Yesterday Once More

I want to write about something other than politics, but life keeps throwing me provocations.

The other morning a right-wing acquaintance on Facebook posted a link to this article from the Commentary blogs, by Jennifer Rubin. According to her,

After the across-the-board defeats in 2008, conservative pundits didn’t rail at the voters. You didn’t see the right blogosphere go after the voters as irrational (How could they elect someone so unqualified? They’ve gone bonkers!) with the venom that the left now displays. Instead, there was a healthy debate — what was wrong with the Republican Party and with the conservative movement more generally? We had a somewhat artificial debate between traditionalists and reformers. If anything, the anger was directly (unfairly, in my mind) against George W. Bush (whose tax cuts even many Democrats now want to extend, and whose strategy in Iraq allowed Obama to withdrawal troops in victory), and to the hapless McCain campaign (which spent the final days of the campaign ragging on its VP nominee).

That's one way of looking at it, I guess. Another way is that the right was furious at their loss, and while they blamed their candidate, they attacked everyone else in sight. To say that they "didn't rail at the voters" is, well, bonkers. Roy Edroso, whose alicublog is most useful as a Rightwing Watch, started collecting the evidence right away. Here are a couple of his examples, the first from Ace of Spades:

America is a special country for going for the Jeremiah Wright's and Bill Ayers' most famous disciple.

We might have elected more qualified blacks to the presidency -- Colin Powell, Michael Steele, the guy who does the funny sound effects in the Police Academy movies -- but we went for the guy who would do his level best to demolish the country.

I couldn't be prouder.

Then this, from Dave Smithee at American Thinker (oh, click through anyway, to see the image of Uncle Sam):

The cyclical nature of human wisdom is well documented in both secular histories, and the biblical record. Blessing, Discontent, Rebellion, Suffering, Penitence, Restoration. Wash, rinse, repeat. As ancient Israel whined to have monarchs rule over them to be like their pagan neighbors, so too are American leftists smitten with the illusory sophistication of the crumbling European economic and social models. They salivate for the esteem of tyrants, socialists, and every manner of grandiose failure; the more extravagant, the better so long as the mission statement is sufficiently lofty. It's said that liberals are like any other people; only more so. In this case, it's their turn to perpetuate the ancient cycle of rejecting what works, turning their backs with disdain on America's incomparable blessings and crying "Give us what they have!"

Well, we've gotten it.

Admittedly, Smithee blames "American leftists" for Obama's election, but if 67% of the American electorate are leftists, then the Republicans have little chance now or ever. His claims only make what little sense they do if he is blaming the voters. (See also the comments on this post.) This sort of equivocal blurring all the American people and those the writer hates is also common among liberals and leftists, of course. In any case, a good portion of the right blogosphere, while they did ask what the Republicans did wrong, claimed that Obama had led the American people astray with his socialist promises and Jeremiah-Wright/Bill-Ayers anti-Americanism, which always goes over well with Liberals (though how did it win over the honest yeoman average Americans who also voted for Obama against McCain?) -- and they were quite willing, as these examples show, to blame the lazy, greedy American masses for being gulled by Obama.

Rubin also says:

When things go wrong for the left, it blames the people; when things go wrong for the right, it blames the governing elites. It is not in the nature of conservatives to demean and attack fellow citizens. To the contrary, conservatives’ vision is grounded in the belief that Americans are competent, decent, and hardworking, and it is the heavy hand of government that threatens to squelch American virtues.

First, as already noted, the right also blames the people; and the left also believes, or claims to believe that Americans are "competent, decent, and hardworking." Neither really believes it. The right favors government regulation of sexuality (laws against fornication, adultery, and sodomy, for example), marriage and divorce, and other private conduct (drug laws), opposes contraception and abortion, and wants the government to set a good example by exemplary religious observance: enforced school prayer, official days of thanksgiving (not fasting, though, that is so 18th century), and a President who pays lip service to Christianity even if he rarely attends church. (By "religious" of course they mean Christianity, and usually Protestant Christianity, though anti-Catholicism isn't the political force here that it used to be). They also want most Americans to suffer nobly when disaster (hurricanes, oil spills, catastrophic illness, old age, unemployment, bank failure, etc.) strikes. They also like officially enforced patriotism, except when their party is out of power; then they feel free to attack the government as vehemently as any hippie.

Second, the right enthusiastically supports government elites when the right is in power. They adore spoiled rich kids like George W. Bush and movie stars like Ronald Reagan. They celebrate captains of industry and are very worried that the rich might have to pay an extra percentage point or two in taxes. As Noam Chomsky says, when you hear about "special interests" in the media, what is meant is usually working people, the elderly, the young, people of color, the poor -- the overwhelming majority of Americans, in short. When you hear about "the national interest", that refers to a tiny minority of business and political elites. Something like that is going on with Rubin's claim that the right doesn't attack "the people," since by "the people" she means right-wing Republicans, an embattled and dwindling minority; by "governing elites" she means everybody else. Therefore the Tea Party movement, representing a rather small and not especially popular portion of the electorate, presents itself as We The People, and demands that the new administration listen to the voters who voted Republican, not those who voted Democratic. (On the other hand, the new administration has been happy to oblige.)

Rubin is correct that there is elitism on the left; I've written about that myself. But as with the essay by George Scialabba I criticized, in more charitable moods the right agrees that the People are good, but since they obviously don't know how to vote correctly they need to be educated. Thus we get jokes like the Pledge to America, which among other things proposes to replace the Affordable Care Act with the Affordable Care Act. The Republicans humbly present themselves as ordinary Joes who happen to be in Congress, and so will lead America out of the Wilderness and into the Promised Land.

However, rejecting elitism (as I hope I do) doesn't mean you can't criticize the people. White America is still pretty racist, in varying degrees of virulence. The United States has brought war, chaos and pestilence to much of the world through war, neoliberal economics, and multinational corporations; most Americans are either unaware of this or don't much care -- which has something to do with why they are unaware of it, I suppose. The passage from Joe Klein that Rubin linked (in the first paragraph I quoted) was not disrespectful and made a good point: that many Americans on the right (but also elsewhere) are noticeably ignorant about their government and what it does, and very inconsistent in what they want it to do. ("Keep the government's hands off my Medicare!" for example, as if Medicare wasn't a government program.) I'm not a fan of Joe Klein, but Rubin's blithe dismissal ignores some serious problems. I think Americans need to educate themselves; there's no one else to do it.

I posted a snarky comment to my right-wing acquaintance's Facebook status when he linked Rubin's post, thanking him for giving me a laugh to start the day and expressing surprise that the Right was into glossolalia. Maybe I shouldn't be snarky; but remember, Rubin is the kind of conservative that my acquaintance considers "sober" and rational, as opposed to Koran-burning Yahoos.

Yesterday Once More

I want to write about something other than politics, but life keeps throwing me provocations.

The other morning a right-wing acquaintance on Facebook posted a link to this article from the Commentary blogs, by Jennifer Rubin. According to her,

After the across-the-board defeats in 2008, conservative pundits didn’t rail at the voters. You didn’t see the right blogosphere go after the voters as irrational (How could they elect someone so unqualified? They’ve gone bonkers!) with the venom that the left now displays. Instead, there was a healthy debate — what was wrong with the Republican Party and with the conservative movement more generally? We had a somewhat artificial debate between traditionalists and reformers. If anything, the anger was directly (unfairly, in my mind) against George W. Bush (whose tax cuts even many Democrats now want to extend, and whose strategy in Iraq allowed Obama to withdrawal troops in victory), and to the hapless McCain campaign (which spent the final days of the campaign ragging on its VP nominee).

