A Colossal Wreck (61 page)

Free speech is no longer a right. Stand alongside the route of a presidential cavalcade with a humble protest sign, and the Secret Service or local law enforcement will hale you off to some remote cage, labeled “Designated protest area.” Seek to exercise your right to dispense money for a campaign advertisement or to support a candidate, and you will at once fall under the sanction of McCain/Feingold, otherwise known as the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002.

In the case of public expressions of protest, we may expect particular diligence by the Secret Service and other agencies in the Obama years; while, perhaps, Obama’s reneging on a campaign promise to accept only public financing has stopped campaign finance reform in its tracks. Liberals, joyously eyeing Obama’s amazing $150 million haul in his final weeks, have preserved a tactful silence on this topic, after years of squawking about the power of the corporate dollar to pollute democracy’s proceedings.

Worse than in the darkest days of the ’50s, when Americans could have their passports revoked by fiat of the State Department, citizens and legal residents no longer have the right to travel freely even inside the nation’s borders. Appearance on any of the innumerable watch lists maintained by government agencies means inability to get on a plane and probably even Amtrak, whose unmolested passengers already risk being stranded
sine die
in some remote siding in the southwestern deserts for weeks on end.

Americans no longer have the right to vote, even if of appropriate age. The Indiana statute okayed by the Supreme Court requires under Indiana’s voter ID law, that persons lacking “proper” ID can only make a provisional vote, with a bureaucratic apparatus of subsequent verification. In some states, anyone carrying a felony conviction faces a lifetime ban on the right to vote.

Fourth Amendment protections have gone steadily downhill. Warrantless wiretappers had a field day, and Congress re-affirmed their activities in the FISA bill, for which Obama voted, in a turn around from previous pledges. Vice-President-elect, Joe Biden, can
claim a significant role here since he has been an ardent prosecutor of the war on drugs, used since the Harrison Act of 1914 (and even before then with the variable penalties attaching to opium, as used by middle-class whites or Chinese) to enhance the right of police to enter, terrorize and prosecute at will. Indeed, the war on drugs, revived by President Nixon and pursued vigorously by all subsequent administrations, has been as powerful a rationale for tearing up the Constitution as the ensuing war on terror. It’s like that with all wars. Not far from where I live in northern California, the war on drugs was the excuse for serious inroads in the early 1990s into the Posse Comitatus statutory inhibition on use of the US military in domestic law enforcement—another constitutional disaster of the Bush years.

In the past eight years, Bush Jr. has ravaged the Fourth Amendment with steadfast diligence, starting with his insistence that he could issue arrest warrants if there was reason to believe a non-citizen was suspected of implication in terrorist activity. Seized under this pretext and held within America’s borders or in some secret prison overseas, the captive had no recourse to a court of law. Simultaneously, the “probable cause” standard, theoretically disciplining the state’s innate propensity to search and to seize, has been systematically abused, as has the FBI’s delirious use of the “material witness” statute to arrest and hold their suspects. Good-bye, habeas corpus.

Federalism and the rights of states have been relentlessly eroded, often amidst liberal cheers at such excrescences as the No Child Left Behind law. Government’s power to seize property under the canons of “eminent domain” received particularly sinister buttress by the US Supreme Court. Have there been any bright patches in the gloom in Bush time? I salute one: the vindication of the Second Amendment in the Supreme Court’s majority decision, vigorously written by Justice Scalia. I’ve no need to tell you what liberals and leftists thought of that one.

Part 3

2009

January 9

Madoffgate is proof of the old rule: the more elegant the tailoring, the more handsomely silvered the distinguished locks, the more innocently rubicund the visage, the more likely the hand covertly fishing for one’s wallet.

Uncle Sam is the biggest Ponzi operator of all. Bernie had to constantly replenish his fund with new deposits; so does Uncle Sam, wheedling more money out of the Chinese, the Indians, the Japanese, and poor Third World nations forced to pony up at the point of a gun. But in the end Uncle Sam has one huge asset denied Madoff, who seems to have stopped short of the straightforward forgery allegedly practiced by Marc Dreier, the Manhattan lawyer arrested in Canada for trying to sell nonexistent bonds to the tune of $380 million. Uncle Sam has the printing press to run off the necessary dollars. He’s certainly going to need lots of fresh new bills. You can set your clock now for the alarms scheduled to go off all the way through Obama-time: credit card debt, commercial real-estate implosion, option-ARM financing.

Maybe Madoff, trolling for suckers in the Palm Beach Country Club and the Jewish charitable foundations, will become the sacrificial symbol of Wall Street thievery, sent off to the penitentiary in lieu of the real big-timers.

January 23

So many ghosts crowded the inauguration dais that it’s not surprising Chief Justice Roberts flubbed his lines and had to be corrected by the man he was swearing in. Over there on the right! That jowly fellow with the five o’clock shadow and the long upsweeping nose. It’s Richard Nixon on January 20, 1973. He’d swept every state in the union in November’s election, except for Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. Listen to him: “As we meet here today, we stand on the threshold of a new era of peace in the world.” Yet American B-52s were still bombing Cambodia, as they had virtually throughout his administration. One and a half years later he resigned, rather than face impeachment.

Why look! Nixon’s smiling. He’s just heard Obama call for “a new era of responsibility.” He’s remembering more lines from his second inaugural in ’73: “A person can be expected to act responsibly only if he has responsibility. This is human nature. So let us encourage individuals at home and nations abroad to do more for themselves, to decide more for themselves.”

Obama offered a mild version of blood-sweat-and-tears. “We understand that greatness is never a given,” he said. “It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted—for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.” I hope we don’t get too much sermonizing about seeking the pleasures of riches. The word “responsibility” from those set in authority over us usually means compulsory belt-tightening and onslaughts on Social Security and Medicare, which Obama more or less promised the
Washington Post
five days before the inauguration.

Each time a new President strides forth, flourishing his inaugural menu of change, one feels the same gloom at these quadrennial displays of leader-lust. Eight years of complaining about George Bush’s arrogation of unconstitutional powers under the bizarre doctrine of the “unitary executive” and here we have the national audience enthusiastically applauding yet another incoming President rattling off the I-will-do’s as though there was no US Congress and he was Augustus Caesar.

The founders, whom Obama invoked in his opening line, produced a Constitution that gives the President, to quote Dana Nelson’s useful new book
Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People
, “only a thin framework of explicit powers that belong solely to his office: for instance, the power to grant reprieve and pardons, and to fill any government vacancies during any Senate recess. His other enumerated powers are either shared … or secretarial and advisory.” Enough of the Commander in Chief! All we need is a decent pardoner and a good secretary.

But credit where credit is due. On his second day in the White House Jimmy Carter amnestied Vietnam draft-dodgers and war resisters. On his second day Obama said Guantanamo and the CIA’s secret prisons must close within the year and said that his administration will be on the side of those seeking to end government secrecy rather than those wanting to enforce it.

February 1

There’s been no exciting surprise or originality in Obama’s opening engagements with the reeling economy. His team is flush with economists and bankers who helped blaze the path to ruin. He’s been selling his $819 billion stimulus program on the Hill, with all the actors playing their allotted roles and many a cheering Democrat not entirely confident that the House Republicans may not have had a point when, unanimously, they voted “No” on the package

America’s economy may be so hollowed out, its industrial base so eroded by twenty years of job exports to China and other low-wage sanctuaries, that a bailout may not turn the tide. Then the Republicans will have their told-you-so’s primed and ready to go in the mid-term elections.

But Obama can scarcely be blamed for putting up his $819 billion pump primer. It was a given, from the moment he got elected, and indeed probably owes, both in its good and bad components, more to Rep. Charlie Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, than to Geithner or Summers.

Obama’s timid folly comes with the impending two to four trillion
dollar bailout package for the banks, signaled by Treasury Secretary Geithner. If anything can make Wall Street smile bravely through the hail of public ridicule for the way it’s been handing out the previous wad of bailout money in the form of bonuses, it’s the prospect of getting further truckloads of greenbacks to lend out to Americans already crippled by debt. So Wall Street can feel satisfaction that its investment in Obama seems to be paying off.

February 12

I walk into a local plumbing store, a large place used by building contractors. There’s one other man in the store, buying a $5 plastic fitting. One of the owners says there’s zero new construction in the area. “We fix a few toilets. The only people actually building are the marijuana growers down in southern Humboldt.”

Take out Humboldt’s good fortune in being in the Emerald Triangle and multiply by every plumbing store in America. Throw in the idled lumber yards, construction stores, paint suppliers, and building crews. Count in the car lots that are going out of business because the banks won’t finance car loans. Go to the lost auto assembly jobs. It tots up to a job loss across America, just in December and January, of 1,175,000. And that’s an underestimate. Every President since Reagan, particularly Clinton, has jimmied the unemployment criteria to produce an undercount. The actual number for the two months is nearer one and three quarter million. The actual total unemployment rate by pre-Reagan criteria, according to statistician John Williams, rose to 18 percent in January, from 17.5 percent in December.

These are numbers out of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and it’s going to get worse as businesses put up their shutters. The air is whistling out of the American economy. My own state of California—often touted as the eighth largest economy in the world—can’t pay its bills. There’s a shortfall in revenues and it can’t sell enough bonds.

On January 26 the California State Controller John Chiang announced that the state is going to print its own money. If the state owes us money we’ll get this scrip as IOUs. Who knows, in happier
times maybe we can hawk them on eBay. Student aid and payments to the disabled and needy will also come in the form of IOUs. Governor Schwarzenegger and his aides are negotiating with the banks to get them to accept the IOUs as deposits.

March 13

In town after town across America these days one can physically see the economic mantras of an entire generation turning to boarded-up wasteland before one’s eyes. Shopping malls, which changed the American landscape within the course of a generation, are dying week by week.

Take the Bayshore Mall in my own town of Eureka, northern California—a covered, pedestrian arcade opened in the 1980s, owned by the Utah-based General Growth company. Located on the edge of Humboldt Bay, though facing the opposite direction towards Highway 101, our mall was an optimistic place in the early days. People dressed up to go there. A friend of mine who opened a coffee stall wore a tie—purchasing it from Ralph Lauren which opened an outlet. Every pretty girl in Humboldt County wanted to work there, to see and to be seen. People drove for three hours through the Yolly Bolly Wilderness all the way from Redding in the Central Valley to savor its glories. There were stylish concerts in its ample food court.

Today the Bayshore Mall molders, embodying the misfortunes of General Growth—the second largest mall owner in the US—whose stock trades now for 55 cents, down from $44 last May. General Growth has now ousted its CEO, John Bucksbaum.

Some major retailers, like Ralph Lauren’s Polo, have long since fled from Bayshore Mall. Walk east along one of the arcades and you come to a wall of plywood, behind which lies the desolation that was Mervyn’s, a clothing chain which has now filed for bankruptcy. The little stores nearby have a somber mien, like people compelled to live in the chill shadow of a funeral home. The food court, serviced by six or seven fast-food businesses, is becoming a sanctuary for the poor who sit in the warmth with modest snacks and while away the hours.

Across the past forty years some 200 cities built pedestrian malls. Today, only thirty remain. Drive around any town and one can see strip malls in similar decline, their parking lots nearly empty, boarded stores in the retail frontage like a mouth losing its teeth, as the lights of Circuit City go out and Linens n Things, Zales, Ann Taylor, and Sharper Image retrench or collapse entirely.

Out of crisis comes opportunity, one that’s been discussed for some years by movements such as the New Urbanists and crusaders for the refashioning of the American urban landscape such as James Howard Kunstler, author of
The Geography of Nowhere
. A mall can be razed to the ground, like the Belle Promenade, on the west bank of the Mississippi in New Orleans. Eureka’s too poor a town to do that. But a mall can be refashioned into a more congenial quartier, one blessed with easier parking.