Bickering Over Terminology Delays Real Action

There’s a debate in the media about the recession. On the right are those who say that the economy has never been better. Not so fast, says the official left: we’ve (just) started a recession.

Phil Gramm, McCain’s former economic advisor, leads the School of Sunny Optimism. “This is a mental recession,” said Gramm. “We may have a recession, we haven’t had one yet. We have sort of become a nation of whiners.” Given his day job, you have to admire his attitude. UBS Investment Bank, which employs Gramm as its vice chairman, was recently forced to write off $38 billion in bad debts because of its exposure to the sub-prime mortgage meltdown, wiping out all its profits since 2004.

Economists are mildly pessimistic. In April, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke conceded that a recession was possible. Stuart Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services Group, believes that unemployment and other data for the first quarter of 2008 marks the official start of a recession. “It is now very clear that the fat lady has sung for the economic expansion. The country has slipped into a recession,” he said, articulating the mainstream view that we’re about to embark on a bumpy ride.

Recession? We’ve been in a recession since 2000.

Forget the experts. They think telling the grisly truth about the state of the U.S. economy could make things even worse–and they’re probably right. But Americans know the truth.

Every major indicator–jobs, wages and cost of living–has trended downward since the dot-com crash of 2000. Since then it has nearly impossible to sell a home, find a job, or get a raise. Rising inflation is tightening the squeeze. Whoever becomes president next year will inherit an economy beginning its ninth year in a downward spiral.

The official inflation rate of two to three percent is a lie, and it has been for years. Presidents Reagan and Clinton ordered the Bureau of Labor Standards to change the way it calculates the Consumer Price Index. Previously they compared the prices of the same items from one year to the next. Now, in order to cheat senior citizens out of cost-of-living increases on their Social Security payments, the government uses a “substitutions” analysis. “The consumer price index assumes that if prices get too high, consumers will start buying cheaper products,” reports The San Diego Union-Tribune. For instance, if steak gets too expensive, they will switch to ground beef.”

Steve Reed, an economist at the Bureau of Labor Standards, freely concedes that the change makes inflation looks lower than it is. He also admits its motivation: “Even if the CPI was one percentage point higher, it could cost the government hundreds of millions of dollars.”

John Williams, an economic consultant who publishes the monthly newsletter “Shadow Government Statistics,” calculates that “inflation is actually running at an annualized rate of 9.95 percent.” Inflation has been rising since 2002.

The U.S. economy must create 150,000 new jobs a month (1.8 million annually) just to keep up with population growth. Anything less represents a net jobs loss.

The Clinton years saw the creation of 236,500 new jobs per month–a net increase of more than 8 million over eight years. As of 2007, the Bush era saw just 70,000 jobs per month–a net loss of more than 7 million. Bush has brought us back to 1992, when his father lost over his own recession.

Among those who still have jobs, they’re not getting raises that keep up with Williams’ inflation rate. Median household income, adjusted for the government’s lowball inflation rate, is down since 2001.

Even white-collar workers, traditionally insulated by advanced degrees, are getting slammed by the eight-year-long recession.

“Wage stagnation, long the bane of blue-collar workers, is now hitting people with bachelor’s degrees for the first time in 30 years,” reported The Los Angeles Times in 2006. “Earnings for workers with four-year degrees fell 5.2 percent from 2000 to 2004 when adjusted for inflation, according to White House economists… [people with master’s and other advanced degrees] have found that their inflation-adjusted wages were essentially flat between 2000 and 2004.” There’s no reason to believe that this trend has reversed.

It takes two consecutive quarterly drops in the GDP, say economists, to make a recession official. But, as with porn, Americans know a recession when they see one. And this one is eight years old.

There are only two real questions. The first is whether Russian president Dmitri Medvedev is right. The U.S., he said recently, is in “essentially a depression.” The second is whether John McCain, Barack Obama, or anyone else is willing to do something meaningful about it.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

Nothing Honorable About the Vietnam War

Every presidential candidacy relies on a myth. Reagan was a great communicator; Clinton felt your pain. Both storylines were ridiculous. But rarely are the constructs used to market a party nominee as transparent or as fictional as those we’re being asked to swallow in 2008.

On the left–OK, not–we have Barack Obama. “The best orator of his generation!” says Ed Rendell, the Democratic power broker who has a day job as governor of Pennsylvania. “The best orator since Cicero!” Republican strategist Mary Matalin swoons. No doubt, Obama reads a mean speech. Take his Teleprompter away, though, and the dude is as lost as George Bush at a semiotics class. Forced to answer reporters’ questions off the cuff, Obama is so afraid of messing up that he…carefully…spaces…each…word…apart…
so…he…can…see…them…
coming…wayyy…in…advance.

Still more laughable than the notion of Obama as the second coming of JFK is the founding myth of the McCain campaign: (a) he is a war hero, and (b) said heroism increases his credibility on national security issues. “A Vietnam hero and national security pro,” The New York Times calls him in a typical media blandishment.

John McCain fought in Vietnam. There was nothing noble, much less heroic, about fighting in that war.

Some Americans may be suffering another of the periodic attacks of national amnesia that prevent us from honestly assessing our place in the world and its history, but others recall the truth about Vietnam: it was a disastrous, unjustifiable mess that anyone with an ounce of sense was against at the time.

Between one and two million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans were sent to their deaths by a succession of presidents and Congresses–fed to the flames of greed, hubris, and stupidity. The event used to justify starting the war–the Tonkin Gulf “incident”–never happened. The Vietnam War’s ideological foundation, the mantra cited to keep it going, was disproved after we lost. No Southeast Asian “dominos” fell to communism. To the contrary, the effect of the U.S. withdrawal was increased stability. When genocide broke out in neighboring Cambodia in the late 1970s, it was not the U.S., but a unified Vietnamese army–the evil communists–who stopped it.

Not even General Wesley Clark, shot four times in Vietnam, is allowed to question the McCain-as-war-hero narrative. “Well, I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president,” he argued. The Obama campaign, which sells its surrogates down the river with alarming regularity, promptly hung the former NATO commander out to dry: “Senator Obama honors and respects Senator McCain’s service, and of course he rejects yesterday’s statement by General Clark.”

Even in an article criticizing the media for repeatedly framing McCain as a war hero, the liberal website Media Matters concedes: “McCain is, after all, a war hero; everybody agrees about that.”

Not everyone.

I was 12 when the last U.S. occupation troops fled Saigon. I remember how I–and most Americans–felt at the time.

We were relieved.

By the end of Nixon’s first term most people had turned against the war. Gallup polls taken in 1971 found that about 70 percent of Americans thought sending troops to Vietnam had been a mistake. Some believed it was immoral; others considered it unwinnable.

Since then, the political center has shifted right. We’ve seen the Reagan Revolution, Clinton’s Democratic centrism, and Bush’s post-9/11 flirtation with neo-McCarthyite fascism. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of Americans–including Republicans–still think we should never have fought the Vietnam War.

“After the war’s 1975 conclusion,” Michael Tomasky wrote in The American Prospect in 2004, “Gallup has asked the question (“Did the U.S. make a mistake in sending troops to fight in Vietnam?”) five times, in 1985, 1990, 1993, 1995, and 2000. All five times…respondents were consistent in calling the war a mistake by a margin of more than 2 to 1: by 74 percent to 22 percent in 1990, for example, and by 69 percent to 24 percent in 2000.”

Moreover, Tomasky continued, “vast majorities continue to call the war ‘unjust.'” Even in 2004, after 9/11, 62 percent considered the war unjust. Only 33 percent still thought it was morally justified.

Vietnam was an illegal, undeclared war of aggression. Can those who fought in that immoral war really be heroes? This question appeared settled after Reagan visited a cemetery for Nazi soldiers, including members of the SS, at Bitburg, West Germany in 1985. “Those young men,” claimed Reagan, “are victims of Nazism also, even though they were fighting in the German uniform, drafted into service to carry out the hateful wishes of the Nazis. They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.”

Americans didn’t buy it. Reagan’s poll numbers, typically between 60 and 65 percent at the time, plunged to 41 percent after the visit. Those who fight for an evil cause receive no praise.

So why is the McCain-as-war-hero myth so hard to unravel? By most accounts, John McCain demonstrated courage as a P.O.W., most notably by refusing his captors’ offer of early release. But that doesn’t make him a hero.

Hell, McCain isn’t even a victim.

At a time when more than a fourth of all combat troops in Vietnam were forcibly drafted (the actual victims), McCain volunteered to drop napalm on “gooks” (his term, not mine). He could have waited to see if his number came up in the draft lottery. Like Bush, he could have used family connections to weasel out of it. Finally, he could have joined the 100,000 draft-eligible males–true heroes, to a man–who went to Canada rather than kill people in a war that was plainly wrong.

When McCain was shot down during his 23rd bombing sortie, he was happily shooting up a civilian neighborhood in the middle of a major city. Vietnamese locals beat him when they pulled him out of a local lake; yeah, that must have sucked. But I can’t help think of what would have happened to Mohammed Atta had he somehow wound up alive on a lower Manhattan street on 9/11. How long would he have lasted?

Maybe he would have made it. I don’t know. But I do know this: no one would ever have considered him a war hero.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

The Triumph of Faith-Based Politics

I believe in John McCain. Which is why I don’t believe him.

When John McCain said he wanted to stay in Iraq 100 years, he didn’t mean it. He just said it to get elected.

His claims that the war is going great? Voting time after time to send hundreds of billions of dollars to fund the war without asking for a timetable for withdrawal? All part of his masterful plan to fool right-wing hicks into voting for him.

Once he gets the keys to 1600 Penn, the real, antiwar McCain will reveal his true plan: Evacuation from Iraq within 24 hours. An apology to the United Nations. Bush put on trial for war crimes. Mandatory gay marriage.

He’s got a similar plan for FISA. True, he voted to allow the president to eavesdrop on Americans’ phone calls and e-mails. He gave the phone companies immunity for the years that they spied on us illegally. As soon as he becomes president, however, McCain will line up all those lying, spying phone company CEOs against the White House wall and personally shoot them with his trusty sidearm, the Beretta PX4.

And he will laugh.

John McCain cares deeply about the same exact things I do. When he takes the Oath of Office on January 20, for example, a certain political cartoonist–not Chief Justice Roberts–will administer it. Government subsidies will allow Americans to travel to Tashkent and other capitals in Central Asia for just $50. And the electronica band Ladytron will play the Inaugural Ball!

Wait a minute, I can hear you saying. John McCain hasn’t said any of this stuff. Know what? You’re right! In fact, he’s mostly said the exact opposite. Which is exactly why I know he’ll do it.

Politicians, you see, are liars. Except when they mostly do, they never follow through on their campaign promises. The more they say they’re for using federal tax dollars to fund faith-based church groups, for example, the more you know they’re actually dogmatic, God-hating secular atheists. Which is, by the way, another reason I believe in John McCain. Because John McCain promises a new kind of politics, one where Americans aren’t separated red state from blue state, cat owner from dog walker. One where soaring rhetoric isn’t just something we read about in books, but watch on TV from time to time.

Some of John’s fans (he feels so near and dear to me, I’m entitled to first-name familiarity) wonder if the old maverick they fell in love with is losing his moral center by lurching to the right. But nothing could be further from the truth.

Straight talk? Not until he wins! After that, look out. We’ll be out of NAFTA faster than you can say maquiladora. Socialized healthcare? You bet. Tax hikes for the rich, free Netflix for the poor, billions to rebuild New Orleans, free kitten and puppy neutering too!

Do I know this stuff? Or am I just making it up–indulging in a sort of faith-based politics?

Yes, and yes. I know what I make up in my own mind, and what I know is that John McCain is a patriot, a man whose unshakeable iron will remained unbroken even after his North Vietnamese captors tortured him into signing a confession for war crimes. I know that John McCain loves America, and that therefore anything he says or does that indicates otherwise–including, say, signing off on Bush’s continued use of torture at Guantánamo–can be nothing more than a necessary attempt to appease the right long enough for him to win the presidency, after which he will no doubt reveal himself to be the liberal, idealistic demigod he has to be because I and others like me have willed him to be so. Regardless of what he says.

Some poutymouths say I’m deluded. That I’ve once again fooled myself into believing a politician was something other than what he appeared to be, or indeed said he was, all along.

A little while ago, Barack Obama campaigned as a moderate and a moderate and a moderate. Then he came out as a centrist. Such betrayal!

In 2000, there was George W. Bush. People said he was stubborn and merciless, that he made fun of condemned prisoners as he signed their death warrants as governor of Texas. But I thought he did that just to win the votes of the Republican base. Deep down beneath that mean, dumb exterior, I just knew there had to be the soul of a scholar and the wisdom of a sage. Oh, well.

And in 1980, when Reagan ran as a militaristic, scary old coot, I thought it was just a put-on he was using to get elected so he could make college tuition free for me and my friends.

But that’s all in the past.

Forty years it has taken me to learn what kind of smile is hidden beneath the Senator’s snowy comb-over. It is all right, everything is all right, the struggle is finished. I have won the victory over myself.

I love John McCain.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

One Amendment from Column A, Another from Column B

A week ago, Justice Anthony Kennedy was a liberal hero. Joining the court’s four liberal jurists, he declared that while 9/11 may have changed everything, it didn’t change the constitution. Despite statements by the Bush Administration to the contrary, Guantánamo is not a legal no-man’s land. POWs being held at America’s Devil’s Island now have the right to challenge their detention in federal courts.
“Thank God,” an editorial cartoonist friend told me after Kennedy cast the deciding vote in a 5-4 decision restoring habeas corpus. “We were one vote away from fascism.”

Antonin Scalia’s dissent–“[granting Guantánamo detainees the right to a fair trial] will almost certainly cause more Americans to get killed”–was widely ridiculed as baseless and hysterical.

What a difference a week–and your politics–make.

Then Kennedy cast the swing vote in another major decision. Declaring Washington D.C.’s handgun ban unconstitutional, he accepted the NRA’s argument that the Second Amendment’s reference to “a well-regulated militia” is not a conditional clause. Wherever they live, Americans are indeed entitled to purchase and keep a handgun.

“What an idiot!” my friend e-mailed me. “Doesn’t he get it? Kids are going to die!” Shades of Scalia; irony included free.

“À la carte” airline pricing–$2 for a Coke, $15 to check a bag, $30 for a coach seat that sucks 95% as much as the regular ones–pisses people off. When it comes to constitutional questions, however, we Americans like to pick and choose our favorite parts of the Bill of Rights like items from a Chinese menu: one from column A, another in column B.

Liberals revere the right to free speech enshrined in the First Amendment. The right to bear arms, not so much. With conservatives, it’s the other way around. Sometimes they clash over the meaning of the original ten amendments. It’s freedom of, not from, religion, say right-wingers. Freedom from, argue advocates of the separation of church and state.

The recently concluded Supreme Court session highlights Americans’ unique refusal to accept the Bill of Rights in toto. Republicans decried Kennedy v. Louisiana, which struck down the death penalty for someone convicted of raping a child. They applauded the court’s approval of an Indiana law requiring voters to show ID at the polls.

Reactions to Supreme Court rulings are rarely related to whether or not the nine justices correctly interpreted the constitution. They’re political. Law-and-order conservatives like their justice Taliban style, tough and vengeful. Thus their dismay that capital punishment for rapists could be deemed cruel and/or unusual. States with GOP-dominated legislatures like voter ID laws, not because they think they don’t violate the equal protection clause, but because they tend to reduce turnout among Democrats.

Partisanship is healthy. Creating your own Constitution around your personal stand on the issues is un-American.

As a holistic advocate of the Bill of Rights, I agree with the D.C. gun ban ruling. When the Constitution was signed in 1787, all land-owning white men–the class of citizens whose voting rights it guaranteed–owned (or were allowed to buy) guns. A “well-regulated militia” was usually an ad hoc affair, a group of guys called up for up to a year (often less) to respond to the threat of, for example, an Indian attack.

Today the Bill of Rights applies to everyone, even illegal immigrants. Moreover, while militias have gone the way of the musket, it’s a fair bet that the government would ask ordinary citizens to use personal firearms to defend U.S. territory in the event of an invasion–i.e., form militias. Why, then, shouldn’t the 18th century right to own a gun, which applied to everyone covered by the Constitution at the time, apply to everyone now?

There’s also a practical argument. As history proves, every government falls. Every nation gets invaded. No one knows when it will happen in any given case, but thus far it’s proved inevitable. When the U.S. government turns against its people, gun nuts will be in a far better position to resist than the double decaf latte types on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. We’ll all be praising Charlton Heston’s memory when foreign troops are marching down Broadway.

But practical arguments aren’t legal, much less constitutional, arguments. Either you agree with the Bill of Rights–all of it–or you don’t.

If liberals think the right to own a gun is antiquated, if they think the ability to resist future government tyranny is less important than reducing the number of young men getting gunned down in cities like Washington, they have a perfectly defensible argument. And they ought to do something about it. They should convince two-thirds of the states to ratify a constitutional amendment abolishing or amending the Second Amendment. Crafting an argument over principle around 18th century grammar and punctuation is tacky and embarrassing.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

Vital Businesses Need Nationalization

The gas station attendant came outside. Wow, I thought, full serve! Ignoring me, she flung a magnetic price decal on top of the price per gallon. Regular unleaded had gone up 20 cents in the time it took me to drive from the curb to the pump.

“You’re kidding me,” I moaned.

“It’s 3 o’clock,” she shrugged. “Just got the new price.”

There has to be a better way, I thought.

And there is.

It isn’t drilling in the Alaskan wilderness. It sure isn’t John McCain’s plan to offer $300 million to the first person to come up with a longer-lasting car battery

Gas prices could hit $7 a gallon before long, Wall Street analysts say, but Americans–always optimists!–take a little comfort in the fact that Europeans have paid more than that for years. But a lot of foreigners are laughing at us even harder than we’re laughing at the Euros.

Did you know that Venezuelans pay a mere 19 cents per gallon? It’s 38 cents in Nigeria. Turkmenistanis might not have electoral democracy, but they only shell out $4.50 to fill a 15-gallon tank. Before we replaced Saddam Hussein with…with whatever they have in Iraq now, Iraqis paid less than a dime for a gallon of gas.

One of the things that these countries have in common, of course, is that they’re oil-producing states. Countries that export oil and gas have trouble explaining to their citizens why they should pay for their own natural resources–and most are smart enough not to try. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Burma, Malaysia, Kuwait, China and South Korea are just a few of the countries that keep fuel prices low in order to stimulate economic growth.

But they also share something else: common sense. Strange it might sound to Americans used to reading about big oil windfalls, they consider cheap gas more of an economic necessity than lining the pockets of energy company CEOs. So they don’t consider energy a profit center. To the contrary; government subsidies (Venezuela spends $2 billion a year on fuel subsidies) and nationalized oil companies keep gas prices low.

Unlike corporations, governments don’t care about turning a profit. They care about remaining in power. Their reliance on political support (or, if you’re cynical, pandering) allows them to do things our much-vaunted free market system can’t, such as make sure that people can afford to eat and buy enough gas to get to work.

Like the rest of the world, Venezuelan consumers have been squeezed by rising prices, and even shortages, of groceries. In 2007 Venezuela’s socialist-leaning government decided to do something about it. First they imposed price controls on staple items. When suppliers began to hoard supplies to drive up prices, President Hugo Chavez threatened to nationalize them. “If they remain committed to violating the interests of the people, the constitution, the laws, I’m going to take the food storage units, corner stores, supermarkets and nationalize them,” he said. Food profiteers grumbled. Then they straightened up.

Not even international corporations are immune from Chavez’s determination to put the needs of ordinary Venezuelans ahead of the for-profit food industry. Faced with severe shortages of milk earlier this year, Chavez threatened Nestle and Parmalat’s Venezuelan operations with nationalization unless they opened the spigot. “This government needs to tighten the screws,” he said in February 2008, promising to “intervene and nationalize the plants” belonging to the two transnational corporations.

Miraculously, milk is turning up on the shelves.

When it works, nothing is better at creating an endless variety of reality TV shows than free market capitalism. But when it doesn’t, it isn’t just that extra brand of clear dishwashing liquid that goes away. Businesses fold. Banks foreclose. People starve. And no one can stop it.

The G8 nations met in Osaka last week to try to address soaring food and energy prices–a double threat that could plunge the global economy into a ruinous depression. But the summit ended in failure. “Any hope that the G8 meeting would result in coordinated monetary action–or concerted intervention in foreign exchange markets–to counter rises, principally in commodity prices, was dispelled by their failure to agree on the phenomenon’s underlying causes,” reported Forbes.

So the G8 ministers punted. “Due to the lack of consensus, they have stated the need for further study,” wrote the magazine.

The problem isn’t the weak dollar or the non-existent housing market. It’s capitalism. A sane government doesn’t leave essential goods and services–food, fuel, housing, healthcare, transportation, education–to the vicissitudes of “magic” markets. Non-discretionary economic sectors should be strictly controlled by–indeed, owned by–the government.

Consider, on the one hand, snail mail and public education. The Postal Service and public schools both have their flaws. But what if they were privatized? It would cost a lot more than 42 cents to mail a letter from Tampa to Maui. And poor children wouldn’t get an education.

Privatization, particularly of essential services, has always proven disastrous. From California’s Enron-driven rotating blackouts to for-profit healthcare that has left 47 million Americans uninsured to predatory lenders pimping the housing bubble to Blackwater’s atrocities in Iraq, market-based corporations’ fiduciary obligation to maximize profits that is inherently incompatible with a stable economy whose goal is to provide people with a decent quality of life.

No one should pressure industries that produce things that people need in order to live to turn a quarterly profit. No one should go hungry, or remain sick, because some commodities trader in Zurich figured out some nifty way to take an eighth of a point arbitrage spread between the price of a hospital stock in New York and in Tokyo.

P.S. If you’re reading this in Caracas, please mail me some gas.

(Ted Rall is the author of the book “Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?,” an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America’s next big foreign policy challenge.)

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL