It's been encouraging to see how many commentators – from Democracy Now's Amy Goodman to the Daily Show's Jon Stewart – have made the connection between the scare tactics used by the Bush administration to sell its Wall Street bailout plan and the scare tactics used by the same administration to sell the war on Iraq. In these dark times, I take this as a small ray of hope, an indication that Naomi Klein may be right when she suggests that crises - or “shocks” - are an effective tool for powerholders* who wish to work their will on a reluctant public, but that societies subjected to repeated shocks can become more “shock-resistant” as the public learns to see through and work around the shock tactics of their leaders.
In the end, Bush's Wall Street bailout has gone through with some modifications (like giving the public equity shares in the companies that are bailed out). Economist Nouriel Roubini, who accurately predicted the crisis when others were claiming the “fundamentals of our economy are sound”, describes the bailout as "a disgrace" and "a bailout of reckless bankers, lenders and investors that provides little direct debt relief to borrowers and financially stressed households and that will come at a very high cost to the US taxpayer.”
So we can't say that the American people's shock-resistance has reached the point where we can actually thwart - or even significantly alter - the plans of the powerholders. Nevertheless, eight years of the Bush administration have provided us all with a useful (if expensive) course in government shock tactics and how best to resist them. We should be codifying these lessons, so we have them handy in the next crisis. In that spirit, I offer a short list of rules:
1) Watch out for power grabs
The first reponse by powerholders to any crisis will be to act to increase their own power (for the good of the nation, of course). You saw the 9/11 attacks as an unprecedented tragedy, but Dick Cheney saw them as an unprecedented opportunity to accumulate more power in his own office and the Executive branch – power that he felt had been illegitimately taken by Congress in the preceding thirty years. In the same way, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson saw the mortgage crisis as an opportunity to gain powers that no Treasury Secretary has ever had, including the right to spend hundreds of billions of dollars of public money with no oversight and no possibility of legal review afterwards.
All powerholders have plans for increasing their own power in a desk drawer waiting for the "right” moment. For this reason, the best response to the first plan that comes out the door is always “no.”
2) You will be lied to
In the first days of a crisis, the government will hold a monopoly on information, as the mass media rush to “respected” authority figures for their take on the crisis. Most of these people will be the same people who participated in the creation of the crisis, either through action or inaction. Dissident voices will be absent from the “debate.” Trust nothing you hear in the first weeks, and be especially wary if there appears to be a “consensus” about what to do.
3) Don't defer to the “experts”
In any real crisis, their will be disagreement among the experts about what to do. This disagreement will be hidden from you in the early days, so powerholders will be able to claim that they are merely acting on expert advice, when they have, in fact, been engaged in a sophisticated process of “expert-shopping” to find the experts who will back them up while discarding experts with alternative views or plans. When asked, “Shouldn't we listen to the experts?” it's best to respond, “Which experts?”
4) Stall for time
Powerholders will want to precipitate a rush to judgement in the early days while they still hold a monopoly on information and proposals. Delaying the “solution” will help to create a space for alternative experts and solutions to come forward. Every additional day is a victory for the citizenry, because it allows more time for power grabs to be exposed and for self-interested proposals to be rejected. More time also increases the number of people who will be asking these questions: “How have others dealt with similar crises? What worked and what didn't?”
5) Refuse to be silenced by “What's your alternative?”
In a crisis, citizens often hesitate to reject the proposals put forward by powerholders because they don't know what to do themselves. Aren't we being unreasonable if we oppose the powerholders plans without offering a plan of our own? And since I lack the necessary expertise to create such a plan – or even to know which plan might be best – isn't it best for me to just stay out of the matter entirely?
But this approach misunderstands our role as citizens of a flawed quasi-democracy. Our primary role is not to spend our days roaming the internet, conducting research in an attempt to craft the best “solution.” In a crisis, the most useful thing the non-expert citizen can do is to slow the decision-making process down, so that the powerholders proposals can be subjected to the necessary scrutiny and people who really do know more about the problem than the rest of us can come forward with alternative proposals. Waiting until you yourself know what to do simply removes you from the game in the most critical early days, and having the best plan in the world won't help if the decision has already been made.
