I imagine that most readers of this blog are too young to remember Richard Nixon, who more than even Ronald Reagan created today's Republican Party. If they did they might be more grateful to John McCain.

Their ignorance of Nixon is especially noticeable when they attack John McCain's campaign for being racist.

If you remembered Nixon, you would think McCain is making a herculean effort to keep the race baiting under control.... Nixon would have played on it ruthlessly.

There seem to be places that McCain won't go... places where his party is begging him to go when they ask him to "take the gloves off: Nixon's places.

Not for nothing did the legendary cartoonist, Herblock portray Nixon crawling from a sewer.

I am afraid to say that if Nixon were running against Obama he would be winning by several lengths by now just as he did against McGovern.

He would, in George Wallace's "immortal" phrase, be "putting the hay down where the goats can eat it." And the few crazy moments at Palin's rallies would be the general tone of  Nixon's campaign.

I don't think many politicians and certainly very few of today's Republicans would allow their life's ambition to evaporate without doing whatever it took to win. This doesn't seem to be McCain's case.

If you think I'm being too easy on him, it's because you just don't remember Nixon.

That is a question all the pollsters and pundits are asking and both sides have their fingers crossed hoping they are or hoping they aren't. All over the world people are speculating about America's latent racism, which is the subject of so many Hollywood films

When I was a little boy in the 1950s the majority of Americans were racist to some degree or another, although many people made a huge effort not to let that get in the way of doing the right thing and behaving with humanity and justice. However, beginning with the Cold War a huge effort of social engineering was undertaken in the United States to eradicate something that was fatally damaging to America's image and which the Soviet Union played on constantly. The effort was made and we have the results today. Some Americans are still racist in the classic sense, but theirs, I believe, is a swiftly dwindling number.

What most Americans are today is not racist, but morbidly self-conscious about race.

I think most Americans think that this characteristic unnaturalness is the rule in the rest of the world. It isn't: some places in the world are like 1950s Alabama and some places the races mix (and I mean mix) freely. But nowhere do people tie themselves in knots over this subject like in the USA.

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I went to school in England in the late 1960s. The weather was atrocious, the food was worse and  there was no central heating... but I don't think I ever laughed so much in all my life. For me the English have, hands down, the best, the cleverest, sense of humor in the world. The video on display features John Bird and John  Fortune ("The Two Johns")  perhaps  England's finest practitioners of satire. In this piece they give probably the best and clearest explanation of today's financial disaster and by far the funniest. I don't think anybody here is going to have much trouble with their  received standard accents and the only vocabulary you might have trouble with is "string vest", which is British for "undershirt". Enjoy!
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On October 29 2004, four days before the last election, Al Jazeera aired an 18 minute video tape in which Osama bin Laden addressed the American people and threatened further retaliation and a desire to bankrupt the US. In the first poll after that tape was released, President George W. Bush opened up a six point lead over Senator John Kerry. The deputy director of the CIA commented that "Bin Laden certainly did a nice favour today for the president".
Joseph Nye - Financial Times

The idea that Al Qaeda,which has seen its reputation grow and its influence flower while fighting Bush, might carry out an attack to help the Republicans this October is something that I have written about repeatedly and its nice to see somebody of Nye's enormous reputation and credibility  say the same thing. I would go so far to say that if Al Qaeda does nothing to influence the outcome of this election, that means that they have been fatally crippled. Simply put, if Al Qaeda is quiet from here to election day, the entire GWOT should be re-evaluated.

Read a longer extract from Professor Nye's article below the fold:

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According to the legend, the Cloak of Invisibility has the power to shield the wearer from being seen by Death.

Harry Potter - Wikipedia

In the picture that illustrates this post, a picture which appears in all the major American media, an actor playing the current President of the United States, strikes the pose of Rodin's "Thinker", obviously engaged in having a bowel movement.

During the entire presidential campaign, primaries included, many people, both for and against, have been asking, "Can an African-American be President of the United States?"

They have been missing the whole point.

