to engage in some serious infrastructure spending, which the country badly needs in any case. The usual argument against public works as economic stimulus is that they take too long: By the time you get around to repairing that bridge and upgrading that rail line, the slump is over and the stimulus isn’t needed. Well, that argument has no force now, since the chances that this slump will be over anytime soon are virtually nil. So let’s get those projects rolling.”

Last week, just days before the election, in an interview with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, Candidate Obama was adamant that New Deal-style public works really would get rolling. “We have to rebuild our infrastructure. Look at China. Their trains are faster than ours, their ports are better than ours. They are preparing for a very competitive 21st century, and we’re not.”

The automatic question in any discussion of New Deal-style national reconstruction is frequently tinged with a sneer: “Yes, but how are you going to pay for all this?” Candidate Obama resorted to a reassuring if-it’s-needed-we’ll-find-the-money. “One of the most frustrating things about the last eight years was the ability of George Bush to pile up debt, huge deficits, and nothing to show for it. If you’re going to run deficit spending you’d better be repairing our roads and bridges, our water systems and our sewer lines.” Obama seemed particularly interested in an updated power grid to manage power from multiple sources. If only to impress Maddow’s largely liberal/progressive audience, Obama had plainly done his New Deal homework.

But the real question is not how we are going to pay for a New Deal, a brave new world, and a new American way. It’s “Will we-the-people accept a serious dose of reality? Or, over a mere three or four generations, have we now become so pampered we’re incapable of aspiring to greatness?” In his Rachel Maddow Show interview, Obama cited the painstakingly innovative organization of his no-drama election campaign as a model he would expand when he tackled the nation’s problems. Barack Obama’s defeat of gutter prejudice and the Joe-the-Plumber contempt for intelligence or decency that were the hallmarks of the McCain/Palin campaign offers some hope he will do the right thing now that he’s in power. He is an African American who has won the presidency. He has already achieved the impossible. He asserts his belief in capitalism and denies he’s a socialist, but maybe it is a new and very different form of capitalism that’s the object of his cool passion. Barack Obama is surely too smart to subscribe to a philosophy in which, as Alan Greenspan put it, the whole intellectual edifice has collapsed.

How far, though, Barack Obama will heed his homework is the key question. FDR’s strengthening of organized labor during the New Deal brought workers to the national table, seating them beside the fat cats, making them more than just an item on a corporate balance sheet. How far Barack Obama is prepared to embrace revitalized labor remains to be seen – as does the extent that labor is capable of revitalizing itself. Globalization and outsourcing dictate that effective labor organizing can only operate globally. Solidarity means exploitation in Bangalore or Beijing is felt as acutely as exploitation in Detroit or Denver. Twenty-first century labor could well revisit (dare I say it?) the ideas of Eugene Debs and the IWW with a century-later makeover. One big union? Anarchist science fiction? Maybe, but when you ain’t got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose.

Brother From Another Planet

In a culture of infantile gratification, Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader, will Americans cling to petulant dreams of Hummers, Viagra, and increasing worthless McMansions even as that very culture collapses?

Perhaps Barack Obama really wasn’t joking at the Al Smith dinner when he quipped he was Superman. Let’s not forget that Superman fell out of the sky over Dust Bowl-ravaged Kansas in the middle of the Great Depression, an alien from another world come among us, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound, but ready to restore truth, justice, and the American way in the era of FDR and the New Deal. Superman’s creators, Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, had a definite left-leaning perspective and, in their early storylines, Superman battled crooked businessmen, corrupt politicians, and grasping slumlords. President Barack Obama is surely too calm, too cool, too collected, and too in control not to precisely calculate even his pop culture references, and, loath as I am to believe in any politician, I find that highly – if maybe irrationally – reassuring.

Mick Farren blogs at Doc40.blogspot.com.