Letter from Woodstock

Tribune, London

 

Things Fall Apart...

John Mason, Woodstock,

December 30th, 2002

 

Sometimes “things fall apart”- and all at once. This now seems true for the Bush administration on several fronts. At home Republican arrogance over their November midterm victory has been checked by a series of political setbacks. Trent Lott’s resignation as Senate majority leader has finally raised a few questions about the brand of southern conservatism shared by most of the Republican leadership - including George Dubuya himself.  Trent Lott, Senator from Mississippi, has been known to genuflect to Jeff Davis and other idols of the Confederacy (often in the pages of the Southern Partisan, the house journal of the neo-confederate League of the South), but his birthday salute to Strom Thurmond and his segregationist, presidential run in 1948, caught the attention of the national press in a way that the Bush White House couldn’t ignore. His ouster quickly followed but not in time to completely smother the affair.

In all fairness, Trent’s salute to Strom’s contribution to today’s Republican party, while indiscrete, was more than justified. In rallying to Goldwater in 1964, Senator Thurmond was a segregationist pioneer who blazed a trail that many Southern democratic defectors would follow over the next 40 years. Most recently, Strom’s friends among the Neo-Confederates such as Robert Hines played key roles in rescuing the Bush ‘s campaign from the McCain challenge during the South Carolina primary in Spring 2000. The dirty secret of the Bush administration -as Michael Lind points out in his hard-hitting analysis, Made in Texas- is that it represents the first time that the White House has been occupied by a Southern conservative since the Civil War.

This history lesson was a hard one for the national press to fathom, but it wasn’t lost on the black voters of Louisiana. They turned out in record numbers in the December runoff for Louisiana’s Senate seat to vote for Mary Landrieu and keep a piece of the Deep South safe for the Democratic Party. This narrows the Republican majority in the Senate from 52 to 51.  But more importantly, the Republican /Dixiecrat coalition now stands exposed as a hegemonic regional party whose national audience is limited to its Southern base and the Rocky Mountain states. Unfortunately for Bush, this excludes most minority groups and the big urban conglomerations on the two coasts where the majority of Americans live.

To make matters worse, the forced resignations of the Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, and Larry Lindsey, White House economic advisor – following on that of the SEC Chair, Harvey Pitt, last month- highlighted the disarray of Bush’s economic policy and the mounting problems created by the “jobless recovery” now entering its third year. The replacement team of Snow, Donaldson and Friedman didn’t signal a change of direction so much as of the salesmen charged with arguing for deeper tax cuts; the privatisation of social security and other “supply side” nostrums. In making their case, the new team is burdened with a set of “bad facts.”

 In addition to state and city budget crises, these include a n unemployment rate that tops 6% (with 8% in New York City alone), a stock market that has scored a 17% loss for the year (its third consecutive loss) and a commercial deficit of over 400 billion USD per year and a weakening dollar (down nearly 10%). The response of the White House team to all this is to make their tax cuts and runaway deficits permanent. The response of the Republican House majority was to recess for Christmas while allowing an extension of unemployment benefits to lapse- thus cutting off support for 750,000 unemployed for New Year’s.  This “oversight” will not be forgotten anytime soon.

Among all the “bad facts,” I find the trade deficit the most disturbing, but imagine that it will remain a “non issue” until our creditors in the EU and Japan finally decline to finance our deficits with their savings to the tune of some 2 billion USD a day. Actually given the declines in the New York stock market, the corporate accounting scandals that cast doubt on the productivity gains of the Clinton ”bubble”, and a crisis of confidence in the Bush economic team, our day of reckoning may not be far off. In view of the fact that we now consume 5% more from abroad than we produce and are highly dependent on foreign suppliers and creditors, brutal adjustments will be required in order for us to live within our means.

Clearly, this is a situation that has been building for long time, but it’s one the Bush people are running away from by “seeking foreign dragons to slay.”  Iraq and Korea maybe “little dragons” but our fixation on these WMD states is a dangerous distraction Any attack on them threatens European and Japanese energy supplies (note bene only 18% of US oil comes from the Mid-East) as well as the security of our principal industrial suppliers on the Asian Rim. One might hope that big debtors like the US would think twice before putting the vital interests of the countries upon whom they depend at risk, but then again, our Southern conservatives always fall hard for a guy who swings a “big stick.”