Tomgram

It’s a wonderful life

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Remember in the film It’s a Wonderful Life when Clarence, the angel, shows George Bailey (the Jimmy Stewart character) the gray and greedy world that would have existed in his small town had he never lived? Well, my latest conspiracy theory is that someone in the new Hollywood re-filmed Wonderful Life and in the remake Jimmy Stewart died for real and we were left in the world without him. Right now, watching what’s happening to American life is like catching Pleasantville, that film where a black-and-white TV world turns into color, in reverse.

A couple of weeks back, Jay Bookman, columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote a piece, Cultural shift gives executives license to steal, that caught something of the graying moment we find ourselves in — though as always what’s a bad moment for some isn’t bad for everyone. He wrote in part:

“Yes, life is good at the top. They get rich if the stock goes up. They get rich if the stock goes down. They get rich if the company makes a profit. They get rich if it goes bankrupt. they even get rich if it turns out it was all done with smoke, mirrors and an auditor who agrees to look the other way.

“A generation ago, a typical executive might be paid 40 times what the average worker in a company was paid. Today, the figure is more like 400 times the average company income, and rising quickly.

“What changed was the culture.. in a culture that elevates greed from a vice to a virtue, any sense of embarrassment is gone. It used to be possible to believe that people got what they were worth. Now they get whatever they can take. There’s a difference.”

Our boy emperor, as the “executive” in charge of the world, is taking what he can get — right now, multi-millions from grateful corporate barons and the tax-lighter wealthy so that his ads can wash the American political scene clean of reality during the 2004 election. His vice-president Dick Cheney cashed in at Halliburton, the company he presided over in his years in the military-industrial wilderness between the regimes of Bush the elder and Bush the younger. (And now Halliburton continues to cash in on its connections. If you want to see how, check out Michael Scherer’s The World According to Halliburton at Mother Jones Magazine on-line).

In fact, it seems that global cash-in time is upon us; and in the meantime, at home our leaders seem to be following some modified version of the Argentinean script (also the Russian script after the Soviet Union collapsed and the Indonesian script that led to the all-Asian near meltdown of 1997). The Federal government has now taking on domestically the roles the IMF and the World Bank play globally — imposing “discipline” on us as if we were an occupied country, and so foreclosing on a society. Today, Bob Herbert, New York Times columnist, offered a powerful description (see below) of the desperation of life at the bottom and in the fifty states of what used to pass for our “union.” Several states are already edging up to a near-Argentinean-style bankruptcy, which is exactly what the utopian reactionaries in Washington have been dreaming of — sucking so much money out of the system that the social safety net, already tattered, will be ripped apart and a half century-plus of social programs deep-sixed. Thus does Ronald Reagan’s dream become our reality.

“A generation ago, a typical executive might be paid 40 times what the average worker in a company was paid. Today, the figure is more like 400 times the average company income, and rising quickly.

“What changed was the culture.. in a culture that elevates greed from a vice to a virtue, any sense of embarrassment is gone. It used to be possible to believe that people got what they were worth. Now they get whatever they can take. There’s a difference.”

Our boy emperor, as the “executive” in charge of the world, is taking what he can get — right now, multi-millions from grateful corporate barons and the tax-lighter wealthy so that his ads can wash the American political scene clean of reality during the 2004 election. His vice-president Dick Cheney cashed in at Halliburton, the company he presided over in his years in the military-industrial wilderness between the regimes of Bush the elder and Bush the younger. (And now Halliburton continues to cash in on its connections. If you want to see how, check out Michael Scherer’s The World According to Halliburton at Mother Jones Magazine on-line).

