[Peace-discuss] CounterPunch on the Democrats

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Amusing, disturbing, and I think largely correct. Come hear Cockburn's
CounterPunch colleague at my place on Saturday afternoon at 3pm -- Jeffrey
St. Clair will talk about "Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Politics
of Lesser Evils."  --CGE]

	The Capitulation of the Left is Almost Unprecedented
	Bush, Kerry and Empire
	By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

As one who regards Gerry Ford as our greatest president (least time
served, least damage done, husband of Betty, plus Stevens as his
contribution to the Supreme Court) I’d always imagined the man from
Grand Rapids would never be surpassed in sheer slowness of thought. When a
reporter asked Ford a question it was like watching that great sequence in
Rossellini’s film about Louis XIV, when a shouted command is relayed at
a stately pace through a dozen intermediaries from the kitchen to the
royal ear. In Ford’s case, to watch a message negotiate the neural path
from ear to cortex was to see a hippo wade through glue.

But I think Bush has Ford beat. Had he ever made a mistake, the reporter
asked at that White House press conference last Tuesday. The president’s
face remained composed, masking the turmoil and terror raging within, as
his cerebellum went into gridlock. It should have been easy for him. Broad
avenues of homely humility beckoned him on. “John, no man can stand
before his Creator as I do each day and say he is without error…”
Reagan would have hit the ball out of the park. But the President froze.
He said he’d have to think it over.

Indeed, accounts of Bush’s comportment by former associates such as Paul
O’Neill suggest a Ford-like core to the man, of tranquil inertness,
penetrated in Ford’s case by the evil counsels of Kissinger, and in
Bush’s by the advisories of all his malign viziers. Why bother
impeaching Bush, as Nader is now wasting our time urging? Leave Bush
alone. Impeach Scalia and indict Cheney, two realistic and useful
political objectives.

Behind the liberal hysteria over Bush, as a demon of monstrous, Hitlerian
proportions, I get the sense of a certain embarrassment, that the man is
bringing the imperial office into embarrassment and disrepute. Hence all
the plaintive invocations of the distress of “America’s allies”,
hopefully to be cured by a competent rationalizer of the empire’s
affairs, like John Kerry. But should not all opponents of the American
Empire’s global reach rejoice that but would not the world be a safer
and conceivably a better place if the allies saw separate paths as the
sounder option? Gabriel Kolko, that great historian of American empire,
has been arguing powerfully (most recently in our CounterPunch newsletter)
to this effect and I agree with him.

With leadership of barely conceivable arrogance and incompetence (Bremer
alone is a case study in the decline in quality of such American leaders
in the past 50 years) the US has managed the amazing feat of uniting
Iraqis in detestation of their presence, and of leaving itself with zero
palatable options. Amid this bloody disaster, with popular distaste for
the occupation of Iraq swelling up in the polls Kerry, with McCain at his
elbow, has been goading Bush into sending more troops. As a prospective
supervisor of empire, Kerry sends forth the word that the Democrats are
the Second Party of War.

Given Nader’s aversion to a strident stance on a straight anti-war
platform, it looks as though the only decent option is Harry Browne of the
Libertarians. Kucinich? As he himself recently put it, he’s a
“tugboat” hauling castaways back into Democratic port in time for the
fall regatta. I heard him on NPR the other day, first saying that he was
staying in the race to show There Is Another Democratic Path, then
refusing the interviewer’s invitation to criticize Kerry.

With hardly a backward glance --or forward look --the bulk of the
surviving American left has blithely joined the Democratic Party center,
without the will to inflict debate, the influence to inform policy or the
leverage to share power. The capitulation of the left --a necessarily
catch-all word --is almost without precedent. By accepting the premises
and practices of party unity the left has negated the reasons for its own
existence.

Let me produce a rabbit from its hat. I wrote that preceding paragraph,
the one beginning “with barely a backward glance”, 20 years ago with
Andrew Kopkind in a piece we did for The Nation in the summer 1984 about
Mondale’s candicacy, where we noted the Democratic Party’s commitment
to “the essential elements of Reaganism: continued military expansion…
further degradation of the welfare system, denials of black demands for
equity; and unqualified submission to the imperatives of the corporate
system.”

Any words you think should be changed?

And talking of the imperatives of the corporate system, Kerry announced on
April 7 that his primary economic policy initiative would be deficit
reduction. Welcome back, Robert Rubin, the man who ran Clinton’s
economic policy on behalf of Wall Street. Kerry’s economic advisers,
Altman and Sperling, acknowledge they consult with Rubin all the time. If
you still foolishly believe that the economy in Clinton-time was properly
guided for the long-term benefit of the many, as opposed to short-term
bonanzas for the wealthy few, I strongly urge you to read Robert
Pollin’s Contours of Descent, which I hailed here last November. In line
with that analysis, and after some useful exchanges with Pollin, let me
note major problems with the Kerry program.

Deficit reduction will do nothing to directly promote the growth of jobs,
the lack of which is now the fundamental problem in the economy. As Pollin
remarks, “It is also a political disaster for the Democrats to again
latch onto deficit reduction rather than jobs as their major economic
theme. The false premise of Rubinomics is that deficit reduction itself
promotes economic growth, and thereby jobs, by lowering long-term interest
rates. This is what Rubin and company think happened in the 1990s. But
they are wrong. What actually happened in the 1990s is that we had an
unprecedented stock market bubble. Because of the bubble, rich people and
corporations engaged in a huge wave of borrowing and spending that drove
the economy upward, only to crash back down when the bubble collapsed.”

Even if Rubin were right about deficit reduction stimulating growth of
GDP, what is clear in the current "recovery" is that GDP growth alone does
not promote job growth. That is exactly what we mean by the "jobless
recovery". The Democrats should instead be talking about a major jobs
program, through refinancing state and local government spending in
education, health, and social welfare. Aside from the social benefits from
these programs, they also provide the biggest expansion of jobs for a
given dollar amount of spending. A million dollars spent on education,
Pollin calculates, would produce roughly twice the number of jobs as the
same amount spent on the military.

But Kerry’s other shoe, war on the deficit as well as war in Iraq, has a
more sinister import. Deficits aren’t intrinsically bad, and the current
one is scarcely unparalleled in recent US economic history. But Bush’s
deficits, amassed in the cause of tax breaks for the very rich and war
abroad, provide the premise of a fiscal crisis to starve social spending.
It’s the Greenspan Two Step: endorse the tax cuts, then say, as the Fed
chairman did in February, that the consequent deficits require an
onslaught on social security. Remember, Bill Clinton was all set to start
privatizing social security, until the allurements of the diviner Monica
postponed the onslaught.

There are progressive ways to close the deficit. For example, Pollin
reckons that if we imposed a very small tax on all financial
transactions-i.e. all stock, bond, and derivative trades, starting with a
0.5 percent tax on stocks and scaling the other appropriately - we could
raise roughly $100 billion right there, or roughly 20 percent of next
year's projected deficit, even if we also assume financial market trading
fell by an implausibly large 50 percent as a result of the tax.

A tax on financial transactions? Now you’re talking, but not about
anything you might expect from the Democratic Party or John Kerry.

	***