Not only can a black man be President of the United States of America; it is now an essential requirement for the job. (continued below the fold)

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Mike Davis has written an article that Tom Engelhardt has posted on TomDispatch that should be required reading for everybody that considers themselves a progressive.

The skinny is that an Obama administration without money, or the will to create a real welfare state, may lead to a Republican resurgence that may be more sinister than Bush.

He hammers on a few ideas that I have been trying to communicate to my readers, but he does it so much better than I ever could that I can't resist posting some excerpts from the article, which is titled, "Can Obama See the Grand Canyon" below the fold

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Mike Davis has written an article that Tom Engelhardt has posted on TomDispatch that should be required reading for everybody that considers themselves a progressive.

He hammers on a few ideas that I have been trying to communicate to my readers, but he does it so much better than I ever could that I can't resist posting some excerpts from the article, which is titled, "Can Obama See the Grand Canyon" below:

Never have so many ordinary Americans been nailed to a cross of gold (or derivatives), yet Obama is the most mild-mannered William Jennings Bryan imaginable. Unlike Sarah Palin who masticates the phrase "the working class" with defiant glee, he hews to a party line that acknowledges only the needs of an amorphous "middle class" living on a largely mythical "Main Street."(...) Out in the stucco deserts of Limbaughland, moreover, fear is already being distilled into a good ol' boy version of the "stab in the back" myth that rallied the ruined German petite bourgeoisie to the swastika. If you listen to the rage on commute AM, you'll know that 'socialism' has already taken a lien on America, Barack Hussein Obama is terrorism's Manchurian candidate, the collapse of Wall Street was caused by elderly black people with Fannie Mae loans, and ACORN in its voter registration drives has long been padding the voting rolls with illegal brown hordes. In other times, Sarah Palin's imitation of Father Charles Coughlin -- the priest who preached an American Reich in the 1930s -- in drag might be hilarious camp, but with the American way of life in sudden freefall, the specter of star-spangled fascism doesn't seem quite so far-fetched. The Right may lose the election, but it already possesses a sinister, historically-proven blueprint for rapid recovery. (...) To what extent can we look to either Obama or any of the Democrats to help us analyze the crisis and then act effectively to resolve it?(...) If you've been watching the sad parade of economic gurus on McNeil-Lehrer, you know that the intellectual shelves in Washington are now almost bare. Neither major party retains more than a few enigmatic shards of policy traditions different from the neo-liberal consensus on trade and privatization. Indeed, posturing pseudo-populists aside, it is unclear whether anyone inside the Beltway, including Obama's economic advisors, can think clearly beyond the indoctrinated mindset of Goldman Sachs, the source of the two most prominent secretaries of the treasury over the last decade. Keynes, now suddenly mourned, is actually quite dead. More importantly, the New Deal did not arise spontaneously from the goodwill or imagination of the White House. On the contrary, the social contract for the post-1935 Second New Deal was a complex, adaptive response to the greatest working-class movement in our history, in a period when powerful third parties still roamed the political landscape and Marxism exercised extraordinary influence on American intellectual life. Even with the greatest optimism of the will, it is difficult to imagine the American labor movement recovering from defeat as dramatically as it did in 1934-1937. The decisive difference is structural rather than ideological. (Indeed, today's union movement is much more progressive than the decrepit, nativist American Federation of Labor in 1930.) The power of labor within a Walmart-ized service economy is simply more dispersed and difficult to mobilize than in the era of giant urban-industrial concentrations and ubiquitous factory neighborhoods.(...) Military Keynesianism is no longer an available deus ex machina.(...) when war production finally started up in late 1940 it became a huge engine for the reemployment of the American work force, the real cure for the depressed job markets of the 1930s. Subsequently, American world power and full employment would align in a way that won the loyalty of several generations of working-class voters.(...) It's worth asking, for instance, what in the actual substance of his foreign policy agenda differentiates the Democratic candidate from the radioactive legacy of the Bush Doctrine? Yes, he would close Guantanamo, talk to the Iranians, and thrill hearts in Europe. He also promises to renew the Global War on Terror (in much the same way that Bush senior and Clinton sustained the core policies of Reaganism, albeit with a "more human face"). In case anyone has missed the debates, let me remind you that the Democratic candidate has chained himself, come hell or high water, to a global strategy in which "victory" in the Middle East (and Central Asia) remains the chief premise of foreign policy, with the Iraqi-style nation-building hubris of Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz repackaged as a "realist" faith in global "stabilization." True, the enormity of the economic crisis may compel President Obama to renege on some of candidate Obama's ringing promises to support an idiotic missile defense system or provocative NATO memberships for Georgia and Ukraine. Nonetheless, as he emphasizes in almost every speech and in each debate, defeating the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, together with a robust defense of Israel, constitute the keystone of his national security agenda.(...) It is bitterly ironic, but, I suppose, historically predictable that a presidential campaign millions of voters have supported for its promise to end the war in Iraq has now mortgaged itself to a "tougher than McCain" escalation of a hopeless conflict in Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal frontier. In the best of outcomes, the Democrats will merely trade one brutal, losing war for another. In the worst case, their failed policies may set the stage for the return of Cheney and Rove, or their even more sinister avatars.

Go and read the whole thing, as I've had to butcher it to make it fit here.

The skinny is that an Obama administration without money, or the will to create a real welfare state, may lead to a Republican resurgence that may be more sinister than Bush.

I am reading traffic from the US Internet 6 or 7 hours a day, 6 days a week for months now and what strikes me most is how ugly so much of its.

Nasty, ad hominem, insulting, vindictive and petty, both on the left and on the right.

Where does that take us?

No matter who wins the election things are going to get much worse.

People are going to feel worse,. If they are angry now, they be angrier later.

There seems to be so much hatred and hostility.

Like Bosnia?

America is so full of guns and takes so much vicarious pleasure at violence...there are so many Columbines and Virginia Techs to remember.

How much farther can this all go before the Timmy McVeighs start to come out of the woodwork?

It's unnerving when history becomes yours, when no one can tell you where the bottom is, or what life will be like after that bottom is reached. It's one of those moments when you discover why overused phrases -- I think here, for instance, of "through a glass darkly" -- were overused in the first place. Tom Engelhardt

Uncle Sam sat in his family doctor's office as the kindly old physician gazed up from the test results and spoke to him in a concerned voice.

"Sam, I'll put it to you straight. You are anemic, you've got high blood pressure, an arrhythmic heart, high cholesterol and I don't like your blood sugar either."

Uncle Sam gulped and asked,
"What can I do Doc?"

"Sam" the doctor said, "if you don't stop mixing cocaine and Viagra, I'd say you have no more than six months left?

"B-b-b-but Doc", Sam stuttered, "I go for a ten mile run every day".

"Sam, if you don't take up something quiet like gardening and leave off the Viagra speedballs you are a dead duck."

"I guess I should see my Rabbi." Sam sighed.

"Are you Jewish?" the doctor asked.

"No" Sam replied, "but this is supposed to be a parody of Thomas Friedman, and he gets his Rabbi into nearly every column".

"The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children's teeth are set on edge"
Jeremiah 31:29

Mr Obama's laudable ambitions to extend health insurance to all Americans, to refurbish the country's failing infrastructure, to make a college education affordable and to cut nearly everybody's taxes will run up against the amazing demands that the rescue will place on present and future taxpayers. The fiscal mess left behind by the Bush administration makes the problem much worse.(...) Circumstances will force the next president to be a fiscal conservative on matters other than temporary stimulus and financial stability. Clive Crook - Financial Times

George W. Bush with his wars, with his tax cuts, with his incompetent profligacy, and now with the measures he is taking to save our toxic financial system, is leaving behind him a weight, a legacy, so poisonous that any major change of direction in American social policies looks impossible in this generation. A death trap for social democracy.

America, of all the developed countries, is probably one with the least safety net. Already many Americans are suffering for lack of health insurance or adequate schools and lacking other programs that citizens of most rich and advanced countries take for granted.

This lack of a basic welfare state means that in any economic downturn poorer Americans suffer much more than their counterparts in other wealthy countries.

To be sick and to be hungry is always bad anywhere. To be sick and hungry in "the greatest country in the world" is to add insult to injury.

We have thus laid out before us many of the classic ingredients of fascism.

According to Wikipedia:

(Fascism) is primarily concerned with perceived problems associated with cultural, economic, political, and social decline or decadence, and which seeks to solve such problems by achieving a millenarian national rebirth by exalting the nation, as well as promoting cults of unity, strength and purity.

The same article quotes Robert O. Paxton, the author of "The Anatomy of Fascism", who defines it as:

A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

It is easy to see that this is the direction that the Republican party has been taking since Nixon's "Southern Strategy" and which we are now seeing in full flower today. Joe Sixpack's, the evangelical's and the rural poor's "uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites" has proven a remarkably effective strategy in good times.

Now with a deep and long recession on the menu and the prospect of a Democratic government despite solid legislative majorities, impotent, without money to institute wide, sweeping social reform, while at the same time America's influence in world affairs steadily declines, is an invitation to classical nativist paranoia of the grossest kind.

And not just for Republicans.

Barack Obama himself succinctly explained the yeast culture of American fascism in a few candid words that brought him much pain:

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And it's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

The present crisis may very quickly turn heretofore prosperous suburbs all over America into "small towns in the Midwest," where the jobs have all gone, leaving bitterness and "clinging" in those whose educational attainments might have previously made them immune to those vapors.

With a weight of present and future debt so heavy that social policies to ameliorate the lot of suffering citizens will be nigh impossible; in a moment of dreamlike gravity, at the end of some unmarked line, leaden footed, molasses blooded and peering into an abyss of clinging bitterness and rage: the American people find themselves at the point of handing a blank check to an unknown quantity who has until now announced the vaguest of recipes for how to solve the situation... and now there is no other viable choice left.

At this point, Unless (God forbid) Osama bin Laden intervenes, that is what there is.

The idea that Obama's inexperience might be important has always been considered irrelevant by the millenarians who cling to him. Those with experience of experience would say that inexperience is only a virtue in young, marriageable girls; and only then in traditional societies, but today, many of America's most hopeful, in the aching audacity of their hope, apparently see some sort of political or administrative virginity to be as essential to redeeming America. Much as the Taliban see value in the hymens of their future wives.

Not only poor Midwesterners "cling" it seems.

I hope they all are right for their sake, for my sake, and for the world's sake.

Surely it is better to hope than to despair

We can only wish President Barack Obama and ourselves Godspeed.

Forget the predatory lenders, Wall Street sharks and their government enablers: It all started with George Bailey. Yes, that George Bailey -- the hero of Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life," (...) George Bailey was actually a pretty savvy businessman. And it's even easier to forget the precise nature of his business: putting the downscale families of Bedford Falls into homes they couldn't quite afford to buy. This is the substance of the great war between Bailey and Lionel Barrymore's Mr. Potter, the richest, meanest man in Bedford Falls.(...) "They had to wait and save their money before they even ought to think of a decent home. Wait? . . . Do you know how long it takes a working man to save five thousand dollars?" (...)"It's a Wonderful Life" debuted in 1946, more than a decade after Franklin D. Roosevelt's National Housing Act kicked off a half-century of federal policymaking aimed at making it dramatically easier for working-class Americans to buy and keep their homes.(...) It offered the average American something no country on Earth had ever offered its citizens before -- the promise of an equality rooted in ownership, a citizenship rooted in self-sufficiency and an entrepreneurial spirit rooted in security. Ross Douthat - Washington Post
Most important, in Roubini’s opinion, is to realize that the problem is deeper than the housing crisis. “Reckless people have deluded themselves that this was a subprime crisis,” he told me. “But we have problems with credit-card debt, student-loan debt, auto loans, commercial real estate loans, home-equity loans, corporate debt and loans that financed leveraged buyouts.” All of these forms of debt, he argues, suffer from some or all of the same traits that first surfaced in the housing market: shoddy underwriting, securitization, negligence on the part of the credit-rating agencies and lax government oversight. “We have a subprime financial system,” he said, “not a subprime mortgage market.” Nouriel Roubini - NYT
The nuclear physicist Leo Szilard once remarked that the fall of the Soviet system would eventually lead to the fall of the American system. He said that in a two-element structure the interrelationship and interdependence are such that the one cannot survive without the other.(...) Without the enemy, the machinery of power begins to race, with nothing to resist it; megalomania sets in. William Pfaff
Sen. Barack Obama has taken a commanding lead in the race for president not because of any dramatic gesture, but because of a signature political trait: his caution. The nation's economic crisis triggered Obama's sharp rise in what had been a tight race. But Obama hasn't tried to seize the kind of central, national leadership position for which Sen. John McCain grasped, and fell short. Nor has he been touting — Bill Clinton-style — a highly detailed plan for what he'll do the moment he takes office. The result is that while virtually all observers agree that he has benefited from the crisis, his allies and critics alike remain a bit hazy on what exactly he would do if he takes office Jan. 20, 2009. Ben Smith - Politico