That's one way of looking at it, I guess. Another way is that the right was furious at their loss, and while they blamed their candidate, they attacked everyone else in sight. To say that they "didn't rail at the voters" is, well, bonkers. Roy Edroso, whose alicublog is most useful as a Rightwing Watch, started collecting the evidence right away. Here are a couple of his examples, the first from Ace of Spades:

America is a special country for going for the Jeremiah Wright's and Bill Ayers' most famous disciple.

We might have elected more qualified blacks to the presidency -- Colin Powell, Michael Steele, the guy who does the funny sound effects in the Police Academy movies -- but we went for the guy who would do his level best to demolish the country.

I couldn't be prouder.

Then this, from Dave Smithee at American Thinker (oh, click through anyway, to see the image of Uncle Sam):

The cyclical nature of human wisdom is well documented in both secular histories, and the biblical record. Blessing, Discontent, Rebellion, Suffering, Penitence, Restoration. Wash, rinse, repeat. As ancient Israel whined to have monarchs rule over them to be like their pagan neighbors, so too are American leftists smitten with the illusory sophistication of the crumbling European economic and social models. They salivate for the esteem of tyrants, socialists, and every manner of grandiose failure; the more extravagant, the better so long as the mission statement is sufficiently lofty. It's said that liberals are like any other people; only more so. In this case, it's their turn to perpetuate the ancient cycle of rejecting what works, turning their backs with disdain on America's incomparable blessings and crying "Give us what they have!"

Well, we've gotten it.

Admittedly, Smithee blames "American leftists" for Obama's election, but if 67% of the American electorate are leftists, then the Republicans have little chance now or ever. His claims only make what little sense they do if he is blaming the voters. (See also the comments on this post.) This sort of equivocal blurring all the American people and those the writer hates is also common among liberals and leftists, of course. In any case, a good portion of the right blogosphere, while they did ask what the Republicans did wrong, claimed that Obama had led the American people astray with his socialist promises and Jeremiah-Wright/Bill-Ayers anti-Americanism, which always goes over well with Liberals (though how did it win over the honest yeoman average Americans who also voted for Obama against McCain?) -- and they were quite willing, as these examples show, to blame the lazy, greedy American masses for being gulled by Obama.

Rubin also says:

When things go wrong for the left, it blames the people; when things go wrong for the right, it blames the governing elites. It is not in the nature of conservatives to demean and attack fellow citizens. To the contrary, conservatives’ vision is grounded in the belief that Americans are competent, decent, and hardworking, and it is the heavy hand of government that threatens to squelch American virtues.

First, as already noted, the right also blames the people; and the left also believes, or claims to believe that Americans are "competent, decent, and hardworking." Neither really believes it. The right favors government regulation of sexuality (laws against fornication, adultery, and sodomy, for example), marriage and divorce, and other private conduct (drug laws), opposes contraception and abortion, and wants the government to set a good example by exemplary religious observance: enforced school prayer, official days of thanksgiving (not fasting, though, that is so 18th century), and a President who pays lip service to Christianity even if he rarely attends church. (By "religious" of course they mean Christianity, and usually Protestant Christianity, though anti-Catholicism isn't the political force here that it used to be). They also want most Americans to suffer nobly when disaster (hurricanes, oil spills, catastrophic illness, old age, unemployment, bank failure, etc.) strikes. They also like officially enforced patriotism, except when their party is out of power; then they feel free to attack the government as vehemently as any hippie.

Second, the right enthusiastically supports government elites when the right is in power. They adore spoiled rich kids like George W. Bush and movie stars like Ronald Reagan. They celebrate captains of industry and are very worried that the rich might have to pay an extra percentage point or two in taxes. As Noam Chomsky says, when you hear about "special interests" in the media, what is meant is usually working people, the elderly, the young, people of color, the poor -- the overwhelming majority of Americans, in short. When you hear about "the national interest", that refers to a tiny minority of business and political elites. Something like that is going on with Rubin's claim that the right doesn't attack "the people," since by "the people" she means right-wing Republicans, an embattled and dwindling minority; by "governing elites" she means everybody else. Therefore the Tea Party movement, representing a rather small and not especially popular portion of the electorate, presents itself as We The People, and demands that the new administration listen to the voters who voted Republican, not those who voted Democratic. (On the other hand, the new administration has been happy to oblige.)

Rubin is correct that there is elitism on the left; I've written about that myself. But as with the essay by George Scialabba I criticized, in more charitable moods the right agrees that the People are good, but since they obviously don't know how to vote correctly they need to be educated. Thus we get jokes like the Pledge to America, which among other things proposes to replace the Affordable Care Act with the Affordable Care Act. The Republicans humbly present themselves as ordinary Joes who happen to be in Congress, and so will lead America out of the Wilderness and into the Promised Land.

However, rejecting elitism (as I hope I do) doesn't mean you can't criticize the people. White America is still pretty racist, in varying degrees of virulence. The United States has brought war, chaos and pestilence to much of the world through war, neoliberal economics, and multinational corporations; most Americans are either unaware of this or don't much care -- which has something to do with why they are unaware of it, I suppose. The passage from Joe Klein that Rubin linked (in the first paragraph I quoted) was not disrespectful and made a good point: that many Americans on the right (but also elsewhere) are noticeably ignorant about their government and what it does, and very inconsistent in what they want it to do. ("Keep the government's hands off my Medicare!" for example, as if Medicare wasn't a government program.) I'm not a fan of Joe Klein, but Rubin's blithe dismissal ignores some serious problems. I think Americans need to educate themselves; there's no one else to do it.

I posted a snarky comment to my right-wing acquaintance's Facebook status when he linked Rubin's post, thanking him for giving me a laugh to start the day and expressing surprise that the Right was into glossolalia. Maybe I shouldn't be snarky; but remember, Rubin is the kind of conservative that my acquaintance considers "sober" and rational, as opposed to Koran-burning Yahoos.

I'm Not Gay, But My Husband Is

(Don't worry -- the couple in that photo are heterosexual. So it's all perfectly normal.)

The California Supreme Court had just cleared the way for same-sex marriage, and Ms. DeGeneres had announced on her program that she planned to marry her longtime girlfriend. “We are all the same people, all of us — you’re no different than I am,” Ms. DeGeneres told Mr. McCain as they sat next to each other in plush chairs. “Our love is the same.”

Mr. McCain called her comments “very eloquent” and added: “We just have a disagreement. And I, along with many, many others, wish you every happiness.”

Ms. DeGeneres said: “So, you’ll walk me down the aisle? Is that what you’re saying?”

Mr. McCain replied, “Touché.”

I realize the necessity of tact and genteel hypocrisy in addressing those whose opinions differ from ours, but I hope that Ms. Degeneres's love for her girlfriend, and now wife, is not "the same" as John McCain's love for his. McCain dropped his first wife when she was disfigured in an auto accident while he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and whether or not one believes the reports that he has beaten his second wife Cindy, it appears that theirs is a chilly marriage of convenience, with separate residences and no love lost. Still, I like the way DeGeneres put McCain on the spot there; it's a pity only entertainers seem to ask questions like that. But once again I'm reminded how much energy people expend trying to get respect from people who don't deserve any respect themselves.

I found the New York Times article I quoted above linked through a post of IOZ'. It's not M. IOZ' best work on matters same-sexual. He blunders by mentioning the candidates' perceived need to "appease the remaining homophobes of rural America and the Midwest," forgetting the cosmopolitan homophobes of the rest of the country (and the world, including Rome, Tehran, and Jerusalem). One of his commenters points this out. A reasonably intelligent man like M'sieu' should have realized by now that bigotry is not, and never has been, limited to any one class or region. Nor, as I've argued before, is it something that springs full-blown from the foreheads of gods or priests. If sex didn't make many people uncomfortable on a very deep level, that discomfort wouldn't be made manifest in religion.

