7th International

Mike and his Blue Dog buddies did their best to prop up Bush and the Empire, with two thirds of their 47 voting Bail, baby, Bail. The Progs did even better with over 80% of their 69 caucus members okaying the Bailout. If this Blue Dog and Progressive Pony-up Show had been crewing the Titanic they would have thought “doing something” meant punching more holes in the hull.

To seal their deal, the Democratic Leadership as usual packed in 150 of the 700 Billion as Politically Correct Earmarks and Tax cuts for the wealthy - impotently leading their Party over Viagra Falls in a Pork Barrel. After all, that’s how War Appropriations traditionally get past Congressional consciences: as hopeful bribes to these mostly rich constituents.

Add Hasty Panic to the mix and you have the way Congress deals with Bush regime’s crisis solutions, whether a prepackaged Patriot Act or a handy Declaration of War. The key, as after 911, is to keep Wall St. open for business. Why, this bill allows the Treasury Secretary to buy bad debts from foreign banks too. It’s a global economy after all and the Party elites have many friends in other countries.

Radicals like Naomi Klein and Michael Parenti should be listened to when they tell us that The System isn’t failing. Was the Enron bilking of California at a continuing cost of one billion a year a failure? The Savings & Loan debacle? Is the gentrification of New Orleans a failure? Disaster Capitalism means punishing the losers relentlessly until only super-sharks like the Joe Kennedys and Prescott Bushes are left standing – with their children in place to rule the country and the Globe.

The point of the Bailout, like the 700 billion that goes to the military, is to make sure that tax money only goes up to the wealthiest, to starve the next administration for money to improve our lives, our education, our health, the very public structures that house our civilization. It isn’t Wall St. versus Main St. That’s a continuum. It’s Business as Usual St. against Your St. and My St..

Remember Argentina? Like us, unfortunately, another Global Economy poster-child turned orphan in the storm. The people there started taking to the streets, disrupting business as usual. When one of their corpora do Presidents announced on TV another go-round of Martial Law, the people never let him finish. They rushed from their homes and he ended his speech by leaving the Presidential Palace via helicopter. The great cry went up for new leadership: “Anybody so long as its nobody we know!”

When the elite fat cats also fled the dead economy for homes abroad, the abandoned workers took a look around. There was leather, there were the factories, there was them and then there wee shoes! It turned out it wasn’t capital (or as Mike Thompson and the rest call it: credit) so much as productive people that created the essential products for everyday life.

Perhaps the habit of our Titanic economy of throwing overboard those weakened by losses of jobs, health care, personal safety nets or even homes offers us a remedy on the Argentine model. Maybe this economy isn’t as Titanic as it seems. Maybe it is more like loosely linked lifeboats and a lifeboat short scramble of first class, economy class and steerage passengers on a sinking pleasure ship. Local economies, John Kenneth Galbraith tells us, did not suffer equally from the Great Depression. Those that maintained community solidarity had a major advantage. Local sustainable economic cooperation is already one of those ideas laying around in this crisis that needs to be picked up.

Furthermore, a mortgage crisis may not be about credit lines for millionaires to keep them (and incidentally their wage slaves) viable. It could be about the social requirement, not just to save current homeowners at risk, but to restore homes to all who lost them. Half a century of neighborhood re-development which a la New Orleans erased the places where working people lived in favor of the most profitable real estate ventures for the big money people needs radical reversal.

To go even further than furthermore, if private property – like your house and curtilage – is so crucial, isn’t it obvious that in a free society everyone should have some? Additionally, if work produces a free society then people must own their work, have the right to their jobs, must own their jobs?

The creative Argentines even managed to prototype freedom from centralized taxation when their federal government was forced to release a significant portion of taxation to direct democratic town meeting type allocation. That is participatory democracy with a proper vengeance!

The Peace movement in the U.S. had something like this when we created Sharing Funds. These were a Government directed “rent strike”. The money people “owed” the feds was kept in safe bank accounts. Interest was used for community projects, voted on periodically by contributors. The principle was available either for community use, or held back should the feds move against wages or property. We could break our ties to the totalitarian withholding tax system and redirect some of the two trillion now slated for Wall St. and the Pentagon right back to Your St. and My St. We could stop paying for out-sized government and start operating self-government. Their crisis can be our opportunity.

Paul Encimer

Labels: Bailout, Blue Dogs, class war, Economic package, Mike Thompson, modern revolution