Friday, October 15, 2004

Semi-Crow

American racial politics have modulated over the years. The segregationists who migrated to the Republican Party in the wake of the Civil Rights movements are not the stone racists of the past. I don’t think they are being disingenuous when they insist that they aren’t prejudiced against black people in general. In 2004, class probably is more salient than race as a factor in judging people, which is to say that a black guy who sounds and looks middle-class might as well be a Caucasian, just as Japanese and Chinese Americans have once again become honorary Aryans. Poor blacks are still despised, however. By the same token, although Republicans are perfectly happy that the franchise extends to Negroes so long as they vote Republican, Jim Crow policies are back in favor for those that do not. The great issue of the Florida election of 2000 had nothing to do with hanging chads, after all, but with the premeditated disenfranchisement of thousands and thousands of black voters who were likely to vote for and elect Al Gore absent the criminal behavior of Jeb Bush and other state officials. The same game is once again underway in Florida and many other places in the United States, not all of them in the South.

From my intensely cynical perspective, the most interesting thing about this issue is the indifference of the Press and the public to very credible reports of utterly unprincipled and often thoroughly illegal attempts to keep people from voting. In Oregon, for example, Republicans are registering Democrats and Republicans to vote and then throwing away the democratic applications but what we hear on the news has to do with Mr. Chaney’s gay daughter. In Florida, people erroneously removed from the voting lists because they have the same names as felons are being prevented from reregistering by various bureaucratic dodges, but the news shows have calculated, with some plausibility, that a mostly White audience won’t care. Indeed, such actions probably strike a good many Americans as desirable so long as the people who are kept from voting aren’t real Americans. Why should they get riled about civil rights violations when they obviously aren’t upset that people in Cuba and Iraq are being tortured in their name? In this respect, it’s no use blaming the degradation of American public life on Bush, Chaney, or Rove or G.E. or Fox. The fault lies with the People. The election is really a judgment about them.

Thursday, October 14, 2004

You Don’t Have to Outrun the Bear

Despite the recent increase in the price of crude oil, the world economy seems to be doing pretty well. Indeed, much more than fears of political instability, it is the growth of countries like China and India that has caused the rise in oil prices and will surely cause further price increases in the future. In this context, the poor performance of the American economy cannot be blamed on the business cycle or a lack of international demand. And America’s economy is performing dismally. Numbers released today show that our trade deficit is increasing. September was the second worse deficit on record. 2004 will be the worst year on record. Meanwhile, claims for first time unemployment insurance were up this morning for the fifth week in a row and the economic recovery from the recession is easily the slowest and weakest of the last 60 years.

Defenders of the administration’s economic policies like to contrast our situation with Europe’s—they are notably quiet about China, Taiwan, India, Indonesia, and the other Asian nations. Unfortunately, the European comparison is not really favorable either. The unemployment rate in France and German is higher than ours, but that result is a statistical artifact that reflects the way that unemployment is counted in those countries. Truly comparable numbers, the percentage of adults gainfully employed, for example, tell a different story. The lower growth rates of some European countries is also systematically misleading because the populations of many European nations are stable. In view of the demographic dynamism of the U.S., our lackluster GNP growth is all-the-more significant.

The policies of the current administration are obviously not the fundamental reason for our competitive disadvantage since the problem has been building for many years. The Bush response to the challenge has been inadequate and wrong-headed, however. Even the steps that made some economic sense—fiscal stimulus, for example—were carried out in the least effective and most expensive way. The recession provided a new excuse for a tax policy whose true motives were a mix of political cynicism and ideological fervor. In any case, economic stimulus is properly a short-term measure that addresses a business cycle problem and not a policy designed to address a long-term structural problem. Indeed, because the tax cuts are essentially permanent, they have put us at an continuing disadvantage relative to other countries by weakening our national credit, especially in view of the huge increases in government spending necessitated by our aggressive foreign policy,

Reasonable people can disagree about what economic policy is best; and even if they aren’t reasonable, you still have to deal with them. I certainly don’t claim any prescience in these matters. What does seem clear, however, is that the economic health of the United States is not the first priority of this administration; and that treating it as an important but secondary goal does not suffice. I’m sure that Mr. Bush would prefer healthy job growth—I don’t think he kicks his dog, either—but the record indicates that in practice rewarding the political base comes first. It has been reported that when Bush himself worried aloud about the bias of the tax cuts, Carl Rove admonished him to stick to the program. Rove’s probably right. Bush’s political support is rooted in those who benefit from the current economic system and he cannot cross them. Everybody understands, for example, that companies are reluctant to hire because of the rapidly increasing cost of the health insurance they have to provide full-time workers. Any serious attempt to improve American competitiveness must address the gross inefficiency of a medical system that delivers a mediocre standard of care at an inflated price. Bush dare not undertake such reforms because the insurance and drug companies are among his most important supporters and potentially his deadliest enemies. Dealing with the health problem is hard enough. Dealing with the health problem while continuing to pay off your friends is simply impossible.