Obama Will Drag Down Democrats in November

I’m a bit late, but this is the time of year when pundits issue their predictions for the coming year. Normally I stay out of the political prognostication racket. It’s as thankless as writing for Arianna Huffington.

Like when I predicted that Howard Dean had the Democratic nomination all sewn up. Nicely played. It’ll be in my obit.

I dare not die.

Do readers remember that I was the only one to call the Afghanistan War lost back in 2001? That I was the first to note that Bush’s handling of Katrina would mark the beginning of the end for his presidency? That I was the first American pundit to criticize Bush after 9/11? Nope.

Anyway…

2010 could end up being a big year politically. So, with nothing more than my already wounded pride at stake (damn you, Howard Dean, you coulda been a contender!), I’m placing my bets.

First and foremost, the economy will continue to sour. There may be small, brief up-ticks from time to time. But the overall picture will keep trending downward. Credit markets won’t loosen. There will be more bankruptcies. More foreclosures. Higher unemployment, both official and real.

I’m a pessimist for one simple reason: none of the structural problems have been addressed. No one has done anything to put more money into the pockets of consumers or businesses. More bailouts and stimulus might help, but Congress won’t approve them after the last time, when bankers used the loot to buy new yachts. Not that they would have signed on during an election year anyway.

Things won’t get better because they can’t get better.

Obama’s job approval rating, which has already fallen faster than any president’s in the history of opinion polling, is tied to the unfolding fiscal apocalypse. Unless there’s another 9/11, his numbers will plunge toward the Dick Cheney Zone.

It’s fair, mostly. Obama could have done a lot to ease the economic pain: direct federal assistance to distressed homeowners, nationalize insolvent banks rather than bail them out, giant New Deal-style federal employment projects, all funded by immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead, he kept Bush’s policies (and personnel). After the voters had rejected them.

Turns out we were wrong about Obama. He’s not smart. He’s not wise.

He’s just calm.

There’s also a racist component to Obama’s problems with the electorate. Obama is much like David Dinkins, elected in 1989 as New York City’s first black mayor. Dinkins, an affable Democrat, made the mistake of thinking that African-Americans were his political base. They weren’t. White liberals were.

At the time I overheard many variants of the following conversation: “New York has a lot of blacks. They’ve never had a mayor. Why not give them a chance to run the city?” Dinkins screwed up—not spectacularly—but he made a lot of boneheaded moves, such as ordering that white teachers be laid off first during the recession.

Hell hath no fury like a white person scorned.

“Never again,” I heard countless white liberals say after that. “They [blacks] had their chance.” White anger at Dinkins was out of proportion in response to his poor performance; if he’d been the same lousy mayor—but with white skin—he wouldn’t have been as reviled.

We’re seeing that now. Obama is a terrible president, just another Bill Clinton, one unwilling to seize the opportunities afforded by the global economic meltdown. White voter remorse, however, is a bitch. Americans hate Obama more than they would hate Clinton (for example)—because he’s black.

Racist buyer’s remorse will hurt Obama in the polls…and lead to Democratic losses in the midterm elections.

Conventional wisdom says that the Democrats will lose seats in the House and Senate in November. But no one is predicting a 1994 bloodbath. The GOP, goes the thinking, is too disorganized and fractured to wipe the floor with incumbent Dems. Also, writes Nancy Cohen in The Los Angeles Times, “what was most important about 1994 politically won’t make or break the 2010 elections. Congress changed hands in 1994 because the Christian right recruited new voters and white Southerners shifted en masse to the GOP.” That won’t happen in 2010, she says. “Neither evangelicals nor white Southerners can swing this year’s election, because they are the Republican Party.”

Generally, I agree with Cohen’s take. But I think Democratic losses will be more severe than the experts expect. Voters are being forced to flop back and forth between two parties they hate, but their contempt for the Democrats will be particularly toxic. Republicans don’t (and didn’t) promise anything more than the same old tax cuts for the rich.

Obama’s Democrats, on the other hand, ran as agents of hope and change. It wouldn’t be as bad for them if their party’s standard bearer hadn’t failed so spectacularly, managing to live down to John McCain’s denigrating portrayal of him as an empty suit.

Nothing pisses people off more than being promised the big and then failing to receive even the small.