The same Times article discusses Barack Obama's confused position on the issue.

Mr. Obama believes that marriage is a sacred union, a blessing from God, and one that is intended for a man and a woman exclusively, according to these supporters and Obama campaign advisers. While he does not favor laws that ban same-sex marriage, and has said he is “open to the possibility” that his views may be “misguided,” he does not support it and is not inclined to fight for it, his advisers say. ...

Some gay allies of Mr. Obama thought, during a televised Democratic forum in Los Angeles in August 2007, that he might come out in favor of same-sex marriage, after he was asked if his position supporting civil unions but not same-sex marriage was tantamount to “separate but equal.”

“Look, when my parents got married in 1961, it would have been illegal for them to be married in a number of states in the South,” Mr. Obama said. “So, obviously, this is something that I understand intimately. It’s something that I care about.”

At that point, he veered onto legal rights, saying that — both in 1961 and today — it was more important to fight for nondiscrimination laws and employment protections than for marriage.

The best I can say for Obama is that he's no stupider on this point than many other people, including gay ones. (In 2000 I saw an interview with Dave McReynolds, an old gay activist who was running for President on the Socialist ticket. Asked about gay marriage, he said that he wasn't interested in getting married "in a church or synagogue"; the civil side of marriage escaped him altogether, as it did Al Gore, who once spoke of marriage as "a sacrament" for men and women, odd terminology for a Baptist.) As a lawyer, Obama should be aware that marriage in the United States comes in two flavors, the religious and the civil. It is religious marriage that is "a sacred union" if one believes in such things, and religious marriage is within broad limits (barring polygamy, child marriage, etc.) outside the reach of the state. Same-sex couples have often exchanged vows, often with the blessing of clergy, to sanctify their unions, and so far there is no law to prevent them from doing so -- only sectarian restrictions that prevent clergy from officiating. In this respect, same-sex marriage is already a reality in the United States.

But religious marriage by itself brings with it no legal benefits, and it is those benefits, the fruits of civil marriage, that the advocates of same-sex marriage covet: shared work and government benefits, visitation access in hospital, and so on. A heterosexual couple, even if they have had a sectarian wedding, doesn't receive those benefits either unless they register their union with the secular state. Contrariwise, a church is not obligated to recognize a member's civil marriage if he or she has not jumped through its cultic hoops. My brother and sister-in-law, for instance, first married at City Hall, then had to make concessions (such as promising to raise their children in the faith) before her church would grant them a church wedding. If I met an atheist woman I chose to marry (it's a lifestyle choice!), we could get a marriage license and share Social Security benefits without the blessing of any god but Mammon, and I doubt there are more than a few religious nuts who'd feel that the heterosexual marriage of two atheists injured their own marriage in any way.

Obama's veer into "legal rights" at that 2007 forum was a blatant evasion, as though the struggle for civil marriage weren't a question of legal rights. If heterosexual civil marriage were also called a "civil union," which I gather it is in numerous European countries, then civil unions for same-sex couples would not be "separate but equal"; but in a U.S. context, civil unions are marriage lite, cementing the second-class status of same-sex couples. It's frustrating to find myself defending legal same-sex marriage in this way, just as it was frustrating to defend Bill Clinton against his enemies, but I am baffled not only that Obama doesn't grasp these elementary distinctions, but that no one close to Obama has spelled them out to him. As with Bill Clinton in 1992, I have to conclude that his gay supporters and advisors are so ignorant that they don't grasp them either.

One old pet peeve of mine may also be relevant here. As "gender" has replaced "sex" in polite discourse, I noticed the term "same-gender marriage" gaining currency some years ago. I haven't heard it so much recently, maybe because "gay marriage" is the usual buzzword. "Same-gender" marriage isn't illegal in the US either as far as I know: an effeminate man and a feminine woman could marry without impediment, though tongues might privately wag. Yet a masculine man and a feminine man could not legally marry, even though they were of different "genders." When I've pointed this out to people who speak of "same-gender marriage," they usually reacted with blank incomprehension -- evidently they didn't know what "gender" means. It's biological sex that constitutes the legal (and religious) barrier, not gender. I know that "gender" and "sex" are not mutually exclusive domains, nor are "biology" and "culture"; and I know that numerous scholars have chosen to speak in terms of the sex-gender system or other terms that try to express the interconnection of biology and culture. The sex/gender distinction has largely collapsed, though many still unconsciously rely on it, and "gender" (masculine/feminine) has come to mean most of what "sex" (male/female") used to mean, wth "sex" used only to refer to copulation. So most of the old sexist baggage has been kept under the sign of gender rather than sex, and people are pretty much as confused -- or flat-out mistaken -- about these issues as ever.

I'm Not Gay, But My Husband Is

(Don't worry -- the couple in that photo are heterosexual. So it's all perfectly normal.)

The California Supreme Court had just cleared the way for same-sex marriage, and Ms. DeGeneres had announced on her program that she planned to marry her longtime girlfriend. “We are all the same people, all of us — you’re no different than I am,” Ms. DeGeneres told Mr. McCain as they sat next to each other in plush chairs. “Our love is the same.”

Mr. McCain called her comments “very eloquent” and added: “We just have a disagreement. And I, along with many, many others, wish you every happiness.”

Ms. DeGeneres said: “So, you’ll walk me down the aisle? Is that what you’re saying?”

Mr. McCain replied, “Touché.”

I realize the necessity of tact and genteel hypocrisy in addressing those whose opinions differ from ours, but I hope that Ms. Degeneres's love for her girlfriend, and now wife, is not "the same" as John McCain's love for his. McCain dropped his first wife when she was disfigured in an auto accident while he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and whether or not one believes the reports that he has beaten his second wife Cindy, it appears that theirs is a chilly marriage of convenience, with separate residences and no love lost. Still, I like the way DeGeneres put McCain on the spot there; it's a pity only entertainers seem to ask questions like that. But once again I'm reminded how much energy people expend trying to get respect from people who don't deserve any respect themselves.

I found the New York Times article I quoted above linked through a post of IOZ'. It's not M. IOZ' best work on matters same-sexual. He blunders by mentioning the candidates' perceived need to "appease the remaining homophobes of rural America and the Midwest," forgetting the cosmopolitan homophobes of the rest of the country (and the world, including Rome, Tehran, and Jerusalem). One of his commenters points this out. A reasonably intelligent man like M'sieu' should have realized by now that bigotry is not, and never has been, limited to any one class or region. Nor, as I've argued before, is it something that springs full-blown from the foreheads of gods or priests. If sex didn't make many people uncomfortable on a very deep level, that discomfort wouldn't be made manifest in religion.

The same Times article discusses Barack Obama's confused position on the issue.

Mr. Obama believes that marriage is a sacred union, a blessing from God, and one that is intended for a man and a woman exclusively, according to these supporters and Obama campaign advisers. While he does not favor laws that ban same-sex marriage, and has said he is “open to the possibility” that his views may be “misguided,” he does not support it and is not inclined to fight for it, his advisers say. ...

Some gay allies of Mr. Obama thought, during a televised Democratic forum in Los Angeles in August 2007, that he might come out in favor of same-sex marriage, after he was asked if his position supporting civil unions but not same-sex marriage was tantamount to “separate but equal.”

“Look, when my parents got married in 1961, it would have been illegal for them to be married in a number of states in the South,” Mr. Obama said. “So, obviously, this is something that I understand intimately. It’s something that I care about.”

At that point, he veered onto legal rights, saying that — both in 1961 and today — it was more important to fight for nondiscrimination laws and employment protections than for marriage.

