2¢worth

The Heart of Darkness

"Their talk was the talk of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless without
hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage; there was not
an atom of foresight... in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem
aware these things are wanted for the work of the world."

Joseph Conrad
---------------------------------------------------------

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired,
signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,
those who are cold and are not clothed."

President Dwight D. Eisenhower
April 16, 1953

=================================

Leave No Millionaire Behind

Driven by hollow political priorities, the Bush administration's disastrous
economic policies are undermining our national ideals.

By Arthur I. Blaustein
July 21, 2003


The President and his party have cooked up the ultimate recipe for keeping
political power. A nation in a constant state of anxiety -- over the thereat
of terrorism, or a potential war -- is a nation off balance. And that
insecurity is the perfect cover to divert public attention from the
country's serious domestic problems and the administration's political
agenda.

The "Bush doctrine" opens the door to a series of pre-emptive wars against
"evil" regimes, ostensibly to protect the United States and bring security,
stability, safety and democracy to the citizens of Damascus, Tehran, and
Pyongyang -- as the president claims to be doing in Baghdad and Kabul.
Meanwhile, the administration shows little or no concern for the security,
stability and safety of the citizens of Los Angeles, New York, Cleveland, or
thousands of other cities and small towns across America, who are facing
enormous economic and social difficulties.

Just like in the "The Wizard of Oz," when we finally get to see who is
operating the smoke-puffing machine, we find a consummate pitchman. In
Bush's case, the man behind the screen is a flag-waving, lapel-pin wearing,
anti-terrorist fear monger who labels his opponents anti-patriotic. He has
done a clever job of manipulating the mass media, but in reality his smooth
imagery and charming personality are subtly undermining America's values.
While he composes hymns to individualism, Sunday piety, trickle-down
economics, and family values, he is trying to gut every program providing
for social, economic, and environmental justice. America's families need
less pious rhetoric, and more policies geared toward a healthy economy,
secure jobs, decent health care, affordable housing, quality public
education, renewable energy and a sustainable environment. Bush seems
unable -- or unwilling -- to grasp that the government has an important
leadership role in this. In fact, the only policy that Bush seems energized
by is one of tax giveaways for the rich and for corporate America.

At present, there exists an air of suspended belief over the radical changes
of the past two years. That is because the layoffs, shutdowns, cutbacks, and
reduced paychecks have been obscured by the events of September 11 and the
nation's subsequent focus on terrorist alerts and the Iraq war. But those
changes are taking a huge toll. Bush's economic policy, which in turn
determines social policy, is much like the iceberg waiting in the path of a
steaming Titanic.

Bush does not seem to understand that, while it is not a sin to be born to
privilege, it is a sin to spend your life defending it. John F. Kennedy and
Franklin D. Roosevelt understood that. They knew the narrowness privilege
can breed. This administration, despite its early pledges to provide a
policy of "compassionate conservatism" has in fact adopted policies that
amount to a war against the poor and the middle class. The tax and budget
cuts were not made in order to jumpstart the economy or balance the budget;
they were simply massive cash transfers. Social programs are being slashed
to pay for tax giveaways for the wealthy and new defense contracts for arms
makers who just happen to be big campaign contributors. Moreover, this was
accomplished in a policy vacuum. The administration has not provided the
American people with a strategic vision as to how this excessive and bloated
arms build-up fits into our larger defense, anti-terrorist, or foreign
policy. Is it in the national interest to relegate our most precious
assets -- our human and natural resources -- to the junk pile while we
increase the pace of an arms race where overkill has long been achieved? Do
we really need to spend $9 billion on a missile defense system that doesn't
work?

Thomas Jefferson warned us that we could be free or ignorant, but not both.
We have not taken that warning to heart. We have not had a serious national
debate about the Bush administration's policies because the mass media have
treated politics -- as well as economic and social policy -- as
entertainment: a combination of hype and palliative. The political and
economic life of the country has been reduced to little more that a struggle
for partisan power, the results not unlike the score of a football game:
BUSH WINS AGAIN or SENATE DEMS BEATEN. There seems to be no sense of higher
good, no question of national purpose, no hope for critical judgment. Hype
has impoverished our political debate, undermining the very idea that public
discourse can be educational and edifying -- or that national public policy
can grow out of reflective discussion and shared political values. We have
sought simplistic answers to complex problems without even beginning to
comprehend our loss.

Which brings us to the difficult and complex issue of the inter-relationship
between America's economic and social policy, and how these policies are
shaped by politics in Washington. A fundamental assumption underlies the
administration's domestic approach -- an assumption so ill-conceived that it
seriously jeopardizes any prospects for solving our nation's pressing
domestic needs. It is the illusion that economic policy can be separated
from social policy.

This is impossible, and the consequences of believing it are grave. By
separating economic theory from social policy, and by pursuing the former at
the expense of the latter, the administration has adopted a strategy of
brinkmanship that could lead to social disaster. The drastic cuts being made
in basic social and human service programs will exact painful and immediate
social and human costs, and they will also appear as direct financial
costs -- in terms of illiteracy, incarceration, and ill-health, among
others -- at future times in different ledgers.

The administration's contention that renewed economic growth as a
consequence of tax cuts for the rich will eventually "trickle down" to the
poor flies in the face of everything we know about poverty today. The best
research indicates the opposite. Growth in the private economy has had a
declining role in reducing poverty, and virtually all of the reduction in
poverty since the mid-1960s has been brought about by the expansion of
national social insurance and income-transfer programs of the kind now under
attack by the Bush administration.

In addition to the massive tax cuts, the administration proposes to
privatize or turn over to the states vast portions of the nation's social,
education, housing and health programs -- a move that amounts to reneging on
our social and moral commitments as a nation. The real issue is not public
versus private or federal versus state; rather, it is the diminution or
avoidance of any national standards of responsibility and accountability.
Worse than that, Mr. Bush seems to be denying that this responsibility even
exists. Successful and effective national programs are being replaced with
an inequitable, inconsistent patchwork of systems run by states -- a
patchwork that is restrictively financed, more bureaucratic, less
accountable, and subject to intense local, political, and fiscal pressures.
Instead of the more efficient government that Bush promises, we will have
fifty bureaucratic and anachronistic messes: government by provisional
catastrophe. The question becomes whether basic human services will be
provided at all.

For true conservatives, the ideological implications behind Bush's economic
policies must be disturbing, in that they depart from the genuine
conservative philosophies that have played such an important role in
American history. Historically, conservatives have not promised lower taxes
or economic privatism. Traditionally, conservative leaders have focused on
the underlying problems of the human community -- issues of leadership, of
equality of opportunity, of continuity and order, of the obligations of the
strong to the weak, and of the safeguards needed to keep the privileged from
abusing their power.

By contrast, the Bush administration encourages us to revert to our basest
inclinations: Look out for number one; write off those who can't make it as
shiftless, a drag on the economy. Our moral decline deepens as we condone
the sheer political power of special and self-serving private economic
interests -- wealthy campaign contributors and corporate powers -- over the
legitimate moral authority that represents our nation's best public
interests. Rather than opportunity, equality, justice, and vitality, the
Bush prescription for economic stimulus amounts to inequality, economic
cronyism, and acquiescence. People programs are out and tax avoidance
schemes are in. Human needs are made subordinated to political and technical
arrogance.

Recently, I took the opportunity to reread Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and
the Federalist Papers, and recalled that our founding fathers were well
aware that politics and economics were interrelated faces of power, each
necessitating its own checks and balances. What impressed me most, though,
was their mature leadership, one that was based on a genuine commitment to
the struggle for social, political, and environmental justice as well as
economic opportunity. A commitment to this sense of public interest is just
as important today.

Only those people have a future, and only those people can be called humane
and historic, who have an intuitive sense of what is significant in both
their national and public institutions, and who value them. It is this
conviction and the continuing belief in the common-sense vision of the
American promise that demand that we begin a serious national dialogue over
our country's economic and social policies. The Bush administration's
radical and dangerous changes have occurred without any serious national
debate. Mr. Bush seems to think that his electoral "mandate," as suspect as
it was, has changed our government from a representative democracy to
economic royalism.

The Bush economic policies -- and the overtly antisocial political
priorities driving them -- are not based on a commitment to any high
principles such as freedom, liberty, equality, justice, or opportunity,
although such pieties are mouthed at the swivel of a camera. The
administration's policies instead are based on the very narrow personal
prejudices and biases of a group of men who have been motivated by the
acquisition of money and power. Bush and Cheney have constructed a
hypothesis to fit a simple notion: "The plutocracy is good to me, so I'll be
good to the plutocracy."

For the past two years I have listened carefully to the President, his chief
advisors, and the neo-conservative right. All of it has reminded me of a
passage in The Heart of Darkness. Joseph Conrad put it this way:

"Their talk was the talk of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless without
hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage; there was not
an atom of foresight... in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem
aware these things are wanted for the work of the world."

Conrad's words capture the radical frenzy in Washington; they reflect the
mood and the moral nullity of the reactionary enterprise that seeks to tear
apart the public good. The Bush administration just doesn't get it. No
country can sustain itself, much less grow, on a fare of smooth one-liners,
rerun ideas, hot-house theories, paranoia, and official policy
pronouncements borrowed from Orwell's 1984; where recession is recovery, war
is peace and a social policy based on aggressive hostility is compassion.
What do you think?

Arthur I. Blaustein is a professor of economic and social policy at the
University of California, Berkeley. He was chair of the President's National
Advisory Council on Economic Opportunity during the Carter Administration.
His most recent books are Make a Difference and The American Promise:
Justice and Opportunity.

http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2003/30/we_481_01.html