alias Bruce.

You Name It.

I saw a bumper sticker like this one on a truck the other day.

What a tribute to the awe-inspiringly seductive powers of delusion. For the sake of a sought-after feeling of potency, or a fearful swipe at the specter of a black president, or a sense of heroic devotion to a single cause (e.g., guns), gaggles of scared and struggling folks are able to convince themselves that by nodding at the power of citizen-stomping corporations in a near-depression economy they are "keeping their freedom and their money." This while the New York Times reports that national unemployment has hit 17.5 percent when you factor in those who are seeking jobs, those who have given up looking, and those who are working part-time because they can't find full-time jobs.

We could detour here into a rant about far-right gullibility and brain failure, but why? It is hardly news that the back-slapping refrain of, "You've got yours, just like us, and don't let those people take any of it away from you" has been the ruling class's most effective sop for white wage slaves ever since the days of black non-wage slavery.

I heard a Republican say on the radio a few days ago that the rise of so-called social conservatism has been the worst thing that ever happened to the G.O.P. Its passing off a mob-mentality moralism as "conservatism," he said, has splintered the party's planks of true conservatism: those being belief in small government, maximum market competition, staying out of people's private lives, etc. This isn't news, either, since we know very well that today's farthest right is not "conservative" at all but a loose posse of reactionaries who like big government and violation of individual rights just fine when it does what they want: punishing women for abortions, using military and police surveillance and violence with abandon, detaining assorted feared "others" without due process, passing laws forbidding gay people to marry, and so on.

So all of this gets me to thinking: We need to make it a public point to delete the word "conservative" from the terms we use to describe such people, and substitute another.

How about "coercive?" As in, "Social coercives have shown support for a measure that would make public the names and medical records of women who have abortions." (This is true, by the way.) Or as in, "In an intra-party conflict among Republicans, coercives are calling for harsh government policies toward illegal immigrants, while business-oriented conservatives are not."

I'm still mulling over other possible terms. Maybe you'll want to as well. It's definitely time to change the lexicon. Calling people "conservatives" when they embrace government-as-God's-goon just won't cut it.

The Invisible Claw.

Man. These days are a true test for free-market disciples who have been telling us, for all these years of deregulation, to trust the markets.

Yes, I know: the Bush II (and Clinton and Bush I and Reagan) administrations were always bogus trumpeters of "free-market" policy: in industries such as health care, media, and finance, conglomerates' state-assisted steamrolling of true customer choice and protection was the real game.

But now Adam Smith has wrought his ruthless and inevitable get-back. And the self-proclaimed invisible-handers of recent decades now have a real chance to test their faith. Badly-run firms selling bad products are doing what the market says they are supposed to do: fail. This is not the fault of the thousands of good-faith GM employees and dealers who booked passage on the Titanic and are now being tossed without lifeboats. Nor is it the fault of good-faith investors who thought their retirements were secure. It is the fault of the Darwinism of capitalism itself (an attribute that free-marketeers claim to revere), and it is the fault of an electoral system wherein the influence of campaign donations (and the spinning door between government and industry) begets policy that has propped up industry losers and defeated Smith's intended thinning of the corporate herd.

What we need from Washington is preventive regulatory policy that nixes rampant conglomerate collusion and funny-money financial schemes. We need a government equipped and willing to take massive therapeutic action to help citizens survive and get back on their feet when industry breaks. And we need the removal of corporate money from the electoral process in order to have a government that will work that way. I hate to put it that bluntly, but that's what it comes down to. As long as private industry pays for policy via the campaigns of candidates, we will get private-dominated policy.

President Obama, as a cool and compassionate healer of traumatic injury, is the chosen and necessary figure of the moment to help American industry save itself from its worst impulses. He will be a huge help for a broken country. But Obama cannot and will not go so deep as to remove the monkey wrench from the heart of the machine. If we want a country run in the public interest, we need to ban a system of private-sector bribery of those we elect to run it. A president who is up to that task has yet to appear.

Saying the F-Word Aloud.

