Jim Lehrer Slips Up

Debate moderators are chosen for their ability to project gravitas, but their real job is to keep the candidates from veering into substance. Journalists don’t become moderators without selling their souls, internalizing the sellout, and then believing in their phony selves. Jim Lehrer is a professional sycophant whose audience is comprised of higher IQ patrons of public television. He’s a good moderator.

But Jim Lehrer accidentally asked a good question the other night – it didn’t get the answer it deserved – that would not be proper. But it was a good question, nonetheless. Addressing Obama:

As president, as a result of whatever financial rescue plan comes about and the billion, $700 billion, whatever it is it’s going to cost, what are you going to have to give up, in terms of the priorities that you would bring as president of the United States, as a result of having to pay for the financial rescue plan?

The reason why we can’t fix our problems, why we don’t have a health care plan, why college education sinks our kids into lifelong debt, why our infrastructure is crumbling underneath us, why we don’t have a national rail system … is that we use our surplus wealth to take care of our wealthy. Obama is talking about doing something about some of these problems (I don’t know how serious he is) and is also talking about offering some tax relief for ordinary citizens, burdened as they are by two onerous income taxes. But if he is elected, he’ll not be able to do anything, and Lehrer made it perfectly clear why – the money is to be spent rescuing the wealthy sector, and won’t be available.

I don’t think that’s an accident. George Bush came to office in 2001 faced with a huge problem – an accidental budget surplus brought about by an unforeseen flurry of economic activity and a stock market bubble. He set out to eliminate it as fast as he could by giving it to the wealthy in the form of tax cuts. It was a dangerous time, and he faced the challenge with resolve and courage. Had the surpluses been allowed to go on, Americans would have demanded the things listed above, and there would be no good reason to say no.

Deficits are intentional. Surpluses are accidental and problematic. We are an enormously wealthy country – we have money to provide for a reasonable retirement for everyone, health care and public transportation and education of our youth, but these are not the things that the owners of the country want for us. These things are egalitarian – they have a leveling effect. So our leaders present us with an endless series of hobgoblins – imaginary monsters to fight – and fighting them absorbs all of our surplus and redirects it at the military industrial complex. Much of the debate last Friday was dedicated to reinforcing the notion that we must fight these imaginary monsters.

It’s been that way all of my life. We fought a massively expensive Cold War with the Russians that lasted from the early 1950’s until 1991. We never actually fought them, but they were the reason why we invested our surplus wealth in missile systems and aircraft carriers. Every time we wanted to attack someone, it was the really the conspiring Russians that were causing the problem.

But the Russians never really threatened us in any meaningful way. We threatened them with missiles, they responded. We occupied West Germany, they occupied East. But they mostly stayed in their sphere, we in ours, and both were happy with that system.

It was a good system, a good way to assure that our surplus wealth was directed at Eisenhower’s military industrial complex. Russia was useful. But then she went and collapsed on us, catching everyone by surprise, and we had no enemy to fight, and no justification for misuse of that surplus wealth. Our leaders frantically searched for enemies, even settling on little Libya at one point. Who to fight? Who to scare us with? For a time during the 1990’s (there’s still some residual) they said we were involved in a global war on drugs, but that didn’t really resonate the way Russia did – foreign substances did not really take the place of really evil foreign people. It was hard to put a face on that enemy. But it was all we had.

We were adrift, having no real enemies, and along came that surplus, and the problem was apparent to all in power – there was a real threat that our wealth would be used to force some kind of equality upon us – health care, educational opportunities, infrastructure – we were starting to dream.

And along came terrorism. Finally, a new and permanent enemy – one to last generations, one to justify the continued squandering of our wealth in such a way that ordinary people do not benefit. Warfare, the GWOT, the counterinsurgencies, Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan are really part of a bigger war, class warfare. We ordinary Joe’s who produce the wealth of our land are the enemy.

The bailout is a massive wealth transfer, and as always, it is directed upward. It, along with military spending, will preclude any spending on ourselves for things we want for ourselvesfor decades to come. It is being presented to us as a fait accompli, and will be driven into us like a spike by both Democrats and Republicans.

Whenever there is “bipartisan” agreement in Washington, there is going to be a massive screwing. The job of politicians and the media right now is to garner public support for the latest wealth transfer. That’s been the push for the last few weeks – not to fix Wall Street so much as to con the American public into accepting the idea that we owe Wall Street anything; that keeping them healthy will keep us healthy. That’s why Lehrer’s question was so appropriate.

It’s never been a perfect system. The bailout may not pass. Occasionally we win a thing or two. There is still some residual of the New Deal and Great Society in our land – Social Security and Medicare and unemployment insurance and the like – those are ways that we use our surplus wealth to help each other. Those programs really work and we can easily afford them. But they interfere with other objectives, so we are told are too costly, that they must be reined in. The object of a successful McCain presidency will be to turn these programs into profit centers for the wealthy, and to squeeze ordinary people out. If Obama is elected, there will be a full court press to keep him from implementing anything he has espoused.

My money is on McCain. I’m not far away from Social Security. I’m feeling unlucky.