US Elections

The country’s in the very best of hands

By James Morrow in Sydney

20 March 2009

The Treasury says the national debt is climbing to the sky
And govermnent expenditures have never been so high.
It makes a feller get a gleam of pride within his eye,
To see how our economy expands,
The country's in the very best of hands.

"The country's in the very best of hands", Johnny Mercer

So the Democrats are encouraging Americans to man the barricades in outrage at protest at bonuses to AIG executives, while the White House frantically rearranges the deckchairs, hanging Chris Dodd and increasingly Tim Geithner out as bait to a public that is staring in disbelief as an administration they elected on the basis of its supposed intellectual and ethical firepower has done more to wreck the economy in eight weeks than the Bush administration did in eight years.

Nevermind that the people who crashed AIG are long gone, and it is the workers who have been brought in to clean up the mess who now work under armed guard, fearful for their safety. What was that about the Right always stoking anger and violence in the community again?

The thing is that as outrageous as the situation at AIG is, it is the Obama White House that is largely behind the bonus outrage, not Chris Dodd. And believe me, as someone who has no love for the ethically-challenged Connecticut Senator, and hopes he is pensioned off to his Irish cottage where he can do no harm, this is a painful thing to write. As Glenn Greenwald, hardly a member of the vast right-wing conspiracy, writes at Salon.com, "It was Obama officials, not Dodd, who demanded that already-vested bonus payments be exempted. And it was Dodd, not Obama officials, who wanted the prohibition applied to all compensation agreements, past and future. The provision which shielded already-promised bonus payments from the executive compensation limits ended up being inserted at the insistence of Geithner".

It's early days but Obama has form with this sort of "modified limited hangout". Remember, last year's tightly-disciplined Obama campaign had no qualms about throwing advisors under the proverbial bus. Heck, back then the then-junior senator from Illinois had no trouble throwing his aging grandmother under the bus.

The fact is, as much as Democrats and the White House may enjoy stoking eat-the-rich class warfare in the hopes that there's a little bit of Hugo Chavez in all of us, they need to take ownership of this problem. Fannie Mae, which did so much to get America - and the world - into this mess is paying out huge bonuses, but somehow they get a pass.

Lkewise, the decades-long attempt by Democrats to force private businesses (i.e., banks) to make bad business decisions (i.e., lend money to the non-creditworthy) for political purposes continues apace. Don't believe me? Just read this story about a bank that is, in the midst of the current crisis, being pressured into making risky loans.

And in printing a trillion - that's trillion with a t - dollars to help pay for "stimulus" that won't come online until the economic crisis is over, the Obama Treasury is guaranteeing not just high taxes but high inflation as well.

The building boom, they say, is getting bigger every day.
And when I asked a feller "How could everybody pay?"
He come up with an answer that made everything OK,
"Supplies are getting bigger than demands."
The country's in the very best of hands.

Of course, the GOP is doing yeoman's duty in highlighting many of these problems, but they are also aiming towards worthy but wrong targets (Christopher Dodd) and missing the big picture. For too long the Republican leadership has been re-enacting Abba Eban's devastating assessment of the Palestinians: They never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

The broader problem Republicans and all Americans must understand is this: Barack Obama, whose entire career up to now suggests that he is a hard-left cynical rabble rouser (sorry, "community organiser") expert at shaking down the corporations and taxpayers who will not stop at populist confiscatory taxes. In an economy where companies are increasingly encouraged to take bailout money or otherwise allow the government to become a "stakeholder", it will only be a matter of time before political witch hunts turn into ex-post-facto wealth confiscation schemes of the sort seen in countries whose democracies are less, shall we say, robust.

Don't you believe them congressmen and senators are dumb.
When they run into problems that are tough to overcome,
They just declare a thing they calls a moritorium.
The upper and the lower house disbands.
The country's in the very best of hands.

In short, the events of the last week do not have the hallmarks of democracy, but rather mobocracy. Which is the very thing the Founders worried about.

The country's in the very best of hands.

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