Clinton in blackface

Anybody who knew me back in the nineties will recall that I was no fan of Bill Clinton, the Democrat who made me feel nostalgic for the liberalism of the Nixon administration. If you happened to notice me driving down the road on November 12, 1999, when the radio announced that Clinton had signed the repeal of Glass-Steagall, you'd have slowed down and moved into the most distant lane in an effort to avoid a total lunatic.

So now, after eight disastrous years of Bush, we have Obama -- putatively "the change you can believe in." Okay, I believe some changes have taken place. From Bush, we seem to have moved about halfway back to Clinton.

I'm not blaming you for this, America. It's not as if you had a hell of a lot of options -- and electing a (sort of) black guy made a lot of people feel like they were voting for change. The problem was that real change never was an option. The plutocrats were in charge, and they remain in charge. Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, and UBS were among Obama’s top contributors. They gave him the early lead in the “money race” that made his candidacy viable.

In return, he let Robert Rubin create his economic team. Rubin, lest we forget, spent 26 years with Goldman-Sachs before he joined the Clinton administration. Together with acolyte Larry Summers and free-market ideologue Alan Greenspan, he quashed the regulation of derivatives and championed the repeal of Glass Steagall, making the current financial meltdown inevitable. Shortly before I found myself in my car, screaming at the radio, Rubin left the Clinton administration to sign on as senior advisor to Citigroup. Still working in that capacity, he signed on as chief financial advisor to Barack Obama.

So, what would you expect -- specifically, what would you expect of Rubin protégé Timothy Geithner, other than more "lemon socialism?" The private sector will "join" with the public sector to buy toxic assets from the afflicted banks that so generously supported Obama, and reap the rewards of any profits that might be made. Losses, of course, will be absorbed by taxpayers.

Clinton -- either one -- would have behaved no differently. On the other hand, if Hillary were president now, it's possible that a few other decisions would have been less Bushlike. A couple that come to mind are Obama's failure to overturn the Bush order allowing "faith-based" organizations receiving government funds to discriminate, based on religion, in hiring; and the continued use of "state secrets" as an excuse to protect Bush administration war criminals.

Well, maybe she'd have been no better. The same oligarchs who supported his campaign supported hers as well.

Turning point?

"Comes the revolution," my mother used to say, imitating her grandfather's Yiddish accent, "we'll all eat pitches and krim."

It was my introduction to irony, and, as a young child, I totally didn't get it. We ate peaches (canned) and cream (sour) as often as we liked -- and George Washington had won the revolution way back in olden times. I caught on later, though, in the sixties, when my radical friends and I were busy changing the world -- and it seems that Mom first heard the phrase from great-grandpa back in the thirties, when she and her radical friends were busy changing the world.

A sizable chunk of the population of the United States seems to think the revolution will be starting tomorrow, at the Obama inauguration -- to which I reply, "pitches and krim." Disappointment, I'm afraid, is inevitable. George Washington really did win the revolution -- the bourgeois revolution -- way back in "olden times," and the plutocrats have been firmly in charge ever since.

This is not to say that some revolutionary change didn't take place in the thirties, with the coming of welfare capitalism, or in the sixties, with the expansion of the welfare state and the gains accomplished for civil rights. It's just that the changes didn't match the expectations. They never do.

So what can we expect of Obama? Anybody who's been paying attention can see that while he speaks like an idealist, his actions are guided entirely by pragmatism. He will not expend "political capital" fighting the health care lobby, so we will not have the single-payer health insurance system we so desperately need. He will not stand up to the financial industry, weakened as it is, so we will continue the long-standing practice of socializing losses and privatizing profits. (Yes, taxpayers, you soon will own a shitload of "toxic assets.") He will not instruct his Justice Department to prosecute the leaders of the outgoing administration for war crimes, and he's likely to entagle us in Afghanistan just as thoroughly and painfully as Kennedy entangled us in Vietnam.

I think the best we can hope for is the reversal of some of the catastrophic mistakes of Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush II -- although nearly thirty years of free-market excess aided and abetted by government is not likely to disappear in eight, despite the clear failure of Milton Friedman/Alan Greenspan economics. Still, all of us can be happy that The Worst President In The History Of The United States Of America will no longer be around to make things even worse.

Is that enough of a "turning point" for you? I hope so.

Would you like some fries with that crow?

Did you see it? Did you see it? It was like Toto yanking away the curtain to reveal that the Wizard was, essentially, just another schmuck (except, in this case, most of the world would have preferred to stay in Oz and not go plummeting back down to Depression era Kansas.) Well, the hearing still was intensely satisfying, at least for me. My only regret is that Milton Friedman died a little too soon, and so never got to eat his own portion of crow while watching his immensely destructive life's work going down in flames.


Speaking of screw-up economists, one of the architects of Reaganomics, Arthur Laffer, was on Bill Maher's show tonight. Remember the "Laffer curve," which purported to show how cutting taxes would increase government revenues? That bit of graphical nonsense was discarded years ago, but the stupid idea it was supposed to "scientifically prove" remained a basic tenet of the Republican faith, and is still alive and well in the McCain campaign.

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It's now the next day, and I have to say I have a certain amount of admiration of Greenspan for eating his crow with an appropriate mix of contrition and dignity. We'll never know, but my guess is that Friedman would have choked on his own bile before admitting he was wrong.

Confronted by nothing more threatening than Maher and the bunch of college kids in Maher's audience, Laffer did the slippery-slide and disavowed his responsibility for three decades of ideologically driven economic auto-immolation. Perhaps, had he appeared on Maher's show instead of before Congress, Greenspan might have done the same -- but maybe not.

One way or another, if I were on the board of Mercer University, I'd try to find a way out of that unfortunate contract with Arthur Laffer. Tell me, provost, how are Soneshine Partners doing these days? How well is Alpha Theory software doing at predicting current market trends?

No matter. History has spoken. Laffer is a loser, and the epistomological paradigm shift is upon us. Maybe. Sigh.