The Dogs of War,
the Bears of Wall St.
by Alexander
Cockburn
Dissident Voice
September 25, 2002
The higher Bush tries to loft himself with war talk, the
darker grow the economy's dire responses.
On Tuesday the Dow Jones industrials dropped nearly 190
points to hit a four-year low. The broader market also finished down. The
Nasdaq composite index, homeport for the New Economy, set a new six-year low.
The Standard & Poor's 500 index was down 14.45, or 1.7 percent, at 819.25.
The Fed's Open Market Committee chose to leave rates at
40-year lows at its meeting Tuesday, saying bravely that consumer and business
demand is "growing at a moderate pace." But it also noted that
considerable uncertainty remains about the timing and strength of an economic
recovery.
Meanwhile, leading economic indicators and housing starts
have fallen for three months in a row. Oil prices are up 40 per cent since the
start of the year.
Last week we wrote here that we've now seen seven straight
quarters of declining investment on plant and equipment and a sharp drop of the
growth of consumer spending over the past four or five months. Suppose, we
asked, there's another drop in equity prices, reflecting dawning awareness that
the performance of many of America's mightiest corporate names has been based
entirely on fraudulent numbers.
So now equity prices have dropped again and federal
prosecutors have announced they're opening a criminal probe into Xerox's accounting
practices. Xerox stock promptly fell 71 cents to $5.96 after the company said
federal prosecutors were opening a criminal inquiry into the company's
accounting practices. WorldCom revealed that it probably misreported $9 billion
in revenue, not $7 billion.
The official rate of profit on capital stock in the
non-financial corporate sector as a whole is now) at its lowest level of the
postwar period (except for 1980 and 1982).
If this was Bill Clinton, the commentators would be flaying
him alive for Wag-the-Dog attempts to use war talk as a way to distract
attention from economic bad news. Thus far Bush has remained aloft on his magic
carpet, but he's losing altitude steadily while Wall Street chews its lip,
foreign denunciations pour in, and the German Social Democrats and Greens exult
in the way Bush handed them an entirely unexpected victory last weekend.
America no longer has Senior Reps of the Ruling Class like
John McCoy or "Wise Old Men" like the infinitely tacky Clark
Clifford. At moments like this, such Senior Reps would step forth with measured
warnings to Bush about his reckless path. These days we're left with Henry
Kissinger.
Probably the nearest thing we have to a senior statesman is
that brilliant Democratic politician, Senator Bobby Byrd, whose monuments strew
West Virginia.
The only opponent Senator Bobby Byrd of West Virginia has
to fear is death itself so in Congress he speaks with a frankness rivaled only
by the Texan libertarian, Rep Ron Paul. In the last week Byrd has excelled
himself in speeches on the senate floor.
Byrd denounced Bush's proposed Homeland Security Agency as
a ramshackle, hastily conceived outrage to constitutional protections, a way of
undercutting the hard rights of federal workers, all in a mission thus far
entirely undefined. Byrd made particular reference to Bush's contemptuous
dismissal of criticism of the proposed Agency as Lilliputian. The venerable,
but frisky senator riposted by deriding Bush as a Caesarist Gulliver impatient
with the restraints of democratic constitutional government.
In another speech Byrd gave Bush some derisive whacks on
the topic of his warmongering against Iraq: "The president was dropping in
the polls and the domestic situation was such that the administration was
appearing to be much like the emperor who had no clothes." Byrd described
the coming of "the war fervor, the drums of war, the bugles of war, the
clouds of war."
"I sat in on some of the secret briefings," Byrd
said, "and nobody from the administration has been able to answer the
question: Why now?"
A few days later in San Francisco another prominent
Democrat, Al Gore, lacked Byrd's fizz but still wagged an admonitory finger at
Bush. Gore's weekend speech to the Commonwealth Club was widely billed as
anti-war. Gore did issue some strong language denouncing Bush's onslaught on
the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. Beyond that the speech was in fact
a measured, fairly well-written advisory on the pretenses and postures
appropriate to the world's premier imperial power.
Gore echoed Henry Kissinger in saying that an attack on
Iraq had to be properly justified, not by bluster about a "regime
change", and by hot talk about America's right to wage "preemptive
war", but by traditional rhetorical escalation within the grand tradition
of such rationales, stretching back to the dawn of the Cold War.
There's probably not been a president since the Second
World War held in such low international esteem as Bush. Mark how Gore felt it
safe to play on this theme in his San Francisco speech. Six, even three months
again, Gore would never have taken such a risk: "In just one year,"
he said, "the President has somehow squandered the international
outpouring of sympathy, goodwill and solidarity that followed the attacks of
September 11th and converted it into anger and apprehension aimed much more at
the United States than at the terrorist network."
If the
economy continues to slide, Bush and his circle will face a truly desperate
gamble, trying to figure whether a $200 billion war on Iraq will save them, or
just plunge them into the mother of all messes.
Alexander Cockburn
is the author The Golden Age is In Us (Verso, 1995) and 5
Days That Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond (Verso, 2000) with
Jeffrey St. Clair. Cockburn and St. Clair are the editors of Counterpunch,
the nation’s best political newsletter, where this article first appeared.