How the Bush Administration Bankrupted America; How the Obama Administration can Restore America's Prosperity

Conservatives are like the comedian Rodney Dangerfield these days, they can't get no respect. In the public mind, figures like Rush Limbaugh, Bobby Jindal, Joe the Plumber, and Sarah Palin are a source of bemusement, a slightly annoying but nonetheless chuckle-producing diversion from the calamities the conservative movement helped engineer.

The same cannot be said, alas, for conservative commentators like Charles Krauthhammer, Michael Gerson, and Sean Hannity (a trio of humorless blowhards oozing animus from every pore). I suspect their vinegary dispositions stem from the fact that their most cherished beliefs are constantly at variance with reality. As William James recognized, there is nothing more painful than false belief.

The financial pain America is currently facing can be traced to a set of false beliefs that constitute the core of conservatism's economic doctrine. These discredited principles include: the notion that tax cuts pay for themselves, the idea markets are self-correcting, and the belief that deregulation serves the common good.

Tax cuts are to conservatives what crack cocaine is to lab rats. The basic idea behind supply-side economics is that taxes must be lowered on America's most productive (i.e., wealthiest) citizens because they alone possess the wherewithal to put capital to work. Conversely, transferring resources to the poor, so the thinking goes, will only insure that wealth is squandered on unproductive forms of consumption.

The wealthy received their tax breaks under the Bush administration, but the promised investment glut never materialized. Conservatives have peddled the notion that taxes are a form of punishment, or a disincentive to productivity. But a truer view of taxes comes from Oliver Wendell Holmes, who held that taxes are the price of civilization. If Holmes is right, then it follows that those who benefit the most from society (i.e., the wealthiest) owe the greatest share in return.

The origins of the current financial crisis are complex. Americans had been living beyond their means on borrowed credit for too long. The United States staked its future on financial services and products, as opposed to manufactured goods. To make up for the trade deficit the United States borrowed heavily from countries like China to keep the good times rolling. Debt-ridden consumers, however, found they could no longer afford to products once housing prices were undermined by deadbeat sub-prime borrowers. By this stage, as British historian Niall Ferguson observes, the United States has become a sub-prime superpower.

To reverse America's economic fortunes, the Obama administration must increase the earnings power of the vast majority of ordinary Americans. Doing this will require substantial and sustained investment to upgrade public education, our healthcare system, and our infrastructure. Investments along these lines are necessary to insure that Americans are the brightest, healthiest, and productive workforce on the planet. When we are once again making the products and services the world wants to buy, then incomes will rise. This will revitalize consumer spending, leading to corporate profits, which will translate into rising stock prices.

Tax cuts disproportionally aimed at the wealthy did not lead to broad-based income gains or the kind of investments America needs to ensure sustainable prosperity. Free market fundamentalism has also proved to be a false creed. Put simply, if the last eight years have shown anything it is that free markers do not inexorably allocate resources efficiently or rationally. In fact, free market fundamentalism has proven to be nothing but a cover for crony capitalism, whereby the powerful and well-connected rewarded themselves by feeding at the public trough. The fact that the financial wizards that created the current crisis walked away with billions, while America's healthcare, education, and infrastructure needs were starved, illustrates the total intellectual and moral bankruptcy of free market fundamentalism.

Looting the financial system and cannibalizing companies could not have happened to the extent it did without wholesale deregulation. The invasion of Iraq was another conservative enterprise predicated on false premises that helped bankrupt the United States, and not just economically but morally too. Of course, conservatives are loath to admit they are wrong, which explains why Krauthhammer and others are trying to portray the Iraq War as a victory. A pyrrhic victory, perhaps, but mostly the Iraq War has been a strategic debacle that siphoned America's blood and treasure in a failed bid to leverage our military might to transform the Middle East. As the historian Arnold Toynbee recognized, societies that attempt to remake far off outposts on the periphery of empire are invariably less successful than societies that remake themselves.

Revitalizing America is a herculean task facing Obama. Conservative commentators have generally heaped scorn upon the Obama administration's approach, which will make government a more central partner in shaping the economic landscape of the future. As Michael Gerson ludicrously puts it, "governments don't invest, they spend." Obviously, Gerson is thinking of the Bush administration, not the far-sighted administrations that initiated the GI bill, the interstate highway system, and the Internet.

Krauthammer is even more obtuse than Gerson. The dyspeptic Krauthammer completely fails to see how healthcare has anything to do with the current financial crisis or its cure. Let me enlighten this vapid windbag. The current healthcare system is an inefficient monstrosity with private insurance companies gobbling up resources to feed a vast bureaucratic apparatus collecting premiums from those who don't need healthcare while denying treatment to those who need it.