For these reasons, the most important demands that citizens can make in a crisis are not demands for specfic policies (which the powerholders will always ignore anyway) but demands for time, transparency and democracy. Time allows popular opposition to be marshalled and alternative solutions to be brought forward, transparency allows the self-interested proposals of the powerholders to be exposed and defeated, and democracy corrects the imbalance of power that makes crises so attractive to powerholders in the first place.
Focusing on these three demands rather than specific policy demands places the citizens on firmer ground, where they can assert their demands with confidence. One doesn't have to be an economist to know that a deal rushed through in a few days in a closed-door process by the same people who caused the crisis is going to be a bad deal. Many Americans recognized this basic fact in the first days of the recent crisis. If they weren't joined by enough of their fellow citizens to create the kind of popular uprising that could reassert the public interest over the self-interest of Wall Street insiders, we shouldn't be surprised. One phrase we've heard repeatedly over the last week is "crisis of confidence", in reference to the loss of trust in investment banks and the pieces of paper that they had gotten so rich promoting. But there's another "crisis of confidence" we should be addressing: the loss of confidence among "ordinary" citizens that they can play any meaningful role in decision-making when they are confronted with policy "debates" featuring derivatives of mortgaged-back securities or shipments of Uranium ore from Niger. I offer the five rules above in an attempt to address this more fundamental crisis of confidence, confident that we will have many opportunities in the near future to test them out.
*For the sake of brevity, I'm following the terminology of social-movement theorist Bill Moyer, who used the term "powerholders" rather than the clunkier "those in power". Marxists might want to substitute the term "ruling class."
UPDATE:
Here's economist Dean Baker talking about the bailout:
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Monday, September 22, 2008
Steve Burns: Stop the Bailout
In her book Shock Doctrine, journalist Naomi Klein explains how those in power use crises - whether economic or military - to suspend the normal democratic process and push through policies that they could never get in "normal" times. It's a warning we should all heed today, as the Bush administration rushes to push through a bailout of investment banks that made bad investments in mortgage-backed securities.
It's a routine the Bush-Cheney (or is it Cheney-Bush?) administration knows well. While most Americans saw the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as an unprecedented tragedy, Dick Cheney saw a tremendous opportunity for a massive expansion of executive power. Some of that power-grab went on behind closed doors, but when Congressional approval was needed, Congress acted as a virtual rubber-stamp. In the Senate, only Wisconsin's Russ Feingold voted against the Patriot Act.
And, when genuine crises couldn't be found, the Bush administration was adept at creating phony crises. In the Fall of 2002, we were told that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction was too urgent to allow any delay in action. The government must act, we were told, and it must act now. As usual, Congress complied, and handed Bush the authority he needed to take us into a war that cost millions of lives and trillions of dollars.
This history must be foremost in our minds as we consider the Bush administration's demand for $700 billion of our money, along with the right to spend that money with no Congressional oversight at all. Predictably, Democratic leaders in Congress seem eager to comply, and House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi has promised the Bush administration a vote on the bill before Congress goes on recess at the end of the week.
If the United States were a functioning democracy we would expect Congress to suspend its recess and hold full public hearings to drag the CEO's of every one of these investment banks up to Capitol hill to explain their reckless investment decisions. Government regulators would be called too, to explain why they looked the other way while this rickety financial house of cards was constructed. Members of Congress would be also called before the cameras to explain their 1999 vote to repeal the Glass-Steagall act. Alongside them, sweating and fidgeting before the hot lights, we would see the main proponents of that disastrous decision to de-regulate the financial industry: former President Clinton and then-Treasury-secretary Robert Rubin, now the main economic adviser to Barack Obama.
There is much that could be said about the financial crisis and the Bush administration's proposed bailout. Progressive economist Dean Baker lays out a response that protects us from economic collapse without rewarding corporate criminals. But the first thing that must be said in response to the Bush plan is "No!" If we can't rouse ourselves to say at least that much to our representatives in Congress, then our country will head further towards bankruptcy - and not just economic bankruptcy, but bankruptcy of the very idea of democratic governance. The "experts" will be in charge, and the Congressional vote that may take place this week will be a mere formality.