(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the new graphic memoir “The Year of Loving Dangerously.” He is also the author of the Gen X manifesto “Revenge of the Latchkey Kids.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL

Why the Blood Is On Our Hands

As grim accounts of the earthquake in Haiti came in, the accounts in U.S.-controlled state media all carried the same descriptive sentence: “Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere…”

Gee, I wonder how that happened?

You’d think Haiti would be loaded. After all, it made a lot of people rich.

How did Haiti get so poor? Despite a century of American colonialism, occupation, and propping up corrupt dictators? Even though the CIA staged coups d’état against every democratically elected president they ever had?

It’s an important question. An earthquake isn’t just an earthquake. The same 7.0 tremor hitting San Francisco wouldn’t kill nearly as many people as in Port-au-Prince.

“Looking at the pictures, essentially it looks as if (the buildings are of) breezeblock or cinderblock construction, and what you need in an earthquake zone is metal bars that connect the blocks so that they stay together when they get shaken,” notes Sandy Steacey, director of the Environmental Science Research Institute at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland. “In a wealthy country with good seismic building codes that are enforced, you would have some damage, but not very much.”

When a pile of cinderblocks falls on you, your odds of survival are long. Even if you miraculously survive, a poor country like Haiti doesn’t have the equipment, communications infrastructure or emergency service personnel to pull you out of the rubble in time. And if your neighbors get you out, there’s no ambulance to take you to the hospital—or doctor to treat you once you get there.

Earthquakes are random events. How many people they kill is predetermined. In Haiti this week, don’t blame tectonic plates. Ninety-nine percent of the death toll is attributable to poverty.

So the question is relevant. How’d Haiti become so poor?

The story begins in 1910, when a U.S. State Department-National City Bank of New York (now called Citibank) consortium bought the Banque National d’Haïti—Haiti’s only commercial bank and its national treasury—in effect transferring Haiti’s debts to the Americans. Five years later, President Woodrow Wilson ordered troops to occupy the country in order to keep tabs on “our” investment.

From 1915 to 1934, the U.S. Marines imposed harsh military occupation, murdered Haitians patriots and diverted 40 percent of Haiti’s gross domestic product to U.S. bankers. Haitians were banned from government jobs. Ambitious Haitians were shunted into the puppet military, setting the stage for a half-century of U.S.-backed military dictatorship.

The U.S. kept control of Haiti’s finances until 1947.

Still—why should Haitians complain? Sure, we stole 40 percent of Haiti’s national wealth for 32 years. But we let them keep 60 percent.

Whiners.

Despite having been bled dry by American bankers and generals, civil disorder prevailed until 1957, when the CIA installed President-for-Life François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. Duvalier’s brutal Tonton Macoutes paramilitary goon squads murdered at least 30,000 Haitians and drove educated people to flee into exile. But think of the cup as half-full: fewer people in the population means fewer people competing for the same jobs!

Upon Papa Doc’s death in 1971, the torch passed to his even more dissolute 19-year-old son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier. The U.S., cool to Papa Doc in his later years, quickly warmed back up to his kleptomaniacal playboy heir. As the U.S. poured in arms and trained his army as a supposed anti-communist bulwark against Castro’s Cuba, Baby Doc stole an estimated $300 to $800 million from the national treasury, according to Transparency International. The money was placed in personal accounts in Switzerland and elsewhere.

Under U.S. influence, Baby Doc virtually eliminated import tariffs for U.S. goods. Soon Haiti was awash predatory agricultural imports dumped by American firms. Domestic rice farmers went bankrupt. A nation that had been agriculturally self-sustaining collapsed. Farms were abandoned. Hundreds of thousands of farmers migrated to the teeming slums of Port-au-Prince.

The Duvalier era, 29 years in all, came to an end in 1986 when President Ronald Reagan ordered U.S. forces to whisk Baby Doc to exile in France, saving him from a popular uprising.

Once again, Haitians should thank Americans. Duvalierism was “tough love.” Forcing Haitians to make do without their national treasury was our nice way or encouraging them to work harder, to lift themselves up by their bootstraps. Or, in this case, flipflops.

Anyway.