The best I can say for Obama is that he's no stupider on this point than many other people, including gay ones. (In 2000 I saw an interview with Dave McReynolds, an old gay activist who was running for President on the Socialist ticket. Asked about gay marriage, he said that he wasn't interested in getting married "in a church or synagogue"; the civil side of marriage escaped him altogether, as it did Al Gore, who once spoke of marriage as "a sacrament" for men and women, odd terminology for a Baptist.) As a lawyer, Obama should be aware that marriage in the United States comes in two flavors, the religious and the civil. It is religious marriage that is "a sacred union" if one believes in such things, and religious marriage is within broad limits (barring polygamy, child marriage, etc.) outside the reach of the state. Same-sex couples have often exchanged vows, often with the blessing of clergy, to sanctify their unions, and so far there is no law to prevent them from doing so -- only sectarian restrictions that prevent clergy from officiating. In this respect, same-sex marriage is already a reality in the United States.

But religious marriage by itself brings with it no legal benefits, and it is those benefits, the fruits of civil marriage, that the advocates of same-sex marriage covet: shared work and government benefits, visitation access in hospital, and so on. A heterosexual couple, even if they have had a sectarian wedding, doesn't receive those benefits either unless they register their union with the secular state. Contrariwise, a church is not obligated to recognize a member's civil marriage if he or she has not jumped through its cultic hoops. My brother and sister-in-law, for instance, first married at City Hall, then had to make concessions (such as promising to raise their children in the faith) before her church would grant them a church wedding. If I met an atheist woman I chose to marry (it's a lifestyle choice!), we could get a marriage license and share Social Security benefits without the blessing of any god but Mammon, and I doubt there are more than a few religious nuts who'd feel that the heterosexual marriage of two atheists injured their own marriage in any way.

Obama's veer into "legal rights" at that 2007 forum was a blatant evasion, as though the struggle for civil marriage weren't a question of legal rights. If heterosexual civil marriage were also called a "civil union," which I gather it is in numerous European countries, then civil unions for same-sex couples would not be "separate but equal"; but in a U.S. context, civil unions are marriage lite, cementing the second-class status of same-sex couples. It's frustrating to find myself defending legal same-sex marriage in this way, just as it was frustrating to defend Bill Clinton against his enemies, but I am baffled not only that Obama doesn't grasp these elementary distinctions, but that no one close to Obama has spelled them out to him. As with Bill Clinton in 1992, I have to conclude that his gay supporters and advisors are so ignorant that they don't grasp them either.

One old pet peeve of mine may also be relevant here. As "gender" has replaced "sex" in polite discourse, I noticed the term "same-gender marriage" gaining currency some years ago. I haven't heard it so much recently, maybe because "gay marriage" is the usual buzzword. "Same-gender" marriage isn't illegal in the US either as far as I know: an effeminate man and a feminine woman could marry without impediment, though tongues might privately wag. Yet a masculine man and a feminine man could not legally marry, even though they were of different "genders." When I've pointed this out to people who speak of "same-gender marriage," they usually reacted with blank incomprehension -- evidently they didn't know what "gender" means. It's biological sex that constitutes the legal (and religious) barrier, not gender. I know that "gender" and "sex" are not mutually exclusive domains, nor are "biology" and "culture"; and I know that numerous scholars have chosen to speak in terms of the sex-gender system or other terms that try to express the interconnection of biology and culture. The sex/gender distinction has largely collapsed, though many still unconsciously rely on it, and "gender" (masculine/feminine) has come to mean most of what "sex" (male/female") used to mean, wth "sex" used only to refer to copulation. So most of the old sexist baggage has been kept under the sign of gender rather than sex, and people are pretty much as confused -- or flat-out mistaken -- about these issues as ever.

In The Home Stretch

I was talking again last night with my ambivalently pro-Obama friend, who’s been urging me to listen to This American Life’s programs on the economic crisis and the bailout. He told me a lot of what was in the earlier one, and while it sounds very interesting and I know I should listen to it, I can’t figure out why he thinks that it would change my opinion of the Bush-Paulson-Obama-McCain bailout. The next time I talk to him I’m going to have to remember to ask him about this. But judging from what he’s said so far, and from what I’ve read by liberal supporters of Obama, I think he’s trying to convince me that there really is a crisis, and that some kind of government of action was a good idea.

I’ve been trying to figure out what I could have said that led him to suppose I thought there was no crisis, or that I oppose government action. He reminded me in our conversation that he’s somewhat to the right of me, but if I opposed any government intervention in the crisis, I’d be way to the right of him, out there with those who denounce Bush’s nationalization of the banks. But once again it appears that a well-meaning person has confused relative difference with absolute difference: that if I criticize the action taken by Bush, I must therefore oppose any action. Which doesn’t follow, either logically or politically.

Right after the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, I had some more heated exchanges with other friends, who were convinced that I didn’t think Osama bin Laden was dangerous. (Similarly, I think only those Americans who believe that the Bush administration staged the September 11 attacks would think that bin Laden and his cohorts are not a threat. Since I’m not one of them …) One in particular argued that we had to do something, that I couldn’t possibly want the US to do nothing when we had to defend ourselves. In that case, I told him that doing nothing was preferable to the US killing innocent people, and that there were plenty of other things we could do instead. None of which the US did.

The current economic crisis is a much more complicated matter, and I wouldn’t presume to say exactly what the government should have done instead of what it did do. I don't know what would have happened if the government hadn't acted at all, though I suspect that stock prices would have bounced back up, as they always do, and the recent spikes upward are just the kind of blip one would expect; I suspect that credit would have begun to flow again as well, and I'm not competent to say for sure, but from what I hear it doesn't sound like the floodgates have opened -- more like the trickle that, again, I'd expect even if nothing had been done.

I think it’s safe to say, though, that the government should have attached some conditions and accountability to the use of the money it was throwing at Wall Street. My ambivalent friend was properly concerned about the failure of credit at the local level, the money flow that drives our economy every day. As I say, he was right to be concerned about that, but the Bush-Paulson-Obama-McCain bailout wasn’t aimed at that problem, nor has it had much effect on it. The banks are using the money for executive bonuses, for swallowing up more small banks, and for paying the fees of the consultants who are managing the bailout. (I was amused by The Economist's recommendation that "governments need to avoid populist gestures. Banning bonuses, for instance, would drive good people out of companies that badly need them", since the people who are taking their bonuses from the public trough are the people who ruined those companies to begin with.) It should be remembered that originally Paulson tried to demand no oversight of his own actions, let alone the banks’; he backed down, but the conditions that were added to the bailout were by all accounts more cosmetic than anything – recommendations and guidelines instead of real conditions. My friend told me proudly that Paulson had only just demanded that the banks begin using the money for loans; if he had listened to himself he might have wondered why such demands had not been made from the start.

There’s been a lot of hooting over former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s acknowledgement that he’d erred by putting so much faith in deregulation and free markets. My ambivalent friend mentioned that Greenspan had also said that he’d never realized that big corporations would be so unconcerned about their own well-being, let alone the public’s. I had to do a bit of digging to find that remark – it’s not in the version of the article on the New York Times’ website, but is here:

"I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms," Mr. Greenspan said.

I shouldn’t read too much into such a short statement, but it seems that Greenspan had ignored his own ideology, which (based on a famous passage in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations) holds that the merchant looks only to his own interests – defined solely as making a profit – and that totally coincidentally, by doing so he contributes to the general good. As Noam Chomsky (and probably other leftists too, but he’s the one I remember now) has often pointed out, it’s unrealistic to expect corporate managers and executives to look at anything but the bottom line in the short term, probably no longer than the next quarterly or at most annual report. That’s their job, and they would rightly (by the working assumptions of corporations) be dismissed if they looked to moral or other long-term concerns. But we’re up against another “Nobody could have predicted …” defense: Nobody could have predicted that Iraqis would resist a U.S. invasion, nobody could have predicted that the levees would break, nobody could have predicted that the decade-long party of the housing boom would come crashing down, nobody could have predicted that deregulation might backfire. By “nobody” is meant “nobody real, nobody who matters, nobody we go to cocktail parties with”, of course; many competent, rational, and knowledgeable nobodies had predicted all those things. And in evaluating the bailout, I think I’ll do well to continue listening to those nobodies.

One such person is Naomi Klein, who warns in this week’s Nation that the bailout is “Bush’s Final Pillage”:

In the final days of the election, many Republicans seem to have given up the fight for power. But that doesn't mean they are relaxing. If you want to see real Republican elbow grease, check out the energy going into chucking great chunks of the $700 billion bailout out the door. At a recent Senate Banking Committee hearing, Republican Senator Bob Corker was fixated on this task, and with a clear deadline in mind: inauguration. "How much of it do you think may be actually spent by January 20 or so?" Corker asked Neel Kashkari, the 35-year-old former banker in charge of the bailout. …

How else to make sense of the bizarre decisions that have governed the allocation of the bailout money? When the Bush administration announced it would be injecting $250 billion into America's banks in exchange for equity, the plan was widely referred to as "partial nationalization"--a radical measure required to get the banks lending again. In fact, there has been no nationalization, partial or otherwise. Taxpayers have gained no meaningful control, which is why the banks can spend their windfall as they wish (on bonuses, mergers, savings...) and the government is reduced to pleading that they use a portion of it for loans.

There’s also a good article on the bailout at Counterpunch this weekend:

the current bailout scam follows the failed model of Herbert Hoover of the early 1930s. In the face of the Great Depression, Hoover created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation that showered the bankers with public money in an effort to bail them out. All it did, however, was to buy him a few months (perhaps that is also the goal of the current Bush administration, as it will soon be leaving the crime scene), but eventually led to the failure of almost all the banks within two years.

Meanwhile, I found this interview with Michael Moore at Democracy Now! Pressed by Amy Goodman on how he could support Obama in light of Obama’s support for the bailout (which Moore calls “a robbery … I can’t believe they’ve gotten away with it so far”), Moore responds like a true believer:

Oh, yeah. Yep. Well, I have a couple feelings about that, or a couple thoughts or theories, and it has to do not just with Obama’s vote on the bailout, but also some of his other campaign positions. But I’m hoping that he was figuring, well, look, we’re just a few weeks away from the election; I’m not going to do anything to rock the boat at this moment, but come November 5th, and certainly January 20th, I’m going to undo the damage that’s been done here. So I’m going to just put a little pin in that hope and tack it up on the board for right now.

I’m also hoping that Senator Obama is, you know, like all politicians: you know, they don’t always keep their campaign promises, right? I mean, it’s not unusual. It’s certainly not unexpected. They just don’t always keep their campaign promises. So, somehow I’ve told myself that those campaign promises that he will not keep are expanding the war in Afghanistan, pushing a healthcare plan that leaves the profit-making health insurance companies in charge of the plan, and, you know, a number of other things that I think a lot of us are concerned about, but—because, obviously, you’re not ever going to agree 100 percent with any candidate on any particular thing. But I’m just—I’m just convinced that these are the campaign promises that perhaps might, you know, not get made—or kept, I should say. So, I don’t know. We’ll see.

The chances that Obama (who isn't Bush!) will move in the direction Moore hopes for are mighty slim, as he must know – he’s old enough to recall some other politicians who bitterly disappointed their liberal followers after they took office. But let me make some predictions, tack up some anti-hopes as it were: If Obama (did I mention that he isn't Bush?) wins the election, no matter how decisively, the Republicans will cry fraud and accuse him of stealing it, just as they did the last time a Democrat won the Presidency. The corporate media will urge him to dignify the charges by reaching across the aisle to appease the Republicans; since bipartisan appeasement is Obama's preferred method (but he's not Bush), he'll do exactly that, with much fine talk about healing the wounds of the election campaign. He will do nothing, at least nothing positive, about the economy. In order to show his toughness on foreign policy, he'll attack some other much smaller nation -- Pakistan, Syria, Iran, it doesn't matter. His apologists will claim that the time isn't right for him to show the real Obama, it's too soon after the wounds of the election, he's a uniter not a divider, but he'll solidify his position now and after the mid-term elections he'll deliver what he promised during his campaign. He may try to privatize Social Security, and he may succeed, just as Bill Clinton (who wasn't Bush either) was able to "reform" welfare. Appeasing the Republicans will be his main agenda (but you have to remember, Obama isn't Bush), for the Republicans are the opposition party when they're not in power while the Democrats are the collaboration party even when they are.

I was talking to a student at work the other day, rubbing his nose in Obama’s actual positions, and he finally said something to the effect that he needed to have hope, and if he couldn’t have faith in Obama he might as well not vote at all. I may or may not vote for Obama on Tuesday – since “We really don’t have much of a choice” as Kos says in this video clip, I might as well throw my vote away on the Saint; it won’t stop me from criticizing him harshly. But “hope”? I’m beginning to understand why the philosopher Walter Kaufmann called hope a great evil, the last evil to come from Pandora’s box.

In The Home Stretch

I was talking again last night with my ambivalently pro-Obama friend, who’s been urging me to listen to This American Life’s programs on the economic crisis and the bailout. He told me a lot of what was in the earlier one, and while it sounds very interesting and I know I should listen to it, I can’t figure out why he thinks that it would change my opinion of the Bush-Paulson-Obama-McCain bailout. The next time I talk to him I’m going to have to remember to ask him about this. But judging from what he’s said so far, and from what I’ve read by liberal supporters of Obama, I think he’s trying to convince me that there really is a crisis, and that some kind of government of action was a good idea.

I’ve been trying to figure out what I could have said that led him to suppose I thought there was no crisis, or that I oppose government action. He reminded me in our conversation that he’s somewhat to the right of me, but if I opposed any government intervention in the crisis, I’d be way to the right of him, out there with those who denounce Bush’s nationalization of the banks. But once again it appears that a well-meaning person has confused relative difference with absolute difference: that if I criticize the action taken by Bush, I must therefore oppose any action. Which doesn’t follow, either logically or politically.

Right after the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, I had some more heated exchanges with other friends, who were convinced that I didn’t think Osama bin Laden was dangerous. (Similarly, I think only those Americans who believe that the Bush administration staged the September 11 attacks would think that bin Laden and his cohorts are not a threat. Since I’m not one of them …) One in particular argued that we had to do something, that I couldn’t possibly want the US to do nothing when we had to defend ourselves. In that case, I told him that doing nothing was preferable to the US killing innocent people, and that there were plenty of other things we could do instead. None of which the US did.

The current economic crisis is a much more complicated matter, and I wouldn’t presume to say exactly what the government should have done instead of what it did do. I don't know what would have happened if the government hadn't acted at all, though I suspect that stock prices would have bounced back up, as they always do, and the recent spikes upward are just the kind of blip one would expect; I suspect that credit would have begun to flow again as well, and I'm not competent to say for sure, but from what I hear it doesn't sound like the floodgates have opened -- more like the trickle that, again, I'd expect even if nothing had been done.

I think it’s safe to say, though, that the government should have attached some conditions and accountability to the use of the money it was throwing at Wall Street. My ambivalent friend was properly concerned about the failure of credit at the local level, the money flow that drives our economy every day. As I say, he was right to be concerned about that, but the Bush-Paulson-Obama-McCain bailout wasn’t aimed at that problem, nor has it had much effect on it. The banks are using the money for executive bonuses, for swallowing up more small banks, and for paying the fees of the consultants who are managing the bailout. (I was amused by The Economist's recommendation that "governments need to avoid populist gestures. Banning bonuses, for instance, would drive good people out of companies that badly need them", since the people who are taking their bonuses from the public trough are the people who ruined those companies to begin with.) It should be remembered that originally Paulson tried to demand no oversight of his own actions, let alone the banks’; he backed down, but the conditions that were added to the bailout were by all accounts more cosmetic than anything – recommendations and guidelines instead of real conditions. My friend told me proudly that Paulson had only just demanded that the banks begin using the money for loans; if he had listened to himself he might have wondered why such demands had not been made from the start.

There’s been a lot of hooting over former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s acknowledgement that he’d erred by putting so much faith in deregulation and free markets. My ambivalent friend mentioned that Greenspan had also said that he’d never realized that big corporations would be so unconcerned about their own well-being, let alone the public’s. I had to do a bit of digging to find that remark – it’s not in the version of the article on the New York Times’ website, but is here:

"I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms," Mr. Greenspan said.

I shouldn’t read too much into such a short statement, but it seems that Greenspan had ignored his own ideology, which (based on a famous passage in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations) holds that the merchant looks only to his own interests – defined solely as making a profit – and that totally coincidentally, by doing so he contributes to the general good. As Noam Chomsky (and probably other leftists too, but he’s the one I remember now) has often pointed out, it’s unrealistic to expect corporate managers and executives to look at anything but the bottom line in the short term, probably no longer than the next quarterly or at most annual report. That’s their job, and they would rightly (by the working assumptions of corporations) be dismissed if they looked to moral or other long-term concerns. But we’re up against another “Nobody could have predicted …” defense: Nobody could have predicted that Iraqis would resist a U.S. invasion, nobody could have predicted that the levees would break, nobody could have predicted that the decade-long party of the housing boom would come crashing down, nobody could have predicted that deregulation might backfire. By “nobody” is meant “nobody real, nobody who matters, nobody we go to cocktail parties with”, of course; many competent, rational, and knowledgeable nobodies had predicted all those things. And in evaluating the bailout, I think I’ll do well to continue listening to those nobodies.

One such person is Naomi Klein, who warns in this week’s Nation that the bailout is “Bush’s Final Pillage”:

In the final days of the election, many Republicans seem to have given up the fight for power. But that doesn't mean they are relaxing. If you want to see real Republican elbow grease, check out the energy going into chucking great chunks of the $700 billion bailout out the door. At a recent Senate Banking Committee hearing, Republican Senator Bob Corker was fixated on this task, and with a clear deadline in mind: inauguration. "How much of it do you think may be actually spent by January 20 or so?" Corker asked Neel Kashkari, the 35-year-old former banker in charge of the bailout. …

How else to make sense of the bizarre decisions that have governed the allocation of the bailout money? When the Bush administration announced it would be injecting $250 billion into America's banks in exchange for equity, the plan was widely referred to as "partial nationalization"--a radical measure required to get the banks lending again. In fact, there has been no nationalization, partial or otherwise. Taxpayers have gained no meaningful control, which is why the banks can spend their windfall as they wish (on bonuses, mergers, savings...) and the government is reduced to pleading that they use a portion of it for loans.

There’s also a good article on the bailout at Counterpunch this weekend:

the current bailout scam follows the failed model of Herbert Hoover of the early 1930s. In the face of the Great Depression, Hoover created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation that showered the bankers with public money in an effort to bail them out. All it did, however, was to buy him a few months (perhaps that is also the goal of the current Bush administration, as it will soon be leaving the crime scene), but eventually led to the failure of almost all the banks within two years.

Meanwhile, I found this interview with Michael Moore at Democracy Now! Pressed by Amy Goodman on how he could support Obama in light of Obama’s support for the bailout (which Moore calls “a robbery … I can’t believe they’ve gotten away with it so far”), Moore responds like a true believer:

Oh, yeah. Yep. Well, I have a couple feelings about that, or a couple thoughts or theories, and it has to do not just with Obama’s vote on the bailout, but also some of his other campaign positions. But I’m hoping that he was figuring, well, look, we’re just a few weeks away from the election; I’m not going to do anything to rock the boat at this moment, but come November 5th, and certainly January 20th, I’m going to undo the damage that’s been done here. So I’m going to just put a little pin in that hope and tack it up on the board for right now.

I’m also hoping that Senator Obama is, you know, like all politicians: you know, they don’t always keep their campaign promises, right? I mean, it’s not unusual. It’s certainly not unexpected. They just don’t always keep their campaign promises. So, somehow I’ve told myself that those campaign promises that he will not keep are expanding the war in Afghanistan, pushing a healthcare plan that leaves the profit-making health insurance companies in charge of the plan, and, you know, a number of other things that I think a lot of us are concerned about, but—because, obviously, you’re not ever going to agree 100 percent with any candidate on any particular thing. But I’m just—I’m just convinced that these are the campaign promises that perhaps might, you know, not get made—or kept, I should say. So, I don’t know. We’ll see.

The chances that Obama (who isn't Bush!) will move in the direction Moore hopes for are mighty slim, as he must know – he’s old enough to recall some other politicians who bitterly disappointed their liberal followers after they took office. But let me make some predictions, tack up some anti-hopes as it were: If Obama (did I mention that he isn't Bush?) wins the election, no matter how decisively, the Republicans will cry fraud and accuse him of stealing it, just as they did the last time a Democrat won the Presidency. The corporate media will urge him to dignify the charges by reaching across the aisle to appease the Republicans; since bipartisan appeasement is Obama's preferred method (but he's not Bush), he'll do exactly that, with much fine talk about healing the wounds of the election campaign. He will do nothing, at least nothing positive, about the economy. In order to show his toughness on foreign policy, he'll attack some other much smaller nation -- Pakistan, Syria, Iran, it doesn't matter. His apologists will claim that the time isn't right for him to show the real Obama, it's too soon after the wounds of the election, he's a uniter not a divider, but he'll solidify his position now and after the mid-term elections he'll deliver what he promised during his campaign. He may try to privatize Social Security, and he may succeed, just as Bill Clinton (who wasn't Bush either) was able to "reform" welfare. Appeasing the Republicans will be his main agenda (but you have to remember, Obama isn't Bush), for the Republicans are the opposition party when they're not in power while the Democrats are the collaboration party even when they are.

I was talking to a student at work the other day, rubbing his nose in Obama’s actual positions, and he finally said something to the effect that he needed to have hope, and if he couldn’t have faith in Obama he might as well not vote at all. I may or may not vote for Obama on Tuesday – since “We really don’t have much of a choice” as Kos says in this video clip, I might as well throw my vote away on the Saint; it won’t stop me from criticizing him harshly. But “hope”? I’m beginning to understand why the philosopher Walter Kaufmann called hope a great evil, the last evil to come from Pandora’s box.

Throwing Money At Wall Street, Continued

(I couldn't find the Feiffer cartoon I wanted, but the one above will do as a reminder that Bush wasn't the first American President to distort facts to support his warmongering. Click on it to enlarge it and make it more readable.)

A few weeks ago I quoted Barack Obama telling a Nevada audience that the Bush-Obama bailout "is not a plan to just hand over $700 billion of your money to a few banks on Wall Street." Since Obama was a major player in pushing the bailout through Congress, he must have known he was lying. Events since then only show how shameless he was. (I know, it's not quite fair to call it "the Bush-Obama bailout" when so many other hands were also involved. I could with as much justice have called it the "Bush-Obama-McCain-Pelosi-Paulson-Frank" bailout, or have hyphenated the names of every other pol who supported the scam. But Obama being the Beacon of Hope and Change, I think it's fair enough to stress his involvement -- especially since he's trying to pretend it's not his fault.)

The indispensable Chris Floyd throws down this article from the Guardian. As he says, that's right, an English newspaper has the information that American newspapers would rather not tell us.

Financial workers at Wall Street's top banks are to receive pay deals worth more than $70bn (£40bn), a substantial proportion of which is expected to be paid in discretionary bonuses, for their work so far this year - despite plunging the global financial system into its worst crisis since the 1929 stock market crash, the Guardian has learned.

Staff at six banks including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are in line to pick up the payouts despite being the beneficiaries of a $700bn bail-out from the US government that has already prompted criticism. The government's cash has been poured in on the condition that excessive executive pay would be curbed.

Floyd comments:

The Guardian errs a bit in that last sentence, of course. Almost all of the "conditions" mentioned in connection with the bailout have no teeth whatsoever, no enforcement mechanism, no real penalities. They are more properly termed "suggestions," or rather, "PR exercises that we hope our Wall Street lords will deign to at least pretend to follow for a short time, until the heat is off."

Now, I'm as punitive as the next radical business-hating lefty who wants to see every Wall Street banker hung from a lamppost. But punitiveness really has nothing to do with it. Given the failure of these institutions and the responsibility of those who run them, there can be no reason why they should be getting bonuses, let alone from public money. Except of course, because they can.

Pam Martens has more on the subject at Counterpunch:

And what will taxpayers get for their investment in these financial firms whose stock prices are getting hammered as the public recoils in revulsion at what they have done to our financial system? The taxpayers, who were not invited to send their own legal representative to the negotiating table, will receive a paltry 5% dividend, exactly half of what Warren Buffett received for his recent investment in General Electric, a company that actually makes something real, like jet engines and light bulbs.

Now we learn from the U.S. Treasury web site that it has hired the law firm of Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett to represent our taxpayer interests going forward at a cost to us of $300,000 for six months work. But we’re not allowed to know their hourly wages; that information has been blacked out on the Treasury’s contract. Curiously, the Treasury has named in its contract the specific lawyers it wants to work for us. Two of those are Lee A. Meyerson and David Eisenberg. Mr. Meyerson has been a central player in facilitating the bank consolidations that have led to the present train wreck, including building JPMorgan Chase from the body parts of Chemical Bank, Chase Manhattan and Bank One.

Our elected representatives may not have been present at the negotiating table, but that didn't stop them from approving the bailout. (Some did oppose it, including my own Congressman Baron Hill. Despite his general enablement of the Bush gang since he returned to Washington in 2006, I guess I'll have to vote for him after all.) As Chris Floyd pointed out last month, though,

The crisis of Wall Street's financial meltdown has demonstrated, once again, that although the Bush Faction thugs are criminals, killers, torturers, and thieves, without even the slightest competence in governing, they remain brilliant political tacticians. They may be willfully ignorant and brutally stupid in almost every other area, but when it comes to advancing their own narrow interests -- at the expense of the political opposition -- their low cunning cannot be denied.

Just look how they have made the Democratic leadership the face of the Administration's bailout plan -- which is perhaps the most virulently unpopular government action in the last 100 years. This unconscionable giveaway to the greedy rich was cooked up in the poison kitchen of the Oval Office, long before the late summer collapses that triggered the public crisis -- yet at every turn, before every camera, who do we see fighting hard for the plan? Why, Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank, front and center, day after day, talking it up, defending the President and his wise counselor, the rapacious Wall Street profiteer Henry Paulson. When the bailout goes through, and ordinary Americans see that their own lives and livelihoods are still collapsing all around them, who are they going to blame? Why, the Democrats, of course.

As usual -- as always -- the Democrats have handed their ostensible opponents a razor-sharp sword. You can hear it now: "That radical liberal feminist from San Francisco, that stubby little Massachusetts homo -- they're the ones who did this to you! Liberals and Jews and homos, they've stabbed you in the back again!"

You betcha! In fact, they have already started. It's hard to say how well it's worked so far, but things haven't gotten as bad yet as they likely will, and besides, the Republicans still occupy the White House -- they'll be able to make a more convincing noise once That One is elected. (But there's the rub, or at least a rub: am I sitting here waiting gleefully for the Crash to come, for the US economy to crumble again as it did in 1929, to show those crooks in Washington and on Wall Street what's what? No, I'm not, if only because I'm one of the millions who would be buried in the rubble of the collapse. I first figured this out in 1991, when I realized that some opponents of the first Gulf War seemed a little too upbeat about the prospect that the war might not turn out to be the cakewalk Bush I promised. So I found myself in the position of trying to persuade my fellows that Bush was right on that one point, that a quagmire wasn't something we should hope for -- too many innocent people would suffer. The people I talked to quickly saw my point, for once.)

The problem is how to make the guilty suffer. That's not going to be easy, since the guilty have most of the power, and since the Democrats showed themselves all too willing to collaborate again with Bush, we are really left with no alternative. It's the eternal unofficial (and gleeful) campaign slogan of the Dems: What are you going to do, vote for a Republican? It's a clear sign of how blind the supporters of both presidential candidates are, that they're willing to blame the other guy for the bailout. Both of them are in it up to their necks. And the voters' money continues to flow to those who made the mess to begin with; I guess they do deserve those bonuses after all -- they know how to keep the moolah coming in.

Finally, Avedon Carol found this quotation from the also-indispensable (if at times insufferable) Alexander Cockburn at The Nation:

On September 23 Obama stated on NBC that the crisis and the prospect of a huge bailout required bipartisan action and meant he likely would have to delay expansive spending programs outlined during his campaign for the White House. Thus did he surrender power even before he gained it.

During this economic crisis, as during previous ones of the past couple of decades, I've seen some journalists complain about the declining quality of Wall Street bankers, who haven't been "taking responsibility" by throwing themselves out of windows to their deaths as they supposedly did in 1929. As a true American of the old school, then, I guess the only people I can say this to now are Obama's fans who urge all voters to make a Leap of Faith and vote for their candidate: Jump! Jump!

Throwing Money At Wall Street, Continued

(I couldn't find the Feiffer cartoon I wanted, but the one above will do as a reminder that Bush wasn't the first American President to distort facts to support his warmongering. Click on it to enlarge it and make it more readable.)

A few weeks ago I quoted Barack Obama telling a Nevada audience that the Bush-Obama bailout "is not a plan to just hand over $700 billion of your money to a few banks on Wall Street." Since Obama was a major player in pushing the bailout through Congress, he must have known he was lying. Events since then only show how shameless he was. (I know, it's not quite fair to call it "the Bush-Obama bailout" when so many other hands were also involved. I could with as much justice have called it the "Bush-Obama-McCain-Pelosi-Paulson-Frank" bailout, or have hyphenated the names of every other pol who supported the scam. But Obama being the Beacon of Hope and Change, I think it's fair enough to stress his involvement -- especially since he's trying to pretend it's not his fault.)

The indispensable Chris Floyd throws down this article from the Guardian. As he says, that's right, an English newspaper has the information that American newspapers would rather not tell us.

Financial workers at Wall Street's top banks are to receive pay deals worth more than $70bn (£40bn), a substantial proportion of which is expected to be paid in discretionary bonuses, for their work so far this year - despite plunging the global financial system into its worst crisis since the 1929 stock market crash, the Guardian has learned.

Staff at six banks including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are in line to pick up the payouts despite being the beneficiaries of a $700bn bail-out from the US government that has already prompted criticism. The government's cash has been poured in on the condition that excessive executive pay would be curbed.

Floyd comments:

The Guardian errs a bit in that last sentence, of course. Almost all of the "conditions" mentioned in connection with the bailout have no teeth whatsoever, no enforcement mechanism, no real penalities. They are more properly termed "suggestions," or rather, "PR exercises that we hope our Wall Street lords will deign to at least pretend to follow for a short time, until the heat is off."

Now, I'm as punitive as the next radical business-hating lefty who wants to see every Wall Street banker hung from a lamppost. But punitiveness really has nothing to do with it. Given the failure of these institutions and the responsibility of those who run them, there can be no reason why they should be getting bonuses, let alone from public money. Except of course, because they can.

Pam Martens has more on the subject at Counterpunch:

And what will taxpayers get for their investment in these financial firms whose stock prices are getting hammered as the public recoils in revulsion at what they have done to our financial system? The taxpayers, who were not invited to send their own legal representative to the negotiating table, will receive a paltry 5% dividend, exactly half of what Warren Buffett received for his recent investment in General Electric, a company that actually makes something real, like jet engines and light bulbs.

Now we learn from the U.S. Treasury web site that it has hired the law firm of Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett to represent our taxpayer interests going forward at a cost to us of $300,000 for six months work. But we’re not allowed to know their hourly wages; that information has been blacked out on the Treasury’s contract. Curiously, the Treasury has named in its contract the specific lawyers it wants to work for us. Two of those are Lee A. Meyerson and David Eisenberg. Mr. Meyerson has been a central player in facilitating the bank consolidations that have led to the present train wreck, including building JPMorgan Chase from the body parts of Chemical Bank, Chase Manhattan and Bank One.

Our elected representatives may not have been present at the negotiating table, but that didn't stop them from approving the bailout. (Some did oppose it, including my own Congressman Baron Hill. Despite his general enablement of the Bush gang since he returned to Washington in 2006, I guess I'll have to vote for him after all.) As Chris Floyd pointed out last month, though,

The crisis of Wall Street's financial meltdown has demonstrated, once again, that although the Bush Faction thugs are criminals, killers, torturers, and thieves, without even the slightest competence in governing, they remain brilliant political tacticians. They may be willfully ignorant and brutally stupid in almost every other area, but when it comes to advancing their own narrow interests -- at the expense of the political opposition -- their low cunning cannot be denied.

Just look how they have made the Democratic leadership the face of the Administration's bailout plan -- which is perhaps the most virulently unpopular government action in the last 100 years. This unconscionable giveaway to the greedy rich was cooked up in the poison kitchen of the Oval Office, long before the late summer collapses that triggered the public crisis -- yet at every turn, before every camera, who do we see fighting hard for the plan? Why, Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank, front and center, day after day, talking it up, defending the President and his wise counselor, the rapacious Wall Street profiteer Henry Paulson. When the bailout goes through, and ordinary Americans see that their own lives and livelihoods are still collapsing all around them, who are they going to blame? Why, the Democrats, of course.

As usual -- as always -- the Democrats have handed their ostensible opponents a razor-sharp sword. You can hear it now: "That radical liberal feminist from San Francisco, that stubby little Massachusetts homo -- they're the ones who did this to you! Liberals and Jews and homos, they've stabbed you in the back again!"

You betcha! In fact, they have already started. It's hard to say how well it's worked so far, but things haven't gotten as bad yet as they likely will, and besides, the Republicans still occupy the White House -- they'll be able to make a more convincing noise once That One is elected. (But there's the rub, or at least a rub: am I sitting here waiting gleefully for the Crash to come, for the US economy to crumble again as it did in 1929, to show those crooks in Washington and on Wall Street what's what? No, I'm not, if only because I'm one of the millions who would be buried in the rubble of the collapse. I first figured this out in 1991, when I realized that some opponents of the first Gulf War seemed a little too upbeat about the prospect that the war might not turn out to be the cakewalk Bush I promised. So I found myself in the position of trying to persuade my fellows that Bush was right on that one point, that a quagmire wasn't something we should hope for -- too many innocent people would suffer. The people I talked to quickly saw my point, for once.)

The problem is how to make the guilty suffer. That's not going to be easy, since the guilty have most of the power, and since the Democrats showed themselves all too willing to collaborate again with Bush, we are really left with no alternative. It's the eternal unofficial (and gleeful) campaign slogan of the Dems: What are you going to do, vote for a Republican? It's a clear sign of how blind the supporters of both presidential candidates are, that they're willing to blame the other guy for the bailout. Both of them are in it up to their necks. And the voters' money continues to flow to those who made the mess to begin with; I guess they do deserve those bonuses after all -- they know how to keep the moolah coming in.

Finally, Avedon Carol found this quotation from the also-indispensable (if at times insufferable) Alexander Cockburn at The Nation:

On September 23 Obama stated on NBC that the crisis and the prospect of a huge bailout required bipartisan action and meant he likely would have to delay expansive spending programs outlined during his campaign for the White House. Thus did he surrender power even before he gained it.

During this economic crisis, as during previous ones of the past couple of decades, I've seen some journalists complain about the declining quality of Wall Street bankers, who haven't been "taking responsibility" by throwing themselves out of windows to their deaths as they supposedly did in 1929. As a true American of the old school, then, I guess the only people I can say this to now are Obama's fans who urge all voters to make a Leap of Faith and vote for their candidate: Jump! Jump!

Surely, Comrades, You Do Not Want Bush Back?

I’ve heard words to this effect from various Democratic liberals over the past year, but I was surprised to hear them from Michael Moore (via):

I’m almost at the point where I don’t care if the Democrats don’t have a backbone or a kneebone or a thought in their dizzy little heads. Just as long as their name ain’t “Bush” and the word “Republican” is not beside theirs on the ballot, then that’s good enough for me.

I, like the majority of Americans, have been pummeled senseless for 8 long years…

It’s true, the past eight years have taken their toll -- so much so that Moore, like so many liberals, has trouble remembering that the Democrats in Congress eagerly helped Bush pummel him senseless. Why should they be rewarded for collaborating with him?

But Mike, Bush’s name is not going to be on the ballot this year. If he could run, I have no doubt he’d be trying, but thanks to the Twenty-Second Amendment to the US Constitution, he can only serve for two terms. And because I’m hopelessly pessimistic (about the Democrats, mind you), I’d almost be curious to see what would happen if he could run again. Given his unpopularity even among many Republicans, could he get his party’s nomination? And if he did, could the Democrats defeat him? Frankly I doubt it, but fortunately we don’t have to find out. And they’ll still have Ralph Nader to blame if McCain beats whoever the Democrats take for their lawful nominee.

I’ve been surprised when liberal Democrats have started ranting in my presence that they want to see Bush defeated this year. I gently point out that he isn’t running. I know, they pant, but I want to see him defeated. (He isn’t running.) I know, but I want to see that bastard defeated, I want to see him go down… It’s like listening to a feral wino muttering about the International Space Jews who’ve put wires inside his head to control his thoughts. “Reality-based”? They flatter themselves. What seriously scares me is how out of touch with reality most Democrats are; they aren’t more or less so than Republicans in general, they just have their own separate fantasy universe, as the Republicans have theirs.

A friend asked me last weekend, a propos my post on Barack Obama’s “proselytizing” remark, what I expect from a pro-gay presidential candidate. Well, it would help for such a candidate not to use bigoted and nearly forgotten clichés about us (this was the first time I can recall having seen “proselytize” used with regard to gays in a decade or more). But as I told my friend, that remark is not why I don’t support or trust Obama. On gay issues he’s quite good, all told, for a mainstream politician. But I’m not a one-issue voter, and I have plenty of other reasons for not supporting him. If I did support him and plan to vote for him, words like “proselytize” would set off alarms in my head, and I would criticize him (I hope) in the same terms I’ve been using here.