By ALEXANDER COCKBURN /
How have McCain, Clinton and Obama adjusted to the new facts of life,
at a moment when the entire system is still tottering?
The Republican, John McCain, has confirmed his own low estimates of
his grasp of economic policy by announcing that he is opposed to any
strengthening of financial regulation to prevent the shenanigans that
caused the subprime and "securitization" catastrophes which have
provoked the current credit crisis. At a moment when the costs of
federal bailout and the incoming recession are certain to require a
big increase in the US government deficit, he wants to cut spending.
Hillary Clinton shuttles between criticisms of McCain's stance and her
formal declaration in one recent speech that she wants Clinton-era
Treasury secretary Robert Rubin, and former Fed chairmen Alan
Greenspan and Paul Volcker to lead a "high-level emergency working
group" to recommend ways to restructure at-risk mortgages to help
avert more foreclosures.
Her nomination of Rubin and Greenspan scarcely encourages confidence
in Mrs C's oft-proclaimed capacity to hit the ground running in times
of crisis. Rubin was the arch deregulator in Bill Clinton's second
term. It was Rubin who successfully pushed for repeal in 1999 of the
Glass Steagall Act which, amidst financial collapse in early 1933
(when Roosevelt closed down the banking system altogether) placed
regulatory barriers between commercial and investment banking.
As fed chairman in the Clinton and early Bush years Greenspan
deliberately encouraged the growth of speculative bubbles. He chose in
1996 not to set margin requirements on stock market speculators and in
later years fiercely advocated the deregulation of the financial
system. His fingerprints are all over the sub-prime disaster.
This brings us to the man who, on the basis of current delegate
counts, will be the Democratic nominee, Barack Obama. His track record
in matters of economic policy is slight, beyond some big favors
extended in his senatorial term to Wall St which have earned him
grateful campaign funding from this quarter. It would be the matter of
an hour for any capable and economically informed speech writer to
draft a speech for Obama which could politely savage Mrs Clinton's
claims that she has the maturity and experience to handle the nation's
economic affairs in what is sure to be a darkish time, at the start of
2009.
In recent days partially released records of Mrs Clinton's White House
log have disclosed that contrary to recent assertions she was an
ardent lobbyist for the trade treaties that have shut down American
factories by the thousand. Equally, he could deride her blue-ribbon
panel of Rubin, Greenspan and Volcker.
But here we come to the disturbing fact that Obama cannot bring
himself, as a Democrat, to rock the boat by pointing out that the
Clinton era was a feeding trough for the rich, but sparse in rewards
for everyone else. Granted, he has put a toe or two in the water. He's
bringing up the repeal of Glass Steagall. But he should turn up the
volume fast.
As for the phone ringing at 3 am: My guess is that President McCain
would be flat on his back, snoring off cocktails, a fine claret and
brandy to follow; Obama would be getting an earful from Michele about
wimping out to Wall Street; Hillary would be reaching out a drowsy
hand to check whether by mistake Bill had ended up in the same bed and
Ralph would be on the phone already, using all available lines.
My Escape from the Titanic
I flew home from London to San Francisco from Heathrow's new Terminal
5, inhabited solely by British Airways. I flew on March 27, the day it
opened. As the world now knows, this was a day of epic British
humiliation. For weeks the British newspapers and television channels
had been vaunting the marvels of T5: miles of baggage conveyors
ru****ng luggage swiftly from check-in point through entrails of steel
to airplane hold; the gospel of efficiency bodied forth in this new
temple of modernism.
The trouble is that the British just aren't very good at this kind of
thing. Year after year Q used to hand James Bond his attach=E9 case of
handy devices =AD a flame thrower in a handspray, a book which fired
bullets out its spine. There was the Aston DB5 with ejector seat and
saw blades in the wheel hubs. The cycle of Bond films began just when
the Labor prime minister Harold Wilson was urging the nation to cast
aside the archaic vestments of the past and bathe itself in the 'white
heat of technology'. Things worked in Bond movies but they didn't work
in Britain and as Kingsley Amis once sadly remarked, if Bond had
really had to use his mini-submarine in combat conditions it would
have surely taken him straight to the bottom. In 1983, just when Q
gave Bond a staggering number of gadgets in Octo*****, Britain became
for the first time in its history a net im****ter of industrial goods.
I got to T5 at around 11am, having traveled out on the Piccadilly
line. Architecturally there's nothing particularly memorable about
T5's three main buildings, all essentially aircraft hangers in basic
contour. I smugly presented my preprinted boarding pass, checked two
bags, wandered about for a minute and then went off to have an early
lunch.