In the documentary film Body of War, we follow the story of Tomas Young, an Iraq war veteran paralyzed from the chest down by a sniper's bullet. The filmmakers cut back and forth between Tomas, struggling to live with his disability, and the Congressional debate and vote that sent Tomas and hundreds of thousands of other young Americans into that war. As the "yes" votes roll in, the camera cuts to West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd. His hands shaking, the 87 year old Senator holds his pocket copy of the U.S. Constitution aloft, and cries, "Stop! Don't rush this through!" That's pretty good advice for us to listen to today.
It's a routine the Bush-Cheney (or is it Cheney-Bush?) administration knows well. While most Americans saw the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as an unprecedented tragedy, Dick Cheney saw a tremendous opportunity for a massive expansion of executive power. Some of that power-grab went on behind closed doors, but when Congressional approval was needed, Congress acted as a virtual rubber-stamp. In the Senate, only Wisconsin's Russ Feingold voted against the Patriot Act.
And, when genuine crises couldn't be found, the Bush administration was adept at creating phony crises. In the Fall of 2002, we were told that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction was too urgent to allow any delay in action. The government must act, we were told, and it must act now. As usual, Congress complied, and handed Bush the authority he needed to take us into a war that cost millions of lives and trillions of dollars.
This history must be foremost in our minds as we consider the Bush administration's demand for $700 billion of our money, along with the right to spend that money with no Congressional oversight at all. Predictably, Democratic leaders in Congress seem eager to comply, and House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi has promised the Bush administration a vote on the bill before Congress goes on recess at the end of the week.
If the United States were a functioning democracy we would expect Congress to suspend its recess and hold full public hearings to drag the CEO's of every one of these investment banks up to Capitol hill to explain their reckless investment decisions. Government regulators would be called too, to explain why they looked the other way while this rickety financial house of cards was constructed. Members of Congress would be also called before the cameras to explain their 1999 vote to repeal the Glass-Steagall act. Alongside them, sweating and fidgeting before the hot lights, we would see the main proponents of that disastrous decision to de-regulate the financial industry: former President Clinton and then-Treasury-secretary Robert Rubin, now the main economic adviser to Barack Obama.
There is much that could be said about the financial crisis and the Bush administration's proposed bailout. Progressive economist Dean Baker lays out a response that protects us from economic collapse without rewarding corporate criminals. But the first thing that must be said in response to the Bush plan is "No!" If we can't rouse ourselves to say at least that much to our representatives in Congress, then our country will head further towards bankruptcy - and not just economic bankruptcy, but bankruptcy of the very idea of democratic governance. The "experts" will be in charge, and the Congressional vote that may take place this week will be a mere formality.
In the documentary film Body of War, we follow the story of Tomas Young, an Iraq war veteran paralyzed from the chest down by a sniper's bullet. The filmmakers cut back and forth between Tomas, struggling to live with his disability, and the Congressional debate and vote that sent Tomas and hundreds of thousands of other young Americans into that war. As the "yes" votes roll in, the camera cuts to West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd. His hands shaking, the 87 year old Senator holds his pocket copy of the U.S. Constitution aloft, and cries, "Stop! Don't rush this through!" That's pretty good advice for us to listen to today.
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Steve Burns: Two wars not enough?
Updated 9/15 (updates below)
Vice President Cheney was in Georgia this week, offering $1 billion in aid and repeating a long-standing U.S. commitment to push for NATO membership for the country.
Georgia had recently been overrun by Russian troops after Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili had sent his own army into the territory of South Ossetia, a region on the border between Russia and Georgia that had maintained its autonomous status since the last armed conflict over the territory in 1991.
Now that his army has been routed, it's clear the Saakashvili's attack was a disastrous blunder, and it's hard to imagine what he could have been thinking. Saakashvili was elected on a nationalist program of "taking back" the autonomous territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which many Georgians believe should be part of Georgia, but his attempt to actually follow through on this promise was reckless in the extreme, and thousands of people in both South Ossetia and Georgia have paid for his recklessness with their lives.
