Why Is America So Mean?

“The 82nd,” the man ahead of me in the security line at the Kansas City airport said. He was 64 and white, very Hank Hill and not the kind of guy you’d typically see chatting up a skinny 20-year-old Latino dude. But they were both veterans. Common ground is a given.

“I was in the 82nd too,” the kid told the old man. I looked down. The kid’s legs were gone. He was standing on metal. Implausibly and heartbreakingly, white Converses adorned the tips of his prosthetic legs. High tops.

On the other side of the metal detector, I caught up with the young vet (Iraq? Afghanistan?). HomeSec was giving him the whole treatment: arms stretched out, the wand, stern expressions and stupid questions. The wand beeped and beeped. The TSA guy scowled. “I’ve got titanium all the way up my spine,” the kid explained.

You’re kidding me, I thought. After what he’s been through. After what he’s done for his country. I wanted to scream: Bastards! You should wave him around the checkpoint. Here, sir, we’d like to offer you a seat in first class. No, no, no charge.

I bit my tongue. Here in the land of the twee and the craven, I know when to shut up. That’s what we do now. Airports are nodes of high-intensity fascism in a nation settling into authoritarianism lite. Hassle the bastards and you might end up dead. I had a flight to catch, doncha know.

Have we, at long last, any decency?

In one respect, the three remaining presidential candidates say, “Yes, we do.” They’ve promised to close Gitmo.

What ought to happen to the nearly 300 detainees is obvious. Hand each of them an apology, a bag of cash–a million bucks wouldn’t be nearly enough for what they’ve been through–and a plane ticket home. Those who can’t return to their countries of origin because their U.S.-backed dictatorships would murder them receive a penthouse suite in the U.S. city of their choice.

I’d let them switch places with their guards and 300 top-ranking members of the Bush Administration for a couple of days first. No questions asked. Just get on the plane, and don’t forget your bag o’ cash.

Anyway.

Here’s how messed up, how separated from common sense justice the United States of America has become: We might close Gitmo. But we’re keeping the inmates!

“When it comes to closing Guantánamo, talk is cheap,” Columbia law professor Matthew Waxman tells The Los Angeles Times. Because, you see, the U.S. government has violated the victims’ rights so egregiously for so long that there’s no longer a legally appropriate way to process them.

“Especially vexing,” says the paper, “are scores of foreign detainees: Officials lack evidence to prosecute, but warn against setting them free.” It’s an 800-year-old Western legal principle called habeas corpus: you can’t hold a person in custody without charging them. Oh, wait–Bush got rid of that.

“Because there is little evidence against them that could be used in a U.S. court, government officials fear that a federal judge could order them freed,” the Times continues. Heaven forbid that we release people, even if there’s no evidence they’ve done anything wrong. What’s next? Taxing the rich?

“Then you would have 100-plus future sleeper-cell members unleashed in Kansas,” a “midlevel official” told the Times. No grain silo would be safe.

Gitmo inmates have been waterboarded, urinated upon by U.S. soldiers, violently force-fed and driven to suicide. Some of the “dangerous terrorists” (John McCain’s description) were 12 years old when Afghan warlords sold them to U.S. forces for cash bounties. They’ve grown up in Gitmo. When do we finally, at long last, decide that they’ve suffered enough?

Maybe we should just shoot them.

It’s not just foreigners. Even for its own native-born wretches, America couldn’t find a path to fundamental decency if it were lit up like Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

In ancient Rome, executioners abided by a rule: If they failed to hack off your head after three swings of the blade, they set you free. Not here. Men condemned to lethal injection wake up screaming; the guards administer more poisons and barbiturates.

Veterinarians abandoned the three-drug cocktail used to kill inmates in most states because they considered it cruel to animals.

Many death row prisoners are innocent. Sometimes they even manage to prove it before their executions. “At least 205 men and one woman nationwide have been exonerated through DNA evidence since 1989, including 53 who…were convicted of murder,” reports The New York Times. But what happens to those who are set free?

No compensation is enough for someone who serves years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. But society ought to come up with something.

There ought to be money. Millions and millions of dollars. So much that the victim of a judicial miscarriage never has to work again. It wouldn’t bring back the lost years, the shattered relationships and murdered moments. But it would be a start.