The U.S. has been all about tough love ever since. We twice deposed the populist and popular democratically-elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The second time, in 2004, we even gave him a free flight to the Central African Republic! (He says the CIA kidnapped him, but whatever.) Hey, he needed a rest. And it was kind of us to support a new government formed by former Tonton Macoutes.

Yet, despite everything we’ve done for Haiti, they’re still a fourth-world failed state on a fault line.

And still, we haven’t given up. American companies like Disney generously pay wages to their sweatshop workers of 28 cents an hour.

What more do these ingrates want?

(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the new graphic memoir “The Year of Loving Dangerously.” He is also the author of the Gen X manifesto “Revenge of the Latchkey Kids.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL

Lost Your Job? The IRS Thinks You’re Loaded

My friend was a survivor. Until she wasn’t. She’d made it through 14 rounds of layoffs at her accounting firm. Then came number 15: “I was a telecommuter. When my boss told me to come into the office for a meeting, I knew I was done for. I told her to cut the crap, save me the trip, and fire me over the phone.”

I told her how to file for unemployment benefits. In New York, you can get up to $405 a week plus $25 in extra “Obama bucks” approved by the feds back during the hope and change days. (Most states pay less.) Then I warned her: “Remember, set some of that aside. Unemployment benefits are taxable.” In New York, that means roughly 40 percent.

She was shocked.

You probably are too.

When people lose their jobs, they spend their savings. They take out loans against their house. They’re poor—but that’s not how the federal government sees them. The IRS sees them as big, fat cash cows. Hey, someone has to pay for those missiles we shoot at Afghan wedding parties—not to mention those bonuses for executives at AIG and Goldman Sachs. Why not people a couple of months away from foreclosure? The unemployed are living phat!

The bizarre unemployment tax goes back to 1985, while the Reagan Administration was busily waging class war against the poor and middle class.

It was Reagan’s idea, marketed as an easy way to raise $2.3 billion over five years. But it was Congressional Democrats, exhibiting their characteristic cowardice, who pushed through the measure. “This is a real step back from a traditional Democratic position,” said Rep. Brian Donnelly (D-MA) at the time. “Under the guise of tax reform, we agreed to raise $2.3 billion from people who don’t have jobs.”

It was also hypocritical for Republicans, who rail against “double taxation” when they argue for the repeal of taxes on the estates of the wealthy. Unemployment benefits, after all, were already taxed once; while employed, workers pay into the federal and state unemployment compensation systems. When they get downsized, they’re merely getting back what they put in.

The official the unemployment rate is over 10 percent and rising. With lots of folks out of work for at least a year, savings are running out. Tight credit and the housing bust means they can’t subsist on home equity loans. And there’s no recovery in sight. In other words, if you’re not out of work yet, you could be soon.

As banks and insurance firms wallow in hundreds of billions of federal bailout dollars, it seems unbelievably churlish to tax unemployment checks, which are the only “income” received by millions of people—and are keeping many of them just barely afloat. It’s also utterly absurd. Why should the government send out money to the jobless, then take it right back?

The Obama Administration should repeal the Reagan Tax on the unemployed, and it should do so this instant. Call your Congressman (it’s more effective than email) and demand that he or she take action on the Unemployment Benefit Tax Suspension Act of 2009 (S. 155), currently stuck in committee because Congress cares more about bankers than struggling unemployed Americans. You can find contact information for your representative and senators here.

(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the new graphic memoir “The Year of Loving Dangerously.” He is also the author of the Gen X manifesto “Revenge of the Latchkey Kids.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL

Columnists everywhere are attempting to name the decade just ended. Here’s my nomination: The Fear Decade.

Since 9/11, We’ve Embraced Our Inner Coward

Home of the free and the brave. Live free or die. Shoot first; ask questions later. Kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out. These were the mottos of a brash, impetuous, audacious-to-a-fault nation.

That nation is dead.

Once we Americas did brave things: We sat on boats, crossing the English Channel, knowing that most of us would die on the beach in Normandy. We sat at the lunch counter in the Deep South, waiting for white goons to beat us up. We also did brave things that were stupid: When the president sent us to Vietnam, some of us went, risking death. Others went to Canada, sacrificing everything for principle. We bungee jumped. We tried New Coke. Bravery can be dumb.