Which brings us back to Cheney and his eagerness to push NATO membership for Georgia. Expanding NATO right up to the borders of Russia has been a dream of Cheney and his fellow "neoconservatives" since the fall of the Soviet Union. If they had gotten their way, and Georgia had been a member of NATO at the time of Saakashvili's attack on South Ossetia and the resulting Russian counter-attack, the United States and other NATO members could have found themselves facing a treaty obligation to come to Georgia's defense. Instead of being entangled in two disastrous wars - in Iraq and Aghanistan - the U.S. could have found itself in three wars, one them with Russia, a nuclear-armed former superpower.
But did that prospect give Cheney, or anyone else in our Executive branch, cause to rethink the "expand NATO" program? Of course not. Three trillion dollars and more than four thousand American lives and more than a million Iraqi and Afghan lives squandered in our current wars produced absolutely no hesitancy to push our country into a possible third war.
But Cheney doesn't appear to be alone in his lack of concern about the potential for engaging our country in yet another war. Both John McCain and Barack Obama were quick to take sides in a squabble halfway around the world over a territory whose name most Americans cannot pronounce. McCain was the most bellicose, saying, "we can't turn a blind eye to aggression and international lawlessness that threatens the peace and stability of the world and the security of the American people", but Obama was not far behind, promising to "renew the tough, direct diplomacy that can curb Russian aggression."
For both candidates, a decades-long ethnic conflict whose most recent flare-up was actually prompted by Georgian aggression gets reduced to a cartoonish need to stand up to "Russian aggression."
And, while McCain assured us that he would "work to establish good relations with Russia so we need not fear a return of the Cold War", both his statements and Obama's made clear that cold-war habits die hard.
There really are no brakes on the American drive to empire. No matter how great a price we pay to purchase it, experience teaches our rulers nothing. And let's be clear that this is really a problem - a compulsion, really - that infects our ruling elites, and not the public at large. Although it's a little-reported fact, 76% of Americans believe the U.S. should not be playing the role of global policeman. Setting aside for the moment the question of whether "policeman" is an accurate description of our role in the world, even when our role of meddling in others affairs is put in that benign light, less than one-quarter of Americans think we should be playing that role.
And yet, despite this overwhelming consensus on the part of the American people that we should be less involved in disputes like the one over South Ossetia, there exists an iron-clad bipartisan consensus among our rulers in Washington that we must come to the rescue of plucky little Georgia, no matter the cost.
In the end, I suppose constraints will have to be imposed on us from the outside. Perhaps cooler heads in Europe might impede the U.S. drive to expand NATO. Perhaps our foreign creditors, who now support the mountain of debt produced by our "all war, all the time" policies, may finally call in their chips and tell us that they're not willing to finance yet another military adventure. We should all pray that this happens, and happens soon, because this election year is showing us that our political system is not capable of self-restraint.
UPDATE: I'm shocked to learn that Thomas Friedman of the New York Times agrees with me.
UPDATE II: In an interview with ABC news' Charles Gibson, Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sara Palin advocated NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, while admitting that this may obligate the U.S. to go to war with Russia:
Vice President Cheney was in Georgia this week, offering $1 billion in aid and repeating a long-standing U.S. commitment to push for NATO membership for the country.
Georgia had recently been overrun by Russian troops after Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili had sent his own army into the territory of South Ossetia, a region on the border between Russia and Georgia that had maintained its autonomous status since the last armed conflict over the territory in 1991.
Now that his army has been routed, it's clear the Saakashvili's attack was a disastrous blunder, and it's hard to imagine what he could have been thinking. Saakashvili was elected on a nationalist program of "taking back" the autonomous territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which many Georgians believe should be part of Georgia, but his attempt to actually follow through on this promise was reckless in the extreme, and thousands of people in both South Ossetia and Georgia have paid for his recklessness with their lives.
