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http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=13588&CFID=2150732&CFTOKEN=65084856 Geov Parrish WorkingForChange 07.21.02 Bohemian Grove no idyll Rude awakening for the new robber barons As Dick Cheney hunkered down with his power-brokering pals at the exclusively bizarre annual Bohemian Grove retreat in California this weekend, it seems fairly likely his friends were more concerned with dressing him down than dressing him up. (Though perhaps the ritual cross-dressing will help him avoid those subpoena-servers.) How is it, they must have hectored him, that, as full-time nanny to the most powerful man in the world, he could have let things come to such a state? The world of the powerful is very much one of what-have-you-done-for-me-lately, usually very lately, and lately has not been kind to the Bush Administration. Those 80+ percent approval ratings of a few months ago must seem like a dim, surreal memory—they were certainly surreal enough when they were happening—in the midst of an economic meltdown centered on the seemingly-imminent indictments of most, if not all, of the Fortune 500 CEOs, and probably half of their board members and two-thirds of their accountants. Maybe next year, they'll have to hold Bohemian Grove down the road in San Quentin. The U.S. stock market has lost 15 percent of its value in the last two weeks. Institutional investors and especially foreign investors are pulling their money out in droves, and individual investors (i.e., folks like you and me)—always slower on the uptake on such matters—are scurrying along behind them. A lot of people are watching the complete evaporation of their retirement funds or life savings, the accumulated wealth they so trustingly put in Wall Street after being beseiged for a decade with promises of fabulous wealth and can't-miss opportunities we'd all be fools to pass up on. Many listened and were, in fact, fooled. (How does privatizing Social Security sound now?) This is a maelstrom—"scandal" is not only far too tame a word, but it implies aberration where there is none—that is just beginning, and not just in the sense of empanelling grand juries and SEC probes. When people start to figure out—and it's starting to sink in as you read this—just how badly they've been hurt at the expense of the owning classes (which are conveniently represented by CEO Bush), the anger will be terrible to behold. It will dwarf the "it's the economy, stupid" downfall of Dubya's father to the same scale that Dubya's stupidity dwarfs that of his father—and Poppy was a much smarter man. Remember the tax cuts for the rich, that were supposed to stimulate corporate spending but haven't, pushed through Congress on the wings of a $300 loan used to bribe the middle class? Remember the $127,000,000,000.00 federal budget surplus of only a year ago, transformed today into an estimated—and these are the estimates of the notoriously math-deficient Bush Administration—$165,000,000,000.00 federal deficit? It'll get worse, much worse, before it gets better, but much of the $292 billion already lost represents either post-9/11 blank checks to the military contractor lobby or those tax cuts to the wealthy—in both cases, evidence that the current meltdown is going to hurt ordinary people far more than the criminal classes whose paper losses we'll already hearing about. The present meltdown has the potential to be much more dramatic in its political impact than past recessions, or Wall Street downticks like the 1987 crash, for two related reasons. First, the economy is far more dependent, fifteen years later, on paper transactions, the service economy, and what is now gingerly called "consumer confidence." The latter is a polite way of saying that for years now people have been encouraged to go into debt and spend, as a way to pump the economy, and consequently many people have little or no savings—or even available credit to help survive bad news. Dot-coms aren't the only outfits whose downfall will be their lack of actual products; a grand proportion of the American economy no longer makes things. That's something other, "lesser" countries do now. As free trade increases and the globe shrinks, the same sort of profiteering on other countries' misery that has fattened America in the past can now happen in reverse. Global corporations are far more fickle in their national loyalties today, too. And, as U.S. economic influence lessens, its ability to carve exceptions to free trade that help keep big chunks of our economy afloat (e.g., agriculture or steel) will be further endangered. And there's more: in short, the U.S. economy has a whole hell of a lot farther to fall. That vulnerability, and the American economy's dependence on confidence, makes particularly potent the most unique aspect of its current crisis. Much more so than past episodes of greed unmasked, as with the 1987 S&L crisis, taxpayers are still paying for this current round of indictments, banktruptcies, and bears-run-amok—all stemming from a fundamental flaw in the way our economy has been operating. This wasn't a few bad CEOs stretching the rules; this was an entire generation of MBAs doing as it was taught to do: lie, cheat, steal, and collect your rewards while screwing the other person. Politically, this is dynamite; it's a combination of the traditional economic impact on voting with the moral repugnance that Bill Clinton engendered. Most people don't like being poor, and they don't like liars and cheaters. The one individual who most visibly represnts that entire range of behavior isn't the CEO of Enron, or WorldCom, or Tyco, or any of the dozens of other soon-forgotten names now in the news. It's George W. Bush himself—a man who, as the entire planet knows, has never had to worry about money or work an honest day in his life. A man who, in the past, has committed the same crimes now making headlines on a daily basis. A man who has gotten every job he ever held—including his current one—through connections and favors, many of them unseemly. A man who has been publicly and stridently unapologetic about his belief in the benefits of greed and of the rich getting much, much richer while others suffer. And a man who has smugly thumbed his nose at the world's laws when he didn't like the laws or they didn't suit his purposes. Bush's defense, as I wrote Friday, has been a good offense—an attempt to separate himself from his cronies by demanding corporate accountability and ethics. But you can't divorce yourself from your entire life experience—and every fiber of your being—with a press release or a few proposals for toothless reforms. (Such as with the ill-fated "TIPS" spy proposal, on which you can look for much more of from me tomorrow.) The American people have far more common sense than that. In his rush to take advantage of 9/11, Bush overplayed his hand with world opinion. Our supposedly unfettered media has shielded Americans from most of the reaction, but now that the extremes of Dubya's reign are catching up with us domestically as well, it won't be nearly so easy a ride. The bad news is economic: things are going to get worse, much worse, before they get better, and a lot of people will suffer. Assuming they avoid indictment, or even if they don't, that won't include most of the Bohemian Grove crowd. But the good news is that the charade has been visibly and irrevocably exposed—not just the charade of a statesmanlike George W. Bush whose leadership benefits us all, but the entire myth of unfettered global capitalism being the highest and best goal of public policy. As with the abuses that led to the trust-busting reforms of a century ago, greedy capitalists have been their own, as well as our, worst enemy—and the best news of all is that more and more people now clearly understand whose side they're on. Nobody's. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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