Ok, that's a bit of a caricature, but it captures an essential truth: private insurers represent a vast layer absorbing our healthcare dollars, but this layer does not deliver healthcare. This system has become an albatross for businesses and individuals. For instance, the cost of health insurance has to be factored into every product, which makes U.S. goods less competitive. Additionally, it stifles individual initiative – i.e., under the current system, employees will be less inclined to leave dead end jobs to pursue more rewarding opportunities if they fear they'll lose their health coverage in the process.

Conservatives like Krauthhammer, Gerson, and Hannity appear congenitally incapable of connecting the dots. These guys are like Rodney Dangerfield – the joke always seems to be on them and they don't get no respect.

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Reverend Wright vs. the Right

A debate between Jeremiah Wright and Sean Hannity would probably be about as subtle and intellectually rewarding as a scene from of Hamlet played by Vince McMahon and Donald Trump. Rightwing bloviaters are in perpetual need of bogeymen to rail against, and what better foil to make stupid white men seem smart than an African-American Archie Bunker. If Reverend Wright weren’t the product of the far left the far right would have had to invent him.

Projection is a psychological mechanism whereby unacknowledged emotions of one’s own – fear, aggression, and bigotry – are attributed to another, thus alleviating oneself of the responsibility for toxic feelings. One can imagine, for instance, the temporary psychological relief a KKK member gets from watching loops of Reverend Wright venting his spleen; the white supremacist feels justified by locating the source of his anger in the uppity black minister spouting “God Damn America.”

Reverend Wright and his most vociferous critics are in many ways mirror images of one another. This can be seen, for example, in the mindset of figures from the religious right, such as Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell, who insisted that the 9/11 attacks were God’s retribution upon America for promoting abortion, gay marriage, and secularism. This is arguably an even cruder and more irrational explananda than Wright’s “America’s chickens are coming home to roost” commentary on 9/11.

Ironically, Wright and his detractors share the same dubious premise: namely, that we live in a just universe where human events are governed by a benevolent deity who nevertheless dispenses rewards and punishments for our moral good. The notion that the perpetrators and victims of terrorism are part of a divine scheme to dispense justice is so patently anti-scientific, juvenile, and irrational that it is beyond embarrassing.

Reverend Wright’s view, however, at least has the virtue of being more theological sophisticated and tenable than that of his counterparts on the right. For instance, Wright makes the perfectly valid point when he draws the connection between America’s foreign policy and a terrorist backlash. Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noregia, and Osama bin Laden were all recipients of U.S. military aid. In a very real sense, as Benazir Bhutto noted decades ago, al-Qaeda was the Frankenstein monster the Reagan/Bush administration helped create.

Wright is an astonishing mixture of erudition and ignorance. He weaves uncomfortable truths and conspiracies into a narrative that can be odious and illuminating at the same time. I don’t doubt that he and his church have done good work ministering to the poor and championing the cause of the disenfranchised and disaffected. Wright’s legacy will be even more mixed, however, if he succeeds in derailing a candidate who transcends the divisiveness that religious demagogues feed on. Here Wright shares another trait with the far right cable crowd: if he spent as much time solving problems as he did whipping up anger and resentment he’d be out of business.

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Sean Hannity’s America: The Politics of Hate

Sean Hannity has taken journalism to a level even Joseph Goebbels would have to admire. In Hannity’s hands, insinuation and guilt by association are art forms. Indeed, his ability to make the worse argument appear better is virtually unmatched by any rhetorician I know of. He may be the finest sophist America has. But let’s give credit where credit is due. After all, Hannity’s success depends critically on the virtually unlimited obtuseness of his audience. It takes a rare and exceptional mind to fall for the same fallacies over and over again, but Hannity’s viewers are unvaryingly consistent in their credulity.

How does Hannity manage to pull the wool over the eyes of his audience while viewers flock away from liberal commentators? I believe this has something to do with the fact that the politics of fear and resentment has proven a winning strategy for the right wing in the past. Put simply, for a lot of voters it’s easier to imagine things that make them angry than to envision ways of solving the challenges that make them fearful and angry in the first place. Hannity’s genius, and that of his compatriots, is to deftly turn public figures like Al Gore, John Kerry, and Barack Obama into emblems that stir the anxiety and ire of a significant portion of the electorate.

Hannity and his ilk do this by twisting the words, exploiting gaffes, and manipulating images in ways that make candidates they oppose seem foreign, condescending, and disloyal to America. For instance, prior to the 2000 election Al Gore said he took the initiative in creating the Internet (which was true). But this was twisted to make it seem like Gore was claiming credit for inventing the Internet, which was supposed to feed into the notion that the VP was a serial exaggerator. Conservative commentators had a field day with John Kerry’s windsurfing, which they used to pigeonhole him as a flip-flopping elitist.

The tactics Hannity and company are using to disparage Barack Obama are no less inane, but they are arguably more subtle and potentially more pernicious. It is essential to expose the sophistic ploys they use to manipulate public opinion so that the 2008 election is decided on basis of ideas and character, not character assassination.

Hannity and like-minded conservative commentators are determined to paint Obama as not one of us. They have to eschew overt forms of bigotry, of course, so rather than attack Obama directly they resort to guilt by association. For example, there are determined to link Obama to William Ayers. Ayres was once a member of an extremist group that protested the Vietnam War forty years ago by building and setting off bombs. Ayres is now an English professor who happens to live in the same neighborhood as Obama. The two also sat on the board of an anti-poverty foundation. Barack Obama was eight years old when Ayers was engaging in his subversive activities and has condemned the acts in question as “detestable.”

If standards of logic and reason were applied there few if any inferences one could deduce from Obama’s tenuous association with Ayres. However, Hannity and his crowd are experts at twisting facts in order to generate and pin a negative emotional connotation on Obama. Here’s how they do it. First, they deliberately exaggerate Ayers’ moral culpability. They do this by stating that Ayers was part of a terrorist group that set off bombs that killed people, but they fail to mention two important facts: 1) Ayers did set off bombs, but no one was killed. 2) Three members of Ayers’ group were killed when a bomb they were making exploded accidentally, but these are the only deaths caused by the group. In other words, attempts to paint Ayers as public enemy number one are overblown.

Ayers, however, had the misfortune of publishing a book on the same day as 9/11. In it he says, “I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough.” Ayers claims that “I feel we didn’t do enough” refers to the efforts to end the war and that he did not mean that he wished he had set of more bombs. In fact, he has acknowledged feeling embarrassed by the arrogance, rigidity, and narcissism he and his compatriots exhibited at the time. Ayers, however, as clearly provided Hannity with the opening he needs to portray him as a terrorist in the same moral category as bin Laden, which he does by depicting Ayers as some one who unrepentantly hates America. After all, as Hannity boils over with righteous indignation, Ayers had audacity to make his “I feel we didn’t do enough” comment on 9/11.

Hannity next step is to keep referring to Ayers as a terrorist while mention the coincidental 9/11 connection over and over again. The idea is to plant in the minds of viewers that Ayers is a guy who attacked America and said these dreadful things on 9/11. Never mind that Hannity has interpreted Ayers’ views out of context -- and in the worst possible way -- while deliberately conflating Ayers and 9/11 in a disingenuous way. The final step of course, is to make the leap that because Obama sat on the same board and knew Ayers that this is the kind of person he surrounds himself.

Hannity also takes a relatively innocuous event, such as Obama’s participation in the Million Man march, and links him to radical black leader Louis Farrakhan. Snippets of Farrakhan are played repeatedly as Hannity makes insinuations about Obama’s associations: There’s a pattern here . . . he’s not who we think he is . . . he’s hiding something . . . etc.

The flap over Obama’s pastor, Reverend Wright, is a variation on this theme. Obama has repudiated the comments his pastor made. But by playing them in an endless loop, and piling one dubious insinuation upon another, Hannity makes several flimsy arguments seem more persuasive than they really are. He does through repetition and the juxtaposition of incendiary images (Rev Wright, Louis Farrakhan, and William Ayers) when discussing Obama. All of this is designed to create and imprint negative emotional feelings towards the likely Democratic nominee. Hannity’s method here is only slightly subtler than the conditioning Pavlov used to train dogs to salivate at the sound of a dinner bell.

Guilt by association, conflation, and other rhetorical slights of hand techniques are the same methods the Bush administration deployed to fallaciously link Saddam to 9/11 in the public mind. Can a well-oiled but increasingly decrepit right-wing propaganda machine hoodwink the American people once again? There’s an old saying, “Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me.” The American people cannot afford to be fooled again.

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Elitism Test.

Everyone knows for a fact that elitists are out to ruin the good old US of A. Elitists are tree-hugging, French-loving, latte-sipping snobs who look down their liberal noses on Chuck Norris movies, the Grand Old Opry, and cultural events like NASCAR. Yes sir, if American-hating elitists ever had their way the U.N flag would replace Old Glory, George W. Bush would be indicted as a war criminal at the World Court, and Barack Hussein Obama would carry out his secret plan to get "Sean Hannity’s America" off the air. Thankfully, there’s a sure-fire test to identify elitists so that they can be exposed before they can cause too much trouble: Answer the following questions to see if you or someone you know is a closet elitist:

1) Can you down at least 12 shots or twelve beers in less than an hour and still bowl better than Barack Obama?

2) Would your wife or girlfriend prefer to stay at home and iron your shirts while the two of you watch reruns of "The Dukes of Hazzard" than have you take her across state lines to the nearest drive-in to see a George Clooney picture?

3) Do you resent the fact that Muslim fanatics housed at Guantanamo appear to have more amenities than the trailer park where you and your in-laws reside?

4) Do you identify with the mountain men in the film "Deliverance"?

5) Would you like the Bush administration to extend waterboarding to include smart-alecky liberal bloggers, political satirists, and other deviants

If you answered "yes" to all five questions: Congratulations, you are not part of the axis-of-elites. However, if you answered "no" to one or more question, then your I.Q. may be in danger of deviating from the mean. Please watch Fox News and then take the test again until you get it right!

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The Media and the Decline of Democracy

Plato equated democracy with mob rule. Watching the media debase the level of political discourse by constantly shifting debate and discussion to the lowest possible level it is not hard to feel the United States has entered a state of terminal senescence. The country is facing some of the steepest challenges in its history – the ongoing threat of terrorism, the disastrous war in Iraq, a housing/credit meltdown that threatens the foundations of the financial system, and an energy/climate crisis that will almost certainly destabilize the planet – but commentators are harping on flag pins, comments made by Obama’s pastor, and Hillary’s gaffe about evading sniper fire. Rome is burning, but the clowns that run the media circus can still divert the masses.

The price of oil just hit a new time high ($115 dollars a barrel). Food costs are soaring. And the record trade deficit means America is maxed out; since 2000 we’ve been borrowing against the future simply to sustain a standard of living the country can no longer afford. The plummeting dollar is a symptom the U.S. is basically insolvent, but Tweedledee (George Stephanopolis) and Tweedledumb (Charles Gibson) still think it’s appropriate to ask candidates Clinton and Obama to make a pledge not to raise taxes on working Americans.

How inane can you get! The Bush administration’s laissez-faire economic policies have led to the largest transfers of wealth in world history as U.S. consumers are now in hock to some of the most unsavory and anti-democratic regimes on the planet (China, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Russia), but the media mavens are trying to extract promises from politicians not to raise taxes on the middle class. What about the dwindling value of the dollar, interest to service America’s debt, and soaring energy/food prices are a stealth tax that Americans will be forced to pay because of the Bush administration’s imprudent policies? Americans are poorer for eight years of Bush’s borrow and spend economics, but they haven’t seen anything yet. The bill for the debacle in Iraq, which by some estimates will cost every American family $50,000, is only beginning to come due.

The credit crisis is just the tip of an iceberg that has capsized the American economy. Housing prices may decline a further 30 percent before things bottom out. This process may take several years, which means the days of homeowners using their homes as ATMs is over for the foreseeable future.

Against this dire economic backdrop John McCain has called for giving Americans a “tax holiday” on gasoline during the summer months. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton promises to investigate oil company profiteering. Neither proposal addresses the inconvenient truth that surging world demand for oil, coupled with the declining dollar, and the increased nationalization of petroleum companies across the globe, have created the perfect storm whereby Americans will have to pay a greater share of their wealth to foreign oil producers. American oil companies have been steadily losing their market share -- a trend the Bush administration hoped to reverse with the invasion of Iraq – and recycled petro-profits are now filling the coffers of Sovereign Wealth Funds in Venezuela, Russia, and the Middle East. Ignominiously, failing and ailing financial firms, such as Citigroup, are now begging these SWF to rescue them.

President Bush’s mishandling of the economy may rival even his mismanagement of the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina. It is now clear that the kind of deregulation and laissez-faire economics extolled by conservatives has brought the financial system to the brink of catastrophe. Free markets work, but only when there is some minimal government oversight. When the financial system is tasked with policing itself you inevitably get insider deals, mountains of bad debt that the taxpayers are expected to assume, and carnivorous CEOs carving up companies and feeding on the spoils, but leaving shareholders and laid off employees nothing but the remains. The CEOs at Bears Stearns and Countrywide did not create value so much as reallocate value, to themselves.

The next American president is going to have to institute measures that will restore credibility and integrity to the financial system, establish a new social compact with the American people (especially a minimum healthcare package), and reinvigorate America’s manufacturing capacity. Put simply, over the last several decades finance became the country’s growth industry as wizards on Wall Street found new ways to package debt, displace risk, and skim money from Main Street. Unfortunately, their financial alchemy did not create new wealth, so much as create the illusion of spectacular riches that would later vanish into thin air once they collected their conjuring fees.

The United States is roughly in the same position as the Spanish Empire under Phillip II. Attempts to plunder gold from the New World could no more keep Spain’s debt ridden empire afloat than the Bush administration’s efforts to establish U.S. hegemony over Iraq’s black gold. As the decline of the Spanish Empire shows, a country known primarily for manufacturing debt cannot thrive economically.

The presidential candidates need to articulate their economic philosophies and explain how they plan to revive America’s economic competitiveness. Unfortunately, the mainstream media would rather focus on trivial matters, such as Hillary’s sniper gaffe or comments made by Obama associates. This is not to say that such questions should not be asked at all, but rather that the media risks turning a presidential contest into a mud wrestling festival if it focuses on trite distractions instead of substantive issues. Needless to say, an army of right-wing pundits is mobilizing to ensure that a flap over flag pins, guilt by association, and other time-tested techniques designed to portray Obama as un-American, will trump the War in Iraq, the Bush recession, and eight years of an inept Republican administration.

The country is going to be in even bigger trouble if the right’s sophistry is able to deflect attention from the moral, economic, military, and strategic carnage conservative rule has wrought. It is positively chilling the way media bloviaters like Sean Hannity are able to manipulate and twist events, situations, and statements in ways that exploit the ignorance and a prejudices of an audience looking for objects upon which they can fixate their anger. Obama’s much maligned comments about small-town voters being “bitter” are right in this regard: if conservative commentators can succeed in making the 2008 election about god and guns they’ll almost certainly prevent the kind of debate the country needs to have to solve its problems.

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Barack Obama vs. The Axis of Idiots

Barack Obama is almost certainly the most substantive, intellectually impressive, and emotionally integrated figure on the American political scene today. His speech on race in America was far more than the typical self-serving political exercise most of us are accustomed to. Rather, it was a revelation into the character of a man who has a profound capacity to understand himself, his country, and the world in all its moral complexity. How refreshing to find someone so edifying and illuminating running for the White House following eight years of the obtuse self-certainty and inflexible mindlessness of George W. Bush.

What made Barack’s speech so impressive was his capacity to empathetically relate to the concerns whites and blacks, conservatives and liberals, and the rich and poor have. His aim was clearly to encourage greater dialogue, empathy, and to edify. His approach stands in stark contrast to a legion of self-serving politicians and pundits who have built their careers upon feeding the fear and anger of their audiences. Indeed, there is a herd of sophistic talk show hosts and cable celebrities -- Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Rich Lowry come to mind – who stuff their audiences with intellectual garbage the way visitors at a zoo might throw morsels of junk food at a gaggle of geese.

Barack Obama is equally perceptive on the subject of Iraq. Obama’s pragmatism, the cogency of his arguments, and his exceptional capacity to raise the level of discourse must terrify the purveyors of prejudice and irrationality. Put simply, a spokesperson for a progressive outlook as articulate as Obama has the potential to transform the political landscape in a way no American leader since F.D.R has. Thus, the right-wing hate machine is being set loose once again to do the only thing its good at: character assassination.

The Bush era conservatives have demonstrated they cannot govern, but their propaganda apparatus would make even Joseph Goebbels spin in his grave with envy. Six years into a disastrous war, and with the country facing possibly the worst financial crisis since The Great Depression, the professional slime-mongers on the right are bent on hanging comments by Obama’s pastor around the candidate’s neck. Obama has denounced the comments, but for shameless sophists guilt by association is a sure-fire way to clip the Democratic front-runner’s wings.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof correctly characterized called Obama’s speech thus: “It was not a sound bite, but a symphony.” Filtered, interpreted, and distorted by right-wing rage mongers, however, Obama’s speech is being dissected into snippets that present a completely misleading picture of Obama and his message. The agents of anger, ignorance, and arrogance have succeeded before in Swift-Boating Renaissance men like Al Gore and John Kerry. As a result, the country is stuck with a pre-Enlightenment President who has succeeded only in taking America back to the Dark Ages.

Obama faces a steep challenge. George W. Bush has demonstrated that even a bad argument aimed at the lowest common denominator has a good chance of succeeding if it is repeated often enough. The instruments that make up the right-wing echo chamber understand this. The weapons they wield are not truth or reason, but repetition and cliches. Obama’s candidacy really is different; it’s based on the premise that a leader can persuade the electorate by engaging them on a higher intellectual and emotional plane. That’s the audacity of hope we so desperately need.

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