Of Cars and Roses: he says what I say but says it better...

From CounterPunch, a short article by Alexander Cockburn that basically resume a lot of what I have said in the last few days, minus the optimism.

If you want to read on the web site here's the link (http://www.counterpunch.org/); if not here's some highlights:

"...Bush is urging the world’s leading economic powers, now mustered in Washington, not to give up on capitalism. The mere fact that an American president should feel obliged to issue this worried advisory shows how desperate things already are and much worse they will soon get.

Each week brings a terrifying lurch, like a house on the edge of some cliff being pounded into slush by a Pacific storm. On the Doppler radar, we can see financial storm after financial storm lined up out there. Next to burst: the credit card overhang, of some $2.8 trillion in consumers’ plastic debt, much of which will have to be written off. The week after? Scores of cities and towns and even states are on the edge of bankruptcy.

This week’s storm center has been the US auto industry, effectively bankrupt. “What’s good for the country is good for General Motors and vice versa,” said GM’s chairman Charlie Wilson in 1952, amid the glorious surge of the postwar auto boom. This week GM’s stock was trading at around $3, and analysts at Deutsche Bank said America’s largest industrial corporation, the ninth largest company in the world, is effectively worthless. Congress seems to be saying, bailout is only for bankers. GM has 266,000 employees. If it goes under, the ripple effect will put 2.5 million Americans out of work.

Drive through any American town and you’ll see hundreds of acres of malls and box stores, almost all of them built in the past 20 years: Target, Best Buy, Circuit City, Home Depot, Borders Books, Linens ’n Things… Each day brings another bankruptcy. Circuit City, Borders, Linen ’n Things have gone. Home Depot is shutting down branches. In my local town of Eureka, northern California, the mall owner, General Growth has gone broke. With malls from Hawai’i to Maine, it was the second largest in America. The US Postal Service, with almost a million employees, and $2 billions worth of red ink this year, is considering the first layoffs, of 40,000 workers, in its history.

Already America’s real unemployment rate, if shorn of statistical tricks designed to conceal bad news, stands at around 15 per cent and is rocketing up. Consumer spending in the third quarter was the worst in 28 years. As the country totters wanly into what promises to be an appalling holiday sales season, Obama and his advisors gingerly finger the poisoned chalice handed them by Bush.

Vivid in their minds is Bill Clinton’s terrible transition, which permanently scarred his presidency. An incorrigible and disorganized procrastinator, surrounded by a self-indulgent, arrogant and inexperienced staff, Clinton left crucial posts unoccupied, ignored burning issues, dithered on policy, offended Congress and by the end of five months had lost control of government.

So Obama is moving with all deliberate speed, starting with the hiring of Rahm Emanuel, fourth in rank among Congressional Democrats, as his chief of staff. Emanuel was present at the early Clinton meltdown and partly responsible for it. A foul-mouthed rough-houser, Emanuel’s job is to try and hold the Congressional Democratic majority in line and enforce White House supremacy. If there’s one particularly salient feature of the Obama campaign, it was discipline. Whether Emanuel will maintain it is an open question.

Already Obama is urging a $50 billion bailout package for the auto industry and in his first press conference he emphasized his campaign commitment to tax cuts for middle Americans to stimulate the economy.

The problem with GM and Ford is that they will be back for more billions in a few months, because their cars aren’t selling well. The problem with tax cuts is that they won’t prompt Americans to rush to the stores to buy things. “Go shopping,” Bush advised the American people after 9/11. They did. But now, hocked up to the eyeballs, they’re stopping and any spare change from lowered tax rates will go to paying off old debts, not buying expensive new cars and gadgets. This week I shopped for old corded phones on e-Bay. I got a big rush scoring an ATT pink princess phone with lighted dial for $13.50, but that’s not going to bail out America.

The options for Obama and his future economic team are bleak. How to revitalize an economy and whose manufacturing jobs have gone to China, where the big employment gains have been among bartenders and waitresses, and where the building and home sales industry will be on its back for years to come? Would the oft-called-for shift to a “green jobs” program really mean big pay offs? The numbers are shaky. The falling price of oil has already finished off big alternative energy schemes like Boone Pickens’ monster wind farm in Texas.

Obama’s advisors ponder huge programs to battle “man-made” global warming. It will be hard to persuade Congress to commit to vast programs to combat the supposed menace, if another cold winter rolls in, and anyway, “war on gobal warming” mostly spells out as adding new taxes to utility bills and saddling the government with new debt for nuclear plant construction and guarantees.

What bailed out America’s economy in the thirties was not the New Deal but World War 2. Obama is indeed pledging a wider war in Afghanistan, but these days America’s wars are financed by countries like China, buying US debt. China says it doesn’t want to go on doing that...."