Then again, this is America. We don’t apologize, much less try to pay penance. Here’s $24 and a cheap suit. Too bad about those 15 years. Thank you for playing. Want compensation? Find a lawyer who’ll work for $24 and sue.

Ah, but there’s a catch: you need a law under which to file a lawsuit. 36 of the 50 states have laws that specifically prevent innocent ex-prisoners from going to court to seek the damages they ought to have been given without asking. Twelve of the remaining 14 have limits. (New York and Maryland do not.) California caps total payouts at a stingy $100 a day, up to a maximum of $10,000–even if they lock you up for 20 years by mistake.

As individuals, Americans are generous to a fault. They do the right thing, or at least they try. The disconnect occurs when we express our collective will, through our courts and government officials. Our laws and our politicians are mean, cheap and callous.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

High Unemployment and High Inflation Make This Recession Different

“Why is this recession different from almost all other recessions?” asked Herbert Barchoff. The economist, a former president of the Council of Economic Advisers, answered his own question: “This is not only the usual cyclical recession, but also a structural recession.”

Barchoff’s dark assessment appeared in a letter to the editor of The New York Times–in June 1992. Then, like now, Americans were suffering through a long, grinding recession following a boom (under Reagan) that had primarily benefited the wealthy. There were mass layoffs. The real estate market had collapsed. Foreclosures were rampant.

George H.W. Bush, who had expected to coast to reelection on the strength of his near 90 percent post-Gulf War approval ratings, projected a Herbert Hoover-like resolve to not lift a finger to alleviate the misery. The Federal Reserve cut interest rates, but it didn’t help. Six months later, angry voters fired an out-of-touch president who seemed unwilling to fix an economy he didn’t think was broken in favor of a guy who claimed to feel our pain.

Barchoff, it would turn out, was too pessimistic. “To reverse the excesses of the 1980’s,” he wrote, “restructuring has been going on in massive proportions at every level. It is a rare day that newspapers do not report layoffs, often in the thousands in the industrial sector.” What Barchoff didn’t know–few people did–was that the U.S. was about to begin the longest, broadest and biggest period of economic expansion experienced by any civilization in human history.

Downsizing continued in traditional sectors like manufacturing and newspapers. Even during the Clinton boom, millions of people were ruined, forced to declare bankruptcy. Midwestern cities were reduced to rusted-out shells. But none of that mattered to Wall Street. The Internet revolution prompted so much capital investment, and generated so many new jobs–freshly minted college grads thought it perfectly normal to earn $85,000 moving around lines of HTML–that otherwise sane people began talking about a “new paradigm” in which “the old rules no longer apply.”

In other respects, however, Barchoff was prescient. “[The then-new European Community] will substantially hurt our ability to be competitive,” he correctly predicted. “The drop in interest rates is no solution. During the Great Depression the prime rate went to one percent, with no cure. When you are out of work or afraid of losing your job, you do not take on debt. Nor will entrepreneurs borrow even very cheap money unless there is a market.”

The Bush Sr. recession was a grim affair. When I graduated from Columbia in 1991, the university canceled its annual jobs fair due to employers’ lack of interest. But it was a picnic compared to what we’re facing now. Bush Jr. could finally realize Barchoff’s nightmare of a structural recession–the kind of no-way-out shock experienced by Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“Normal” cyclical recessions feature increased unemployment, which puts downward pressure on prices. You rarely see high unemployment and high inflation at the same time. Conservative economists point to rising inflation during the late 1970s as an exception, but that wasn’t even a downturn, much less a recession. Inflation was high but unemployment was low. Anyway, the inflation didn’t hurt workers; during the Carter years mean wages rose faster than inflation. The opposite is true now. Real income is falling.

The economy has bled 3.1 million jobs since George W. Bush assumed the presidency in 2001, the worst record since the Depression. The official unemployment rate, constantly re-jiggered to make the economy appear more robust, has risen to 5.1 percent. The long-term unemployment rate, which includes people who have had such bad luck looking for work that they’ve given up entirely, has doubled, to over 13 percent.

