Obama came rolling into office bipartisan guns a-blazin’. He met with congressional Republicans. He met with conservative columnists. He courted, compromised, and curried favor, but never seriously called them out on their incessant whining about insufficient (in their view) tax relief contained within the president’s stimulus plan. Birth control provisions were dropped, tax cuts added. In the end, the stimulus package was far more modest on infrastructure related items than most economists think is demanded by a crisis of this magnitude. (100,000 jobs cut this week alone – good grief!) And yet, when it came to a vote in the House, not one Republican supported it. My first reaction to this news was, well… okay, then can we have the original package back – the one Democrats could have passed two weeks ago? What the hell – the G.O.P. acts like a dog that can’t eat all his food, so he pisses on it. So much for bipartisan good will.

Personally, I think this notion of bipartisanship is way overvalued. For one thing, the ultimate expression of it is the one-party state (and we practically have that now). Aside from that, I don’t see the point in bending over backwards to bring the G.O.P. along if it means adopting a large portion of their program – namely, the same supply-side, deregulatory, neoliberal nonsense that got us into this mess in the first place. Sure, a lot of Democrats – probably most – helped get us here as well, but they have become born-again Keynesians in the face of this almost unprecedented economic meltdown. Republicans are still selling the same old soap as before, whether it’s McCain talking or Boehner or that brown haired buy who isn’t Boehner: tax cuts. Not only that, but “fast-acting” tax cuts… which is to say the same kind as Bush passed (mostly benefiting the rich) with the term “fast-acting” stitched on to make it sound as though the savings would land in anyone’s pocket before May 2010.

They’ve got it ass-backwards, of course. We need to raise taxes on all those folks who made out like bandits over the past 25 years (and particularly since Bush’s last two rounds of tax cuts), including those Merrill execs who took multi-million dollar bonuses home from their failed company. We need to slap excess profit taxes on the oil companies retroactive to the last eighteen months or so. We need to slash the ludicrously bloated Pentagon budget, repurposing the billions mindlessly sluiced into useless aircraft carriers, Virginia-class submarines, joint-strike fighters, and missile defense, into useful projects. We should do all this and more, whether Republicans sit on their hands or not.

He’s back. New Yorkers now have a new senator, a relatively conservative Democrat named Kirsten Gillibrand whom animal rights activists have dubbed “New York’s Sarah Palin” (with some justice, as she is a gun nut / hunting freak). A bit unnerving to me was the sight of Al D’Amato on the podium at her public introduction… standing right behind her. Apparently he’s an old family friend. Gaaaack. It took us 18 years to get that asshole out of the Senate… only so that Patterson could name one of his surrogates. Some justice there.

luv u,

jp

Welcome to the third presidency of this humble blog. I started posting this screed back in 1999. (Who can doubt that cawing pterodactyls carried my postings to the server in their enormous, leathery beaks?) Certainly this is the most highly anticipated administration of the three and, I firmly believe, of the past 40 years. The phenomenal crowd at Obama’s inauguration was evidence of that. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen so many people that happy to be standing out in the cold. Expectations are high, no doubt of that…. perhaps unreasonably so. Still, it is a little hard not to feel uplifted by that spectacle, just as the sight of those people in Chicago on election night was something of a thrill. It makes you feel as though we’ve arrived at a whole different kind of place in America, even if just for a moment. Nice feeling. Though, speaking personally, an even nicer feeling was had when I saw Bush climb aboard that helicopter and fly away, far far away, to the land of yesteryear. Gone for good… and I do mean “good”. That was worth the price of my ticket.

Well, that part is over. And here comes the next thing. Untangling the unholy mess that Bush and company made of the economy is going to be the fight of the century, particularly if we are going to attempt to move the nation in a progressive direction for a difference. Will Obama’s stimulus package accomplish this? Not in and of itself. (That one-third portion of G.O.P.-appeasing tax cuts, certainly not.) But I can tell you, there must be something worth doing in there, because the Republican leadership is screaming bloody murder. You can hear the whining from outer space. Some freak G.O.P. congressman was on MSNBC complaining that infrastructure projects would take two years to get rolling and that direct aid to states in the form of unemployment benefits and food stamps would run out in two years. No shit, congressman. Any other insights you’d like to share? Clearly, these fuckers would prefer more massive tax cuts to the richest Americans, since this is the only kind of “stimulus” they seem to understand. Trouble is, they don’t work. Whether or not they agree with the Obama package, you’d think current circumstances would compel them to admit that the same old thing is not what we need right now.

We’d be well advised to keep this in mind: those who wish to undo the remnants of the New Deal and the Great Society are hoping to use this crisis towards that end. And don’t think I’m singling out Republicans – there are plenty of Democrats on that bandwagon as well. As Naomi Klein has pointed out more than once, natural disasters, wars, and economic upheaval present great opportunities to roll back public goods, like social programs, public housing, etc. People are in shock and disoriented to the point where the powerful can pull the rug out on them before they even know what’s happening. You can hear the mutterings about this now. For instance, we have just witnessed massive infusions of public cash into private enterprise. That has not to any reasonable extent translated into public ownership of those companies. Instead, I keep hearing the topic of “entitlements” being raised as something that must be addressed. Is that how we are to pay the tab for A.I.G., Goldman, and CitiGroup?

So… sure, I celebrate the end of another Bush era – one particularly more noxious than the first. That said, we will need to be particularly vigilent in the months ahead.

luv u,

jp