Robert Freeman has a March 15 piece at Common Dreams that begins:

In early 1919, Germany put in place a new government to begin rebuilding the country after its crushing defeat in World War I. But the right-wing forces that had led the country into the War and lost the War conspired even before it was over to destroy the new government, the "Weimar Republic." They succeeded.

The U.S. faces a similar "Weimar Moment." The devastating collapse of the economy after eight years of Republican rule has left the leadership, policies, and ideology of the right utterly discredited. But, as was the case with Germany in 1919, Republicans do not intend to allow the new government to succeed. They will do everything they can to undermine it. If they are successful, the U.S. may yet go the way of Weimar Germany.

It is a question we cannot afford to ignore at a time of ostensible political hope for American progressives and centrists. Yes, we have beaten back the lipsticked dogs of Bushism for the time being, and we have a democratically-inclined leader of inspiring potential in the White House. But the sneaking appeal of fascism in the United States is something that deserves more than whispers and dismissive ridicule. It has been perking its ears and skulking around America's shuttered factories and shattered dreams for some time now, and it could prove as seductive to the heartbroken in Boise or Boston in the early 21st century as it did in Berlin in the 1930s.

Freeman writes terrifyingly well about this: the way in which the German hard right fanned the terror and rage of capitalism's and war's biggest losers; the stubborn obstructionism with which the political opposition savaged the moderate new German government's attempts at reform and recovery; the ease with which a resultantly crushed population turned its rage upon a proffered set of alleged demons. It's all way too familiar: the sneering demagoguery, the serial tarring of so-called enemies, the ruthless desire for the new Administration's optimism to fail, the willingness of a desperate corporatist party to take down the country in order to revive its own fortunes.

You can see where Freeman is going with this: There is a cadre of Republicans in 2009 -- including the fist-pumping Rush wing of the party -- who would rather rebuild their political base on the bitterness of total economic collapse than be left in the political lurch by a Democratic-led recovery.

Some of Freeman's tone gets a little overheated for me, including the malevolent language with which he describes our ultimately being colonized by our Chinese fiscal masters; even if his scenario holds true, his lingo here smacks of a kind of Yellow Peril. Do I detect an ethnic undertone here, Robert? What's up with that?

But on the politics of what we might call fascist drift -- an insidious trend that Bush II kicked into higher gear with his post-9/11 culture of fear and anger -- Freeman nails it. Read his piece. If we try to laugh away this issue, we may yet awaken one day to find that we are in another country.

Thanks to Karla for the info.

More Than Stupidity.

The dishonesty and silliness of Rush Limbaugh's comments at last week's Conservative Political Action Conference are not worth any elaboration here, although you can read the transcript. But I think a couple of things about the CPAC and its constituency are pretty interesting.

One is the way the headbanger wing of the GOP seems to be taking the party down with it. Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who I think was born seeking the scent of blood, has had a field day portraying Limbaugh as the de facto head of the Republican Party. Meanwhile, House Republican Whip Eric Cantor is laying down rubber backpedaling away from the Limbaugh crowd. As the economy worsens and even Obama's dire warnings look excessively optimistic, Republicans challenged by the rabid right find themselves, ironically, more and more on the side of -- Obama. He, after all, like them, is a corporate politician who is trying to save contemporary American capitalism without devolving to human sacrifice. The political alternatives for Repubs now appear far worse than hashing out a theatrically stormy agreement with Obama. If they stick with the traditional gilded script of tax cuts, which the savvier Repubs are beginning to realize are Monopoly money in the face of this monstrous economic meltdown, they lose. And if they turn and surrender to the embrace of Rush and his rabble, they lose. Their center-right constituency is disappearing: if the economy fully tanks toward depression, the quietly greedy suburban Republican base is likely to dissipate in desperation, leaving two main camps standing: the corporate pragmatists (led by Obama and what is left of the GOP) and the raging paleo-right (led by Limbaugh and others). As a guy working out next to me at the gym commented the other day while Rush moved his mouth silently on the big TV, this is a recipe for a third party, one drawing pretty much on the appeal of embryonic fascism: anger, revenge, obsession with enemies, theocracy, winning back the honor of the humiliated fatherland, and the rest. It could happen. If the bulk of today's Repubs finally run screaming from the wild-eyed right, then Rush's troops will have to go somewhere.