The idea or thread that holds the above quotes together is that the legendary prosperity of the American middle class, their massive home ownership and dizzying consumption have long been based on easy credit, that with the end of the cold war, America's credit binge went out of control, that the days of easy credit have just ended with an enormous bang or thud and that if Barack Obama, probably the next president of USA, has any specific ideas about what to do about the whole thing, he is playing his cards very close to his chest, indeed.

The reference to the cold war is very relevant, in my opinion.

If a worldwide banking meltdown, such as we are experiencing right now, had occurred in the 1960s or 70s, the large soviet backed, communist parties of France and Italy, and their trade unions, would have been out in the streets in force rapidly destabilizing those countries: the reaction in Asia, Africa and Latin America might have been even more explosive. Certainly the risk of strengthening such political movements would have been a conscious restraining factor for regulators all over the capitalist world. Those parties and those unions no longer exist. At the end of the cold war, as William Pfaff writes, "without the enemy, the machinery of power begins to race, with nothing to resist it; megalomania sets in."

With this crisis the era of easy private credit is surely drawing to a close and we will see a revival of traditional, conservative, lending practices. This means, for those too young to remember, that to get money you will have to already have money. Nouriel Roubini gives a short list of things that you will find yourself paying up front for besides a house: anything you usually pay for with a credit-card, or a college education, or an automobile, etc.

As you look at the list of things that you will have to save up to buy, James Stewart's, Charles Bailey voice may echo in your ear, "Do you know how long it takes a working man to save five thousand dollars?" In 1946 you could buy a house with five thousand dollars, nowadays you can't buy very much with that sum, but it is still hard for anyone on minimum wage, or not so minimum wage, to save five thousand dollars.

A great many people are going to discover for the first time in their lives that they are poor and they are going to resent it.

Many more people than today are going to feel bitter and in Barack Obama's prescient phrase, "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations”. As another major new voice in American politics might add, "you betcha".

With nothing to threaten it, the system has set out to destroy itself. Now the danger to our system is right wing populism not socialism. Socialism or at least some version of a Scandinavian social democracy is the only way to stabilize this situation and stability is the most truly conservative of values.

This ultra-right, Le Pen-like populist anger is going to sweep America and make an already horrible situation much worse, unless very proactive, openly social democratic, anti-poverty programs are put quickly into place: universal, free health care, grants, not loans, for higher education, government sponsored, high quality subsidized rental housing with option to buy, etc. And make no mistake, this means cutting back defense spending, closing tax havens and raising taxes on the very rich and moving the money into education, health and infrastructure... right away.

Nothing original here, the plans are already drawn up, all you have to do is translate them from Swedish.

The wing nuts are accusing Barack Obama of being a "socialist radical", oh, but were it true.

I think he should quickly announce his future cabinet choices and give a detailed outline of the legislation he aims to pass in his first hundred days.

If Obama doesn't move strongly with vigorous social democratic measures to stabilize the situation of America's seething masses of nouveaux pauvres, he will simply be fattening frogs for snakes... keeping the Oval Office chair warm for Sarah Palin or even worse in 2012.

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