In fact, it seems that global cash-in time is upon us; and in the meantime, at home our leaders seem to be following some modified version of the Argentinean script (also the Russian script after the Soviet Union collapsed and the Indonesian script that led to the all-Asian near meltdown of 1997). The Federal government has now taking on domestically the roles the IMF and the World Bank play globally — imposing “discipline” on us as if we were an occupied country, and so foreclosing on a society. Today, Bob Herbert, New York Times columnist, offered a powerful description (see below) of the desperation of life at the bottom and in the fifty states of what used to pass for our “union.” Several states are already edging up to a near-Argentinean-style bankruptcy, which is exactly what the utopian reactionaries in Washington have been dreaming of — sucking so much money out of the system that the social safety net, already tattered, will be ripped apart and a half century-plus of social programs deep-sixed. Thus does Ronald Reagan’s dream become our reality.

In the meantime, our rulers are gathering ever more draconian powers to deal with any unruliness in the populace. I include two accounts, one an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times by a former judge and “judicial analyst” for Fox News (you explain it.); the other an anecdotal description of the loss of liberties in this country by Neil MacKay of the Glasgow Sunday Herald. And finally — call me a romantic (and you will) — a piece I liked by Bill Kauffman from the Counterpoint website on televised America versus the real America. Tom

Oblivious in D.C.
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times
June 30, 2003

Of all the challenges we face, none is more troubling than the fact that thousands of Oregonians – many of them children – don’t have enough to eat. Oregon has the highest hunger rate in the nation.
– Gov. Ted Kulongoski, in his
State of the State address.

Those who still believe that the policies of the Bush administration will set in motion some kind of renaissance in Iraq should take a look at what’s happening to the quality of life for ordinary Americans here at home.

The president, buoyed by the bountiful patronage of the upper classes, seems indifferent to the increasingly harsh struggles of the working classes and the poor.

To read more Herbert click here

‘Enemy Combatants’ Cast Into a Constitutional Hell
By Andrew P. Napolitano
The Los Angeles Times
June 27, 2003

President Bush has declared Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri of Peoria, Ill., an enemy combatant.

Al-Marri was arrested shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, and indicted by a federal grand jury for lying to FBI agents about the dates he traveled in the U.S. and the dates he made certain telephone calls and for possession of false credit cards. When he refused to cooperate with the Justice Department in its investigation of terrorism, as is his right, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft asked a court to dismiss the indictment against him, which it did; asked President Bush to declare Al-Marri an enemy combatant, which he did Monday; and then whisked Al-Marri under cover of darkness from a federal holding facility in Chicago to a Navy brig in South Carolina.

Al-Marri could languish there for the rest of his life without ever having been convicted of a crime.

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, practices law in New Jersey and is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News.

To read more Napolitano click here

Rage. Mistrust. Hatred. Fear. Uncle Sam’s enemies within
By Neil MacKay
The Glasgow Sunday Herald
June 29, 2003

When the Hollywood actor Tim Robbins took to his feet before the National Press Club in Washington DC in April this year, he delivered a speech laced with deliberate echoes of Bob Dylan’s protest song Blowin’ In The Wind. While Dylan, however, sang of freedom and liberty one day triumphing over repression and control, Robbins was saying that the greatest democracy on earth, the United States of America, was heading in the opposite direction under President Bush: to a future where freedom had lost out to repression and liberty to control.

To read more MacKay click here

Why I’m Not Ashamed to be an American
My America vs. the Empire
By Bill Kauffman
Counterpoint
June 25, 2003

In the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, John Fogerty of the terrific (if weather-mad) band Creedence Clearwater Revival recalled “feeling this shame just sweep over me…I was terribly ashamed of our country.”

He needn’t have been, as he soon realized. For Richard Nixon was “not my country. He’s those guys–over in Washington. First thing I thought about was the Grand Canyon and my friends and neighbors–and the people all across the country. The people in power aren’t my country any more than a bunch of gangsters are my country.”

Nor is the Fortunate Son in his fortified bunker on Pennsylvania Avenue my country–or your country, either, unless you are as thin and insubstantial as one of those vapid wraiths hissing of empire on CNN or MSNBC or any of the other alphabetical collisions in our corporate-media soup.

Bill Kauffman’s “Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette: A Mostly Affectionate Account of a Small Town’s Fight to Survive” has just been published by Henry Holt. He can be reached at: [email protected]

To read more Kauffman click here