Which leads to the second interesting thing. The populist economic rhetoric of the far right has changed very little in the past 20 years or so, and Rush trotted it out faithfully once more at CPAC with, among others, his claim that the Obama taxation agenda "punishes earners." The trick here is an old one: to rhetorically link the interests of the wealthy with those of struggling wage-workers -- in this case using Rush's vague term "earners" -- under the pretense that what is good for one is good for the other. So we end up with an auditorium full of working- and middle-class and unemployed wage-earners roaring with rage at the prospect of Obama hiking the taxes of those who make $250,000 a year or more, and bellowing for the liberation of the wealthiest 2 percent from threatened tax increases.

Progressives have been asking for decades how so many people who are getting so screwed can be so stupid. The answer, I think, is that they're not.

Sure, many are ignorant and ill-informed, courtesy of Fox and a procession of gizmos and circuses. And there is a certain "I want to get rich, and once I am I want it gamed for me" reverie that goes on. But the point I'm making is that Rush and his ilk get away with transparently false economic arguments not primarily because the audience is stupid but because it is intoxicated with something else: a mean, I'm-going-to-kick-some-ass authoritarianism. Not just Let's fight for what we want, but Let's grind up those bastards. Let's show them who's boss. Look at virtually any far-right issue, and notice how contempt and egotistical aggression pretty much dominate the cause. Taxation: I could be comfortable and successful if the damned government didn't tax my paycheck away and hand it out to black people who don't want to work. Let's wipe up the floor with those goddamned liberals and lazy spongers. Iraq: We're better than those ragheads. Let's kick their insurgent asses. Terrorism: We're better than those ragheads. Let's kick their jealous America-hating asses. Abortion: We're Godlier than the baby-killers. We are the hands of God's wrath. Urban crime: We're better than those weak drug addicts and layabouts and their feral kids. Let's lock up the SOBs, and if they're killers, toast 'em. Religion: Our God knows best, and he'll take this country and lay waste to this heathen world.

You get the idea.

It's all about the feeling: Being the boss. Getting some get-back. Spearing the bad guys. Possessing the blood-coursing power to smite. Being entitled to be in charge. And so of course the other anointed are also seen as entitled to their own share of bad-assed rule: the rich, the military, the quick, the crafty.

That's where we progressives so often go wrong. We gape at the throngs who roar their approval as they get serially fleeced, and we shake our heads at how very, very bad they are at math.

But the fact is they're not even glancing at the math. They're entranced with what, to them, feels like it really counts.

Not Exactly Bipartisan: Addendum.

What is most striking about party-line Republicans' opposition to the Obama stimulus plan is their claim to its offending their sense of fiscal responsibility and their aversion to big-ticket deficit spending. Talk about hypocrisy. This is the party that gave a blank check to George W. Bush's reckless deficit spending for a disastrous and immoral war and to outrageously unnecessary tax benefits for the richest American individuals and corporations. Now, faced with huge federal spending that might actually do some good for the general population and the economy, these same Republicans feign principled revulsion. Spare me.

Not Exactly Bipartisan.

Well, the stimulus package has passed the House, which is a good thing for more than 200 million Americans who have been waiting for eight years for a broken and corrupt government to do something big in their general interest. It's not a perfect bill. But then, a decently honest crane operator with a half-full tank of gas on a desperately-needed construction job is a lot better than a gaggle of lobbyists with shovels. I think the package is certain to also pass the Senate, where, as I heard a radio commentator say yesterday, members represent entire states and not narrower congressional constituencies with local beefs.

The bad thing is the congressional party-line vote -- not a single Republican voted "yea" -- which is a defeat for new President Obama's trumpeted quest for concerted bipartisan action to get a grip on the economic crisis and to invest in ways to rebuild a failing nation, such as education and infrastructure. Current Republicans' stubborn insistences on even more tax cuts, which failed as a purported economic engine for business in the Bush administration and would fail again now, seem to be reflexive holdovers from eight years of supply-side thinking. A healthy chunk of the blame for the antipathy in Congress has to go to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, (photo above, with Majority Leader Steny Hoyer), whose "Yes, we wrote the bill. Yes, we won the election" statement was one of the politically dumbest public gestures we've seen recently, even as a form of understandable Democratic payback for the bullying Republicanism of the Bush years.