Meanwhile, inflation is approaching seven percent. Again, that’s the official inflation rate. Your mileage as an average American–who spends a third of your pay on housing and more and more on gas–will vary. But let’s not dwell on the irony of $4-a-gallon gas resulting from a war fought to steal oil.

But wait. There’s even more bad news.

Two-thirds of economic activity is generated by consumer spending. Most people are broke. So much for that two-thirds. “In 2000,” reports David Leonhardt in The Times, “at the end of the last economic expansion, the median family made about $61,000, according to the Census Bureau’s inflation-adjusted numbers. In 2007, in what looks to have been the final year of the most recent expansion, the median family, amazingly, seems to have made less–about $60,500.”

This, says, Leonhardt, is a big deal. “This has never happened before, at least not for as long as the government has been keeping records.” RBC Capital Markets reports that consumer confidence has fallen below 30 percent, an all-time record low. T.J. Marta, a fixed-income strategist at RBC, said: “What confidence? There is no confidence. It’s like 1929.”

If Barchoff had picked up a copy of the San Jose Mercury-News in 1992, he would have read about the birth of the Web revolution, then touted as the “information superhighway.” But there’s nothing like that coming down the pike today. To paraphrase the ever-quotable Donald Rumsfeld, we’re going to have to make do with the economy we have, not the one we wish we had.

Liberal economists like Paul Krugman suggest a rerun of the 1930s, when FDR’s New Deal employed millions to build new infrastructure like dams and bridges. But none of the three remaining presidential contenders is likely to undertake such a thing. “The worst-case scenario” about the 1991 war against Iraq, Barchoff said in 1992, would have been if it had lasted two years and cost an extra $200 billion. Iraq War II, now in its sixth year, is currently pegged at an estimated $3 trillion. Republican John McCain is committed to pouring more trillions into Iraq War II until victory is achieved, i.e., forever. As Democrats wary of being tarnished with the label of “big spender,” both Obama and Clinton will likely place fiscal discipline ahead of expansive new government programs.

There is no short-term fix. In the long term, we must put more money into more people’s pockets. That means higher wages and lower taxes for the poor and middle class. Some of what is needed is easy to see: a more progressive tax code, repealing laws that allow employers to harass and fire those who try to organize unions, nationalizing industries run by vampire capitalists–health insurers, private hospitals, colleges and universities. Banks encourage predatory lending while stifling saving. They ought to be re-regulated. What madness permits them to charge 30 percent on credit cards while paying one percent on passbook savings accounts?

More–much more–is necessary to prevent the wholesale collapse of the U.S. economic system. A maximum wage should be imposed–the highest paid American should earn no more than ten times the lowest paid. I know, I know–none of this will happen. There will be nothing but Band-Aids and lazy rhetoric as we plummet into the abyss. It cannot be otherwise, for our politics are ossified, the media is corporatized, and we the people are dull and apathetic.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

THIS WEEK’S SYNDICATED COLUMN: BIGOTRY, APOLOGY, REPEAT AS NECESSARY

The Rise of John McCain

In the 1993 film noir “Romeo is Bleeding,” the late Roy Scheider plays a mob boss. “You know right from wrong,” he tells a hopelessly corrupt cop portrayed by Gary Oldman. “You just don’t care.” It’s a perfect summary of John McCain’s political career.

Time after time, McCain weighs a decision. Then, after careful consideration, he chooses evil over good. In the short run, evil gets him what he wants. Later, when the devil comes to collect his due, McCain issues a retraction.

Running for president in 2000, John McCain squared off against George W. Bush in the key South Carolina primary. Asked whether the Confederate battle flag should continue to fly over the state capitol, McCain sided with the rednecks: “Personally, I see the flag as symbol of heritage.”

A few months later, he’d lost South Carolina and quit the race. He apologized–not to the African-Americans he’d offended, but to a friendly audience of Republicans. “I feared that if I answered honestly, I could not win the South Carolina primary,” he admitted. “So I chose to compromise my principles.” It wasn’t the first time, or the last.

Also in 2000, McCain insulted Asians. “I hate the gooks,” John McCain hissed, “and I will hate them for as long as I live…and you can quote me.” After a few days of negative press attention, he took it back: “I apologize and renounce all language that is bigoted and offensive, which is contrary to all that I represent and believe.”

What does McCain “represent and believe”? In 2000 McCain attacked George W. Bush for speaking at Bob Jones University, a freaky institution that smeared Catholics, banned jazz and interracial dating. Six years later, however, it was McCain’s turn to suck up to the Christianist right. He appeared at the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s extremist Liberty University, which–like BJU–bans gays and denies pregnant students the right to seek an abortion.

No apology for that one.

In 1983, John McCain was a freshman congressman from Arizona, then one of the most right-wing states in the country. In order to appease his Republican Party’s base–racist whites–he voted against the bill that established Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. “I thought that it was not necessary to have another federal holiday, that it cost too much money, that other presidents were not recognized,” he explained in 2000. Do Chester Arthur or Gerry Ford deserve holidays? Anyway, MLK Day didn’t cost employers a cent; Washington’s Birthday and Lincoln’s Birthday were replaced by the generic President’s Day.

He also floated the “states rights” excuse (with its own racist signifiers) that referenced his support for Confederate “heritage” in South Carolina. “I believe it’s an issue that the people of South Carolina can settle, just as we in Arizona settled the very divisive issue over the recognition of Dr. Martin Luther King as a holiday. I resented it a great deal when people from Washington and pundits and politicians and others came to my state to tell us how we should work out a very difficult problem.”

Healthcare is “a very difficult problem.” Iraq is “a very difficult problem.” MLK Day, like the Confederate flag “issue,” was a simple question of right and wrong.

True to his pattern, McCain understood that the racist pandering he used to launch his political career could come back to haunt him in the more enlightened–the John Birchers who contributed to his early campaigns might say “politically correct”–election year of 2008. Time for another apology: “I was wrong and eventually realized that, in time to give full support for a state holiday in Arizona,” he concedes. “We can all be a little late sometimes in doing the right thing, and Dr. King understood this about his fellow Americans.”

A little late?

“Well, I learned that this individual was a transcendent figure in American history, he deserved to be honored, and I thought it was appropriate to do so,” McCain explained about his change of, um, heart. Dr. King was assassinated in 1968. McCain voted no on the MLK bill in 1983. That’s 15 years later. How much longer did McCain need to “learn” about “this individual”?

The big question is: Is McCain racist? Or is he pandering to racists? And is there a difference?

His 2007 use of the term “tar baby” pretty much settles it. Unless, of course, you’re a sucker for yet another apology: “I don’t think I should have used that word and it was wrong to do so.”

It’s the 21st century. Even Nazi skinheads don’t use terms like “tar baby.”
God, if you’re up there, please grant us this wish: Don’t let John McCain become president. But if you do, don’t let him meet any foreign leaders who don’t happen to be white.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

Next Prez Must Make Bush an Unperson

“No one owes obedience to a usurper government or to anyone who assumes public office in violation of the Constitution and the law. The civil population has the right to rise up in defense of the constitutional order. The acts of those who usurp public office are null and void.”
–Article 46, Constitution of Peru

Comedian Bill Maher is a brilliant contrarian. He dislikes George Bush. Yet his view of the stolen 2000 election is conventional, ahistorical and quintessentially American: Forget it! Move on! “Oh, Ted,” he replied when I mentioned the judicial coup d’état on his TV show, which aired October 3, 2001. “That’s so September 10th. It really is.”

It has been nearly eight years since the U.S. Supreme Court violated the Constitution by installing George W. Bush as president. Their ruling was immaterial. They shouldn’t have agreed to hear Bush v. Gore in the first place. Under Article II of the Constitution, Federal courts don’t have jurisdiction in election disputes. The state supreme courts–in that case, Florida–have the final word.

It’s tempting, as Maher suggested, to try to move past 2000. But we can’t. What followed doesn’t allow it.

When a ruler seizes office by extralegal means he rules the same way. Because he does not derive his power from the people–indeed, his rule relies on their passivity–he is not beholden to them. Selling the public on his policies is hard enough for a legitimately elected ruler; an illegal one has to resort to bullying, presented as a stern, autocratic triumph of the will. He is forced to order his lawyers to find legal loopholes using the most tortured reasoning imaginable. In the end, when citizens turn against him, the tyrant shrugs his shoulders. “So?” This is what the vice president replied when a reporter asked about polls showing that Americans have turned against the Iraq War. Cheney’s question was perfectly reasonable. Why should he care what we think? We didn’t elect him. He doesn’t owe us the slightest consideration.