We now know that by then T5's systems had already collapsed. In the
case of the Titanic there was this same lag between the fatal incision
of the iceberg into the hull, with consequent alarums deep in the
bowels of the mighty liner and the dignity and repose of the first
class lounge. In the case of T5 the planners had forgotten to create
parking slots for the baggage handlers. When the handlers finally got
to the doors of T5 their security p***** didn't work. The few that
managed to get through didn't know where their work stations were. The
baggage handling software had already failed. My two bags which I had
complacently supposed were being whirled at tremendous speed to the
Boeing 747 at Gate 38 in Terminal B had in fact joined a mighty logjam
in the center of the baggage maze. Everything came to a standstill.
But upstairs chaos was not yet apparent. BA's greeters, soon to be the
objects of vilification and physical threat, smiled sweetly. Since
T5's policy is not to have strident loudspeakers, there were no quacks
of warning or alarm from the loudspeakers. It was 11.35am. A nice
young woman next to me at the marble bar in the dining room turned out
to hail from Youghal, in county Cork, just like me. As we chatted
along, she kept peering at the monitor. Her flight was 15 minutes
away, yet no boarding gate was advertised. Off she went, just like a
passenger on the Titanic going to check to the bulletin board at the
purser's office. I never saw her again; and I'm fairly sure she never
saw her flight. She did have an overnight bag on wheels. An hour later
BA was telling passengers to send their suitcases home, stuff their
essentials into their pockets and bunk down for the long wait.
I went off to Terminal B on a little railway, the sort that was
cutting edge at SeaTac in the 1970s when optimists were writing about
impending conversion of the war economy to the "social industrial
complex". There was almost no one in Terminal B. At Gate 38 I was the
only person. No other travelers, no BA staff, just the quiet bulk of a
747 at the boarding ****t. Gradually the passengers mustered. In a
movie this is where we would meet our characters: the noisy fellow who
would panic and elbow the old lady; the lovers holding hands as they
plummeted through the depressurized door; the unassuming co-editor of
the radical website and newsletter who in the end takes control of the
747 and brings it safely down.
Our flight was scheduled for 13.45. At 13.50 we were told there was a
change of plan. Our plane was at A 18. We had to go back, in a
building designed to deal with people only going forward into their
plane. By now, word was filtering to the outside world. The stock
price of the Spanish company that owns Heathrow was dropping. The
chairman of British Airways was sketching out his speech refusing to
resign. Passengers were punching each other in the check-in lines.
We knew little of this at A18. By 4pm we were boarded, wedged into
seats so tightly crammed that when I dropped my book, there was no way
to maneuver one's body to get a hand under the seat. There was the
familiar wait for the tractor to haul the plane out to the runway; the
familiar inaudible drone from the Captain. By six pm were in the air.
We flew over southern Greenland. I was disappointed to see no signs of
farming, amid newly benign conditions. We flew over Hudson's Bay.
There seemed to be plenty of ice. We flew over Tahoe. We were four
hours late. No bags for most of us of course.
Moral: just don't travel BA and don't go through Heathrow. It's not
worth the hassle. With T5 it's all worse. Go to Paris or Frankfurt and
head on to your destination by plane or rail from there. And don't
travel Ryanair either. The tickets look cheap but by th time you pay
overweight and a thousand other outrageous imposts it's cheaper to go
on a regular airline. In a properly functional Hell Michael O'Leary,
Ryanair's bosss, will fly endlessly between Stansted and the Arctic
Circle. He will be told that every article of clothing he wears will
require a charge of one million Euros.
You Read It Here First
If recent columns in the New York Times by Maureen Dowd and Nick
Kristoff apropos Hillary Clinton seemed familiar it's because they
were. You read them here in Jeffrey St Clair's piece on HRC, "Blonde
Ambition"
That's the one that began:
Hillary Clinton cannot win the Democratic nomination for president.
The numbers tell the story. Even with robust victories in
Pennsylvania, Indiana, West Virginia and Kentucky, Hillary will trail
Obama in popular votes and pledged delegates as they enter the
convention hall in Denver. . . . Hillary Clinton is the prisoner of an
unimpeachable mathematics. So she makes the most of a remorseless
situation by doing what the Clintons do best: commit political
fratricide. Quite literally, in this case, by knocking off a brother.
In order to realize her vaulting ambition, Hillary must mortally wound
Obama as candidate in the fall race against John McCain so that she
can run against McCain in 2012.
Worth copying, I'm sure you'll agree.
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