Which brings us back to Cheney and his eagerness to push NATO membership for Georgia. Expanding NATO right up to the borders of Russia has been a dream of Cheney and his fellow "neoconservatives" since the fall of the Soviet Union. If they had gotten their way, and Georgia had been a member of NATO at the time of Saakashvili's attack on South Ossetia and the resulting Russian counter-attack, the United States and other NATO members could have found themselves facing a treaty obligation to come to Georgia's defense. Instead of being entangled in two disastrous wars - in Iraq and Aghanistan - the U.S. could have found itself in three wars, one them with Russia, a nuclear-armed former superpower.
But did that prospect give Cheney, or anyone else in our Executive branch, cause to rethink the "expand NATO" program? Of course not. Three trillion dollars and more than four thousand American lives and more than a million Iraqi and Afghan lives squandered in our current wars produced absolutely no hesitancy to push our country into a possible third war.
But Cheney doesn't appear to be alone in his lack of concern about the potential for engaging our country in yet another war. Both John McCain and Barack Obama were quick to take sides in a squabble halfway around the world over a territory whose name most Americans cannot pronounce. McCain was the most bellicose, saying, "we can't turn a blind eye to aggression and international lawlessness that threatens the peace and stability of the world and the security of the American people", but Obama was not far behind, promising to "renew the tough, direct diplomacy that can curb Russian aggression."
For both candidates, a decades-long ethnic conflict whose most recent flare-up was actually prompted by Georgian aggression gets reduced to a cartoonish need to stand up to "Russian aggression."
And, while McCain assured us that he would "work to establish good relations with Russia so we need not fear a return of the Cold War", both his statements and Obama's made clear that cold-war habits die hard.
There really are no brakes on the American drive to empire. No matter how great a price we pay to purchase it, experience teaches our rulers nothing. And let's be clear that this is really a problem - a compulsion, really - that infects our ruling elites, and not the public at large. Although it's a little-reported fact, 76% of Americans believe the U.S. should not be playing the role of global policeman. Setting aside for the moment the question of whether "policeman" is an accurate description of our role in the world, even when our role of meddling in others affairs is put in that benign light, less than one-quarter of Americans think we should be playing that role.
And yet, despite this overwhelming consensus on the part of the American people that we should be less involved in disputes like the one over South Ossetia, there exists an iron-clad bipartisan consensus among our rulers in Washington that we must come to the rescue of plucky little Georgia, no matter the cost.
In the end, I suppose constraints will have to be imposed on us from the outside. Perhaps cooler heads in Europe might impede the U.S. drive to expand NATO. Perhaps our foreign creditors, who now support the mountain of debt produced by our "all war, all the time" policies, may finally call in their chips and tell us that they're not willing to finance yet another military adventure. We should all pray that this happens, and happens soon, because this election year is showing us that our political system is not capable of self-restraint.
UPDATE: I'm shocked to learn that Thomas Friedman of the New York Times agrees with me.
UPDATE II: In an interview with ABC news' Charles Gibson, Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sara Palin advocated NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, while admitting that this may obligate the U.S. to go to war with Russia:
When Gibson said if under the NATO treaty, the United States would have to go to war if Russia again invaded Georgia, Palin responded: "Perhaps so. I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you're going to be expected to be called upon and help."
UPDATE III: Ever heard of the 1994 NATO Participation Act? Or the 2002 Gerald B. H. Solomon Freedom Consolidation Act? Both of these bills, passed without debate by both houses of Congress, signed into law by a Democratic President (Bill Clinton) and a Republican President (George W. Bush) made it the policy of the United States to treat "countries emerging from communist domination" as de facto allies, even though no formal decision had been made on their applications to the NATO club - while also pushing for full NATO membership for those countries. The bills also allowed for weapons sales and the stationing of U.S. military advisors in countries right up to the Russian border. The step-by-step expansion of the U.S. empire proceeds apace, with no need to consult - or even inform - the public. A "bipartisan consensus" ensures there is no debate about this extremely risky program of expansion, and a compliant media ensures the public is in the dark, at least until we're dragged into another war.
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