Electoral illegitimacy begets illegitimate rule: Secret detentions and torture redefined into meaninglessness. Secret prisons. Ending habeas corpus, the right to have one’s case heard before a judge–a right English-speaking people had enjoyed for 800 years. Secret “signing statements” purporting to negate laws signed in public. Spying on Americans, lying about it to Congress, and then, after getting caught, trying to legalize it retroactively. Destroying evidence. An executive order granting the president the power to declare anyone–without evidence–an “enemy combatant,” then order that person imprisoned for life, or even assassinated.

Even if the next president has promised to end extraordinary renditions (which began under Bill Clinton), close Gitmo, outlaw torture and overturn the Military Commissions Act, which eliminated habeas corpus, he or she will surely be tempted to retain some of Bush’s beefed up new executive powers upon moving into the Oval Office. Who wouldn’t want to read their political opponents’ email and listen to their phone calls?

But let’s posit, for the sake of argument, that Bush’s evildoing comes to an end next January. There will still be a mess to clean up.

One million Iraqis and Afghans are dead. Tens of thousands more have been tortured and maimed. Thousands of dead soldiers; tens of thousands more grievously wounded. Millions of Americans have had their privacy violated. They deserve justice. We deserve justice. The war criminals, torturers and phone companies deserve due process. If there are consequences for driving fast and cheating on your taxes, after all, there surely ought to be a price to pay for urinating on an innocent man in a dog cage at Guantánamo.

America might want to move on. How can the rest of the world let us?

Bush v. Gore gave us an illegitimate president. Bush presided over an outlaw government. If we sit on our asses, as we’ve done since that weird, soul-crushing day in late December of 2000, illegality will be hardwired into the U.S. government. The country itself will become, like the Soviet Union and its wonderful freedom-guaranteeing constitution, a caricature of itself. “What is the difference between the Constitutions of the USA and USSR? Both guarantee freedom of speech,” the old Russian joke went. “Yes, but the Constitution of the USA also guarantees freedom after the speech.” A gangster regime presiding over the trappings of law and order is a vicious joke–illegitimate and ultimately doomed.

There’s one way–only one way–to avoid ratifying Bush’s legacy. The next president must do the following three things immediately upon taking office:

1. Issue an executive order declaring all laws and actions undertaken by the Bush Administration, the states and local municipalities (because many state and local ordinances are influenced by national politics) between January 2001 and January 2009 null and void.

2. Act quickly to restore the rule of law–freeing Gitmo inmates, offering compensation to victims of torture and rendition, order immediate withdrawals of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and other undeclared wars.

3. Create a cabinet-level department to investigate top officials and subordinates of the Bush interregnum for crimes they may have committed and refer them to the appropriate courts for arrest, prosecution and imprisonment.

When Charles de Gaulle took over as president of France at the end of World War II, he erased the Vichy regime from the history books. “Vichy is, and remains forever, null and void,” he declared. Yale historian Jay Winter explained de Gaulle’s reasoning: “Pétain’s government was de facto, not de jure; therefore, the Republic had not died [in 1940]; it had been usurped by the traitors who had signed the Armistice with the Nazis.” It’s a kind of fiction (Vichy had a stronger case than Bush to be considered legitimate), but defining Vichy as an aberration reaffirmed France’s commitment to democracy and the rule of law. Pétain was convicted of treason. His death sentence was commuted to life in prison. Hundreds of officials were prosecuted during the postwar épuration (purge). France moved on.

I know none of this is likely to happen. But this is no time to be “realistic.” The German patriot Henning von Tresckow, leader of a circle of officers who tried to kill Hitler in 1944, knew that their plot was a long shot. Nevertheless, the general urged his comrades to go ahead “at any cost…We must prove to the world and to future generations that the men of the German Resistance movement dared to take the decisive step and to hazard their lives upon it.”

Now it is time for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain to prove that they are true patriots. Unlike Tresckow, they need risk neither life nor limb. Their supporters should press them to declare that, should they become President, they will erase George W. Bush and his deeds from American history.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL