Strange New Respect

I'll say this much about Obama. He doesn't seem to be planning to do what so many of his Democratic predecessors have done, namely drag a bunch of cronies, good ol' boys, hacks, fools, and all-around shitkickers up to Washington to turn the White House, basically, into the governor's mansion of a seedy Southern state for four years. LBJ certainly did this, as did Carter and Clinton, but Obama seems to have more perspective and, while not totally turning his back on "local interests" (in his case Chicago) he really does seem to want to pick the best people for the various jobs -- according to his criteria, of course -- out of a nationwide field, and the emphasis is on actual experience (again, for good or ill, in the case of Hillary, e.g.). Can it be that his administration will wind up being the least parochial, least bucolic, and widest in scope of any since... oh, I don't know when. Eisenhower maybe? If so, that could be a good thing, at least in the area of foreign affairs, where we have seen the effects of provincial thinking for far too long. In domestic terms, sometimes the "local yokels" have a better finger on the pulse of regular people -- but that this is not necessarily the case was shown in high relief by the Carter and Clinton administrations. There is, of course, a natural tendency for anyone, once they get inside the Beltway, to develop instantaneous delusions of grandeur and start to think that they have been voted into office in order to remake the world in their own image. This, in turn, is the result of what happens when government that is many orders of magnitude too big encounters fallible human beings. The man (or woman) has not yet been born who can satisfactorily handle that much power -- the temptations are too great. In this sense, it's good that we still have what is called "balance of powers", albeit it's a shadow of its former self as provided in the Constitution. We also have the shadow government in the form of the intelligence agencies, and frankly I'm not sure whether they have always provided a moderating effect over the years. But their self-preservation instincts have at least held off total chaos, as I suspect happened during the Carter years.

Certainly the influence of the international corporations has acted, most of the time, as a stabilizing influence, as has the activity of more deeply-hidden international organizations. But certainly all of these entities cannot have stood for moderation at all times, as the current economic crisis makes clear. Or, maybe what's "moderate" and "conservative" for them is catastrophic for the average citizen -- this is also a possibility. Think of the business interests behind the Vietnam and Iraq wars, for example, or the ones behind the destruction of the Amazon rain forests. The guys on top never break a sweat; they sit in climate-controlled offices in New York, San Francisco, and Rio de Janeiro, wearing designer suits, while wars are breaking out between the peasantry and "developers" in the back country. And more often than not, it's the American military that winds up doing all the heavy lifting -- and American politicians who get all the blame. The question we should always ask about American, or international, business is not how its moguls appear when testifying before a Congressional committee, but how its cutting edge appears when it reaches indigenous peoples. Because that is the true "face" of big business; the rest is just window dressing for public consumption.

In any case, one question is whether business will have any less impact in an Obama administration than it has in the Bush administration, and the answer is no. By any measure, the Democrats and the liberals have long since shared the peace pipe with business -- particularly the largest, most international, and most predatory. Small businesses can expect nothing from the liberals but harassment; this has been the case for decades. But unlike the 1930s, say, when the Democrats/liberals were still animated by ideals, a cloud of cynicism has enveloped them all -- and none more than Bill Clinton, although there is no reason why Obama can't catch up. The old, radical, take-to-the-streets liberalism of the New Deal period, which survived at least through the 1950s, is basically dead. For one thing, the cataclysms of the 1960s involved a significant reshuffling of political alliances. The old union leaders who had been taken on "Potemkin Village" tours of the Soviet Union in the 1930s were dying off... the union rank and file had grown much more conservative... and union membership as a proportion of the total work force was falling off, thanks not so much to government policies as to the shift from manufacturing to "service", and from domestic to international. At this point, the unions are holding on like ticks in many areas, and they constitute an elite -- the cream of the labor force, at least based on compensation if not on productivity. But eventually this generation will die off and it won't be replaced, for the simple reason that no one can afford it. The tough union negotiators were too smart by half; they worked out wildly extravagant compensation schemes with management, which was at that point over a barrel, and then proceeded to ride the wave for a while, but eventually the firms involved either contracted or folded altogether, or went international thanks to things like NAFTA. And the unions were caught in a shell game by all this, because many of the fervent supporters of free trade and "internationalism" were, in fact, their old liberal friends in Congress. But, you see, free trade and internationalism were "ideas", and the unions had run out of "ideas" decades earlier -- their only argument was, keep us on the books as an elite labor force. Why? "Just because." Well, that was no longer good enough, so "ideas" prevailed, and what we have now is "free trade" with all of its discontents -- the primary one being a gradual economic "leveling" of the U.S. with the rest of the world, which -- let's not forget! -- was one of the original "ideas" of the radical labor movements of yesteryear. So finally they're getting their wish -- but the guys who did all the wishing are long gone. Ironic? You betcha, as Sarah Palin would say.