But it’s still brave.

Then came 9/11/01. It was the defining event of the decade that ends today, a fin-de-siècle moment for a previously proud nation’s once glorious history.

The Fear Decade had begun.

Bin Laden wanted the destruction of the World Trade Center to smack oblivious Americans’ upside their collective heads, to draw their attention to their nation’s toxic foreign policy (especially in the Middle East), maybe even to demand that the U.S. stop propping up dictators. It didn’t work.

Rather than prompt them to reassess their government’s behavior, Americans got angry. Anger, as any shrink will tell you, comes from fear. And fear makes you do stupid things.

Fear of future attacks. Fear of Muslims. Of anyone wearing a turban. Foreigners. The next thing we knew, the paranoid delusionals leading us convinced us that fearful people and things were everywhere. Mail full of anthrax. Gas stations stalked by snipers. Threat levels: orange, red, etc. (but it’s always orange). Avian flu. Eeek! Stop these things! Do whatever it takes!

Throwing innocent Muslim men in prison? It was worth it to (possibly, probably not) prevent one attack. Torture? We couldn’t take any chances—what if the victim knew that a bomb was about to go off? Because one lunatic tried to blow up his joke of a shoe bomb on a flight from Paris to Miami, America’s 800 million air travelers are ordered to take off their 1.6 billion shoes every year. Because a half-dozen Brits thought about trying to blow up planes using hair peroxide and Tang (yes, really), millions of nursing mothers were told to dump bottles containing thousands of gallons of breast milk into trashcans at airport security checkpoints. Never mind the scientists who said such plots couldn’t work. And now, the most fearsome fear of all: the Paris-to-Detroit underwear bomber. Airport security is about to turn really ugly.

Governments act stupid and mean. That’s normal. What the Fear Decade made different was us. It made us let the government do whatever it wanted.

Fear is irrational. As I pointed out at the time, Iraq’s longest-range missiles couldn’t reach Europe, much less the United States. In other words, it didn’t matter if Saddam had had WMDs. It didn’t matter to us, anyway. Yet we destroyed our economy and murdered two million people to invade Iraq.

I watched a legless vet, humiliated and detained by a TSA agent as he repeatedly explained why the metal detector kept going off: his body was full of titanium, courtesy of the Iraqi insurgency. I watched. So did other passengers. We said nothing.

We were afraid.

Not just at the airport. We were afraid at work. Unions were deader than dead, the government was in the hands of gangster capitalists, and the economy started tanking the instant Bill Clinton began packing his bags. We were overleveraged, maxed out and one paycheck away from losing everything. Ask for a raise? Demand longer vacations? Are you crazy, brother? Like Jews assembled in the freezing courtyard of a concentration camp, we stared straight ahead, terrified, hoping not to be noticed, to live to see the next “selection.”

Fear everywhere! National Guardskids, all of 20 years old and decked out in their best Kevlar, brandishing automatic weapons taller than they are at women and children as they came out of commuter rail stations. Annoying, sure—but what if…what if…what if something happened? We heard that the government was listening to our phone calls and reading our email but instead of summoning up outrage at this brazen and illegal violation of privacy we took cold comfort in that hoary chestnut: “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”

But we were afraid. We all were. We still are.

Then we elected Barack Obama. We didn’t vote for him because he was accomplished. He wasn’t. Or because we liked his ideas. He hardly had any. We voted for him because he seemed so calm.

But he was afraid too. More than that, he wanted us to keep being scared—of the same exact stuff Bush had had us so frightened of! Lions and tigers and Muslims, oh my! The Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, even though the Pentagon said there were fewer than 100 Al Qaeda guys in the whole country! Iraq, still, although he couldn’t quite explain why, and the bad guys who didn’t do anything wrong at Guantánamo, just in case.

Now it’s all fear, all the time. Fear of diseases (H1N1). Fear of evil banks (feed them or they’ll go away, which would somehow be worse). We were arrogant once, loud and silly and funny and crazy as hell, and we were Americans.

Now we’re timid and pissy and pissed off, and I don’t recognize, much less like, what we’ve become.

(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the new graphic memoir “The Year of Loving Dangerously.” He is also the author of the Gen X manifesto “Revenge of the Latchkey Kids.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL