I wouldn't get into the absolutist/relativist thing. I'd say the local right wingnuts will pick up any old excuse to dump on anybody who's not in line with current "right" thought. The only "abosolute" thing there is the nuts part. Anyway, I had to look up a bit from the local rag that I thought you'd like, it's a book review but I also found a recent straight editorial by the same guy that's good and of current interest.
BUSH'S NEW RIGHT IS THE OLD WRONG
Madison Capital Times; Madison, Wis.; Nov 2, 2001; John Nichols;
The "new economy" was already collapsed into the first stages of an old-fashioned recession before Sept. 11. But in the aftermath of Sept. 11, the new economy really took a hit.
No, we're not talking an economic hit. Worse! The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon kicked the philosophical underpinnings out from under the unfettered market's castle in the air.
For more than a decade, the U.S. Congress - whether under the control of Democrats or Republicans - had embraced the wholly incredible notions that free markets could cure all ills and that anything the public sector does, the private sector could do better. Had Congress continued to follow that theory, its immediate reaction to Sept. 11 would have been to say: Let's keep the federal government out of these rescue and recovery operations.
But that wasn't the response, was it?
Instead, a Congress that had for months claimed to have no money to spend suddenly found $20 billion for New York, $20 billion for the military-industrial complex and $15 billion for airline executives whose golden parachutes had failed. In other words, the response of congressional Republicans and Democrats was to start spending money as fast as the mint could print it.
Roll over, John Maynard Keynes, and tell FDR the news! Suddenly the government-be-damned crowd was singing, "The public sector is all right."
Immediately, the mandarins of corporate capital - from the Wall Street Journal editorial page to the Heritage Foundation's glimmering headquarters in Washington - began spinning the unquestioning media. Yes, yes, of course, the public sector should be bailing out major corporations and their investors, the line went. But no, no, the spin continued, government spending to aid the laid-off employees of those corporations would be a very bad idea. Socialism for corporations, a free market for the people, went the lie. And it was frosted with the "oh, by the way" call for granting President Bush "fast track" authority to create a corporate-friendly, worker-unfriendly, borderless business fantasyland to be called the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
This absurd scenario - which continues to play out as Congress debates an economic stimulus package designed to have laid-off workers finance tax breaks for the nation's largest corporations - has not come as news to Thomas Frank. The Chicago-based founding editor of The Baffler penned a brilliant book last year, "One Market Under God," which exposed the utter fallacy of the "free markets good, public investment and regulation bad" market populism that pretty much defined elite "thinking" in the 1990s.
Marshaling facts and fury, Frank used his book to expose the "tableaux of greed, legislative turpitude, and transparently self- serving sophistry" of the market's proselytizers - from the comically pro-corporate Thomas Friedman of the New York Times to Rush Limbaugh to George W. Bush.
No, Frank argued, corporations did not dispense "freedom" with each purchase; nor were "swashbuckling" CEOs the contemporary defenders of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And when few others were doing so, Frank explained that Bill Gates was not a charming eccentric with a flair for the technical and a digital dream of one big happy wired world; rather, Gates was an old-fashioned robber baron with an arsenal of new weapons to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.
Like the boy who recognized the emperor's nudity, Frank pointed out that "the logic of business is coercion, monopoly, and the destruction of the weak, not choice' or service.' "
In a wonderful afterword to the new paperback edition, Frank skewers the remaining defenders of a new economy that is rapidly losing its luster. Noting Bush's determined clinging to the lies of the '90s - as evidenced of late by his against-all-logic promotion of corporate tax cuts, "fast track" and private airport "security" - Frank suggests that Bush is practicing "the most pro-business politics in 70 years."
But as the lie of the new economy and the unfettered market is exposed, he says Bush may soon find himself and his ideology going the way of another Republican free marketeer. Once Americans recognize that Bush's new right is the old wrong, Frank writes in a delicious closing line to a delicious book, "once we confront the slick patter of market populism with the true language of economic democracy, we will send Bush and his corporate cronies the way of Herbert Hoover."
One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy
By Thomas Frank
Anchor Books
436 pages, $14.95
WOULD GOP CHEER PRESIDENT GORE?
Madison Capital Times; Madison, Wis.; Nov 1, 2001; John Nichols;
With the masters of war falling short of mastery, anthrax blowing in the wind and Cabinet secretaries tangled up in bureaucracy, the word around Washington is that George W. Bush just dispatched an e- mail to Al Gore.
"Jeb found another 600 Democratic votes in Florida," the e-mail goes. "Al, the job is yours."
Of course, that's absurd. Florida Gov. Jeb Bush does not know how to count Democratic votes. Besides, George Bush the Elder would never allow a son of his to relinquish the White House the family "won" back on the wings of butterfly ballots and a tap from Katherine Harris' magic wand.
But, just for the sake of argument, let's imagine that the Supreme Court had not decided to end last fall's Florida recount and that the final tabulation had - as Bush lawyers clearly suspected it would - handed the presidency to Gore. And let's assume, as is only a little bit unfair to the former vice president, that Gore would have handled the response to the Sept. 11 attacks with the same combination of high-flying rhetoric and short-of-the-mark strategies.
How do we think congressional Republicans, talk radio personalities and "brains on hold, bandwagon on overdrive" television pundits would have cheered their president on?
Would congressional Republicans have said, as so many Democrats have, that there is no place for serious discourse about the administration's management of war, anthrax or civil liberties?
Would they have praised Gore for initial restraint in pursuing the war? Would they have been understanding about his defense secretary's failure to coordinate strategy with Afghan rebels until weeks after air raids began? Would they not have questioned the rising civilian toll?
Would they have remained confident in Gore's secretary of state as the international coalition began to fray, with British parliamentarians calling for an immediate bombing halt and Pakistan - the most tenuous ally - growing ever more chaotic?
Would they have cheered Gore's creation of an Office of Homeland Security?
Would they have been understanding about Gore's secretary of health and human services suggesting that the first guy to die from anthrax must have drunk water from the wrong river?
Would they have accepted the "mistakes were made" replies of federal bureaucrats to the deaths of blue collar postal workers whose pay grade was not high enough to merit the attention of the fearless anthrax hunters?
Would they have nodded approvingly as Gore's attorney general repeatedly announced "high alert" terrorism warnings but refused to explain why?
Would they have cheerfully endorsed an "anti-terrorism" law that assaults dozens of cherished civil liberties but does not promise any realistic progress toward greater security?
Despite their pronouncements of patriotism and denunciations of dissent, one assumes that America's conservative leadership class would be perhaps a bit questioning of a President Gore. And rightly so. If Gore - the choice of a clear plurality of Americans on Nov. 7, 2000 - were handling the current circumstance as Bush is, there would be reason to praise some of his actions. But there would as well be a need to question his missteps - not for partisan points, but because a democracy functions best when there is engaged dialogue about public policy.
* It is that engaged dialogue that has been sorely lacking in recent weeks - especially in Washington. The diminution of the discourse and the denial of dissent have not merely damaged democracy. They have prevented the Bush administration from responding as well as might have been to deadly serious threats - just as a similar failure to debate would have prevented Al Gore from ably serving the nation. |
