As a result
of Obama's accommodation to Wall Street, the wealth and assets of the US have shifted
so much into the hands of the few that (bipartisan) big-money governance is by now virtually unstoppable. Sadly, even tragically, we have missed what
will probably prove to be our generation's greatest opportunity to reverse the
direction of history. In 2008 and 09,
Wall Street was so hated by the American public that we could easily have
chosen a New Deal type of direction. The
conservative economic policies of the last forty years were in ruins around us. But Obama was afraid (or otherwise unwilling)
to point this out. So this golden
opportunity was squandered. Obama had a
once-in-a-lifetime chance to take our financial oligarchy apart -- not just for
electoral reasons, but because that was what real democracy required. Yet despite the right's perception of him,
already, as Robespierre reincarnated, he didn't do it! Yes, he may win re-election this fall, but at
best he will be remembered as just another Clinton -- a guy who "triangulated'
and got the best deals he could, while supposedly facing down a right-wing
nation. That the nation isn't right wing, and that it would have followed him had he
led with boldness, is something that people like you and I will get to meditate
on sourly for the rest of our lives.
But what
about the bait and switch of the "small business operator" vs. the
emergence of global corporations, many based in the US? One of the biggest myths of the populist right,
that the Wall Street/global corporate overseers exploit, is that some kind of
absolute "free market" benefits the US. The reality is that with the global trade
agreements, global financial markets and
corporations don't have significant national allegiances. Multinational corporations put small business out of business! -- think pharmacists, hardware stores,
clothes stores, small grocer, bakeries, book stores etc. These global corporations belong to the
market place and labor forces of the
world, not to the US. But there are
no Tea Party members who are out protesting companies like Walmart or General
Electric.
The
important fact here is that the Tea Party, and to some degree the larger
conservative revival generally, is a movement of small business. Small biz carries with it its own variety of
populism, which is sometimes mistaken as representative of the interests of the
people as a whole, but which almost
always tends to act as a front for the larger corporate interests. So:
Small merchants are out there in the
town square, mad as hell about the Wall Street bailouts, rallying the public
with them. But their solution is always to get government "off their backs"
and to defenestrate organized labor -- "solutions' which have nothing to do
with the problems before us!
The funny
thing is, you can see a situation where small business might have gone the
other way, had the Obama administration made even the smallest effort to correct
their populist narrative. Once upon a
time, small business people were fairly progressive -- because progressives
were the people who enforced antitrust laws.
So how might the Obama team
have reached out to the angry small retailers demonstrating in the park down
the street? Answer: By promising to bring back antitrust
enforcement and Glass Steagall, just for starters -- things that are deep
in the Democratic tradition, but that for whatever reason are off limits in
this day and age. But even to bring this
up as a topic of discussion is to understand the terminal absence of creativity
from which the Democrats suffer.
Epilogue
F. Scott
Fitzgerald once concluded his greatest novel with these lines: "Gatsby
believed in the green lights, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes
before us. It eluded us then, but that's
no matter -- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further.... So we beat on, boats against the current,
borne back ceaselessly into the past."
Parallel to
this, Frank writes, "Every problem that the editorialists fret about today
will get worse, of course: inequality, global warming, financial bubbles. But on America will go, chasing a dream that
is more vivid than life itself, on into the seething Arcadia of all against
all."
Gatsby, an
aspiring romantic member of the nouvelle riche, was shot to death. Frank ends his book on an almost equally
gloomy note, saying that "Hope"
and utopia, for conservative protesters, is achieving a seething Arcadia of all
against all. But this is, unfortunately,
a pit of hell for everyone else. Their
green light (that of the conservatives) ought to be a bright, flashing red
light for the world.
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