I do think the new-era-of-bipartisanship pitch is overrated, and has more to do with Obama's political desires than with putting sound policy into place when Obama-supporting Democrats have solid majorities in both houses. (It is worth remembering that the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 was filibustered for 54 days, and that 95 percent of Southern Democratic senators and 100 percent of Southern Republicans voted against it, while 98 percent of Northern Democrats and 84 percent of Northern Republicans voted in favor of it. Not to draw equivalencies between 1960s southern segregationists and the range of modern Republicans who oppose Obama's bill, which would be absurd. But some bills you have to fight for.) But if your party is going to talk bipartisan talk, Speaker Pelosi, you also have to walk the walk and do what Democrats did in the Senate, which was to sit down and talk with Republicans while drafting policy that the Dems still knew they had the muscle to force through.

One of the big questions (and hopes) about Obama, I think, is whether he truly is the kind of transformative, magnetically compelling politician who can pull people together, at least to a reasonable extent, in a traumatized nation. It's not fair to claim, after this one vote a mere week into his presidency, that he can't. It is fair to continue to ask if he can.

But it is also fair to ask those of us who claim to care about policy to stand up and make some noise. One president does not a government make. Relative silence from a suffering population is one more reason for politicians to continue to feel safe hewing to party-line positions that resist the policy changes most of us want.

Go Detroit!

 

Not exactly fair to the workers. But dead on when it comes to the Big Three management mentality.

Thanks to Barbara for the tip.

Sit-Ins and Outlaws.

We have yet to see whether the sit-in begun last week by 200 workers at the suddenly-closed Republic Windows and Doors plant in Chicago will be resolved quickly, although it looks as if it will, with the State of Illinois now having cut off all business with Bank of America over the bank's denial of survival financing to the company.

This one's bad. According to the New York Times (12/8 and 12/9/08), Republic gave workers just three days' notice of its closure when in fact managers had planned since October to close the plant by January. Worse, workers were shown the door without back pay they were owed. And worse yet, the company's owner quietly laid the groundwork to open a window business in Iowa last month -- lending credence to workers' long-standing fears that the plan all along was to dump the Illinois plant and its employees and reopen more cheaply elsewhere.

Companies have rights to cut expenses and to act in defense of their own survival. They also have a moral and legal obligation to treat workers fairly and to honor promises (back pay, for instance, is no elective matter of soft-hearted managerial largesse). Bank of America appears to share blame through its stonewalled refusal of Republic's requests for payroll financing. This has its roots, you'll recall, in BOA and other banks' years of reckless mishandling of their own loaning capabilities.

Is the Republic sit-in (pictured above) an extreme case or a canary in a coal mine? How many more latent Republics are out there at this moment, squeezed by creditors and hiding from their workers the news of impending closure or large layoffs? How many workers, run through this mill of betrayal in the coming weeks or months, might feel moved to follow the Republic workers' example and either occupy closing plants or sit down on the job?

For a thoughtful look at what is possible, go to Nelson Lichtenstein's December 8 commentary in his CNN column, in which he considers how the Republic scenario does (and doesn't) compare to the sit-downs of workers in 1936-37, when a GM plant took one step too far and a wave of sympathetic sit-downs by fed-up workers swept the country. What we have today is by no means what we had in 1936. But it might also be closer than we think. Avoid a straight-on look at it and we might regret it.

An excerpt from Lichtenstein's piece:

The factory occupation by 200 workers at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago, Illinois, recalls one of the most storied moments in American history, when thousands of Depression-era workers took over their own workplaces, seeking union recognition and better wages.

The pivotal battle began on the morning of December 30, 1936, when shop activists shut down a General Motors factory in Flint, Michigan, to restore the jobs of three of their workmates fired by the company.

When GM agreed to recognize the United Automobile Workers, all sorts of workplaces, from dime stores to shoe shops, caught the spirit. Pie bakers, seamen and movie projector operators sat down. Even before Flint, there had been occupation strikes at Hormel in Austin, Minnesota; Goodyear in Akron, Ohio; and Bendix in South Bend, Indiana. As often as not, they won.

There are big differences between those events and the occupation at Republic Windows and Doors. The Chicago workers already have a union. They seek severance pay, not a raise. Theirs is a protest, not a strike. Rather than disrupt production, they refuse to vacate a closed plant. And their numbers are minuscule in comparison to the half-million American workers who sat down in 1936 and 1937.

Some of the underlying issues, however, are the same: preservation of jobs, economic fairness and the meaning of democracy itself. Even if this occupation is quickly settled, it has exposed perfidy and dramatized justice, as did the sit-downs of the 1930s.

Factory occupations are rare because they violate the everyday laws of property, and for the most part American workers are law-abiding people.

They occur only when workers feel morally aggrieved, when they sense that ownership has itself violated the law, when the boss has become the outlaw in their eyes and in that of the community as well.

For Lichtenstein's entire column, go here.

A Better Bailout.

The financial industry bailout is proving a bust because its bipartisan designers, while having spoken loudly about the need to hold banks accountable, failed to build in a big stick (or even a tiny one) for enforcement. The Government Accounting Office recently declared the bailout toothless, which surprises no one except perhaps those of its architects who lay down to sleep expecting a fairy to deliver results for the hopes placed under their pillows.

Meanwhile, Detroit's automotive CEOs have learned that private jets don't play well as a method of transit for a panhandling trip to Washington. But they persist in calling for an auto industry bailout (about which President-elect Obama is now noncommittal), while in a poll this week 60 percent of Americans disapprove.

Many of us have noticed how swiftly the trumpeted rigors of capitalism wilt into a mumbled version of CEO socialism when the market produces actual consequences for the titans of industry. But since the deregulation era has seen monopolies mega-merge themselves into something approaching a state labor apparatus, the "too big to fail" argument has taken on a good bit of public-interest weight. We have to save the rulers, the claim goes, so that the little people will still have jobs.

But there is an alternative. What if we specifically bailed out consumers and jobs instead of vaguely funding CEO fiefdoms? What if our federal money directly underwrote relief and procedural reform for X number of mortgage- and fund-holders, and X number of productive auto industry positions, instead of filling discretionary coffers for CEOs who have already proven their blindness and greed?  After all, in the event of a bailout, someone, whether CEO or public servant, is going to have to make the judgment of how to throw government money toward productivity. Who is more trustworthy for the task: the CEOs who Lear-Jetted their companies into fiery crashes in the global race for sound investment and well-made sustainable transportation, or a fleet of independent auditors charged with instilling fiscal discipline? Do you go with the proven screw-ups or with the feasible benefits of a new set of eyes? Or, at the very least, with a buttoned-down set of stipulations for how the money is used and with clear legal consequences for failure to comply?

The heart of it, I think, is not whether there is a bailout, but who we choose to bail out.

Loose Ends.

MUTINY ON THE BAILOUT: Aside from the pulsing knot in your stomach when you consider what you thought was going to be your nest egg, what's striking about the implosion of the banking bailout package is that it reflects a greater reluctance among Republicans than Democrats to pour hundreds of billions in public sustenance down the gullet of negligent private industry. That sort of state-capitalist bottle-feeding of the hapless brats of business has been a Republican specialty throughout the Bush years. But in the current massive meltdown, it has been core Republicans who have revolted, telling Bush, in effect, "Hey, since when in a free enterprise system are fat-cat screw-ups protected against their own failures?" while Democrats such as Barney Frank have labored to cobble together a rescue package to save the financial sector's bacon. Two-thirds of Democrats in the House voted for the package. Two-thirds of Republicans voted against it. The GOP rebellion smacks of a Republican turn toward, shockingly, strict fiscal conservatism, which hasn't been Republican policy (although it has been Republican rhetoric) for years. The further irony is that Bush, in this most recent White House plea for taxpayers to aid the rich in order to save ourselves, may for the first time in his presidency have at least part of one foot planted in the public interest. Being pegged for crying wolf -- as in 9/11, WMDs, Iraq, and tax cuts for the wealthy -- is a real bear, isn't it, W?

McCAIN-OBAMA DEBATE #1: Judging strictly by words spoken, the debate was pro forma: McCain attacking dishonestly (he just won't stop pretending that his business-friendly tax, economic and health care plans aren't Bush 3), Obama parrying politely, and both men scurrying to dodge their own flagrant inconsistencies (McCain ducking the elephantine reality that the Iraq war he backed has created most of the security problems he now says we must solve; Iraq war opponent Obama trying to weasel-word his once-clear declaration to set a withdrawal date for the conflict). But what interested me most was the way these two men behaved: McCain petulantly refusing to look at Obama or to address him directly; Obama giving McCain full personal attention and allowing himself on numerous occasions to announce, "John is right;" McCain and his wife nailing themselves to their end of the stage at debate's end, causing the Obamas the symbolic (but noble) concession of walking fully across to McCain's side to shake hands and exchange niceties; Obama calling McCain "John" throughout the debate, which was a subtly assertive gesture for a black man already resented in some white McCain encampments as an uppity Negro. Overall, I thought McCain came off as a threatened, bossy-acting curmudgeon, and Obama as a too-cautious superior opponent who felt it only fair to tie one hand behind his back. I, like scads of other voters, keep wishing that Obama would take off the white gloves. But he does have a real problem: if he casts one flashing glare too many, about 50 million white voters will lock their car doors against him. As I've written before, and as Brent Staples wrote poignantly in a September 21, 2008 New York Times op-ed, a lot of white voters are already afraid of black men and are subconsciously poised to flee Obama if he shows too much 'tude. So the Senator from Niceness is in a bit a of trap: he's a wimp if he doesn't fight back and he's an Angry Black Guy if he does. It's not an enviable position.

CLINTONS, WHERE ARE YOU? Heard much lately from Hillary or Bill in the much-needed defense of their party's nominee in the face of a reinvigorated Republican campaign of smears and lies? Neither have I. Kind of odd that the man who is the most gifted politician of at least the past 20 years, and the one woman best positioned to discredit that faker Sarah Palin, would be so quiet at such a time. If Hillary weren't so highly principled an individual, one might almost wonder if she's figuring how a weakened Obama would improve her chances next time. Let's hope the Clintons have been sharing an unfortunate case of laryngitis and we'll hear more from them soon. See Paul Slansky's "A Note to Bill Clinton" for a more personal approach to this question.

BIDEN-PALIN DEBATE: Well, this will sure be interesting. I never thought I'd see a candidate who stood to benefit even more from low expectations than George W. Bush, but here we are. If Sarah Palin doesn't forget Biden's name or start speaking in Satanic tongues on network television Thursday night, her handlers and followers will declare victory. Given that Joe Biden has six terms' worth of actual geopolitical knowledge, I'm betting that Palin's pit team will aim low, going for rehearsed zinger lines that will score points with club-dragging impressionables in the TV audience or perhaps lashing out at personally vulnerable points in Biden's history. If you're Karl Rove, the wonderful thing about a Sarah Palin is that the cruder and the more belligerently ill-informed she is on national and world affairs, the more her crude, ill-informed public feels she's one of them. It's a no-loss proposition. If she comes off as defiantly snappy, she wins; if she comes off as defiantly brain-dead, she wins. She is, really, the most advanced development yet in the statesmanship-doesn't-matter movement of the far right, a step beyond even W, who was himself a shocking phenomenon of anti-distinctive mediocrity. Palin is comforting proof, to the mentally lazy and the ignorant, that government is bullshit, that anybody can do it, that all it takes is attitude and a sneering our-kind-of-people moxie. The big question, I think, is how many Americans will be suckered by her Mrs.-Palin-Goes-to-Washington act. For reality checks, take a look at Fred Kaplan's Slate article on Palin and foreign policy and Tim Dickinson's Rolling Stone checklist of Palin lies versus facts.