Bush, economic crisis, and war

Steve Clemons tells us that Bush will make a public pronouncement about the financial crisis at 7:45 a.m. EST Tuesday. This is not a reassuring prospect. When he made his last such pronouncement, it was decidedly not reassuring.
My strong guess is that Bush doesn’t actually know enough about the way financial markets and the rest of the economy works to be able to have an opinion on what ought to be done, and that he’s subcontracted the entire handling of the current crisis to Treasury Secretary Paulson. Just as he subcontracted the handling of the nation’s security affairs for many years to Dick Cheney. But now Paulson’s bailout plan is in deep political trouble. It needs presidential leadership. But how can the president decide what’s the best thing to do if he doesn’t even understand the basics of how the financial system works? How can he judge the technical aspects– or the political aspects– of Paulson’s proposal? Who else does he talk with or listen to about these matters?
For a while now, the country’s sometimes deadly serious jester-in-chief, Jon Stewart, has been gently mocking Bush’s lame-duck status by referring to him as “Still-President Bush.” But I think Jon has it wrong. It seems to me that Bush has barely been a participant at all in all the negotiations and deliberations over the response to Wall Street’s crisis. Last Wednesday, he seemed completely out of it. I wrote the next morning, “His face was puffy, his hair a little bushy and ill-kempt, his expression that of a scared rabbit, his affect wooden… ”
Paulson, Bernanke, and the Democratic leadership in Congress have been doing all the heavy lifting on trying to fashion and win support for the bailout. The politics of this have been bizarre in the extreme– until you remember what generous donations the big financial houses have all been making over the years to the Dems’ political campaigns, as well as the GOP’s. There was also, of course, McCain’s completely over-dramatized and unhelpful attempt to inject campaign politics into the whole decision-making process…
We should be clear that the gargantuan amounts of money the country has poured into waging the two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been a big motor for the current crisis. Firstly, in themselves. Chalmers Johnson helpfully reminded us today that last week, the Congress passed by a huge majority a “$612 billion defense authorization bill for 2009 without a murmur of public protest or any meaningful press comment at all.” He notes that though “only” $68.6 billion of this is expressly to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the year’s-end price tabs for those two wars will be much higher, as the administration continues its practice of winning huge “supplemental” appropriations for them during the course of the year.
These defense expenses are, of course, ones that recur annually… So each year it’s like the equivalent of passing an entire Wall Street bailout plan.
Johnson describes the whole defense budget as “pure waste.” I would say there are some portions of it that serve a useful purpose. But there are other, even greater portions that are either just useless or even actively counter-productive. For example, the stepped-up military actions in Afghanistan over the past year has been accompanied by a greater collapse of security there, the resurgence of the Taleban, and an apparently great increase in the number of Afghans who have been deeply angered by actions like the aerial bombardment of people accused– often with little or no evidence– of being “terrorists.”
Also, the way Bush sought to fight these wars, from the very beginning, was in a way that imposed no immediate financial burden on the US citizenry. Every previous war the US has fought has been funded mainly through increased taxation. But Bush and Cheney didn’t want to do that. They wanted US citizens to keep as much of their money as possible so they could continue spending, spending, spending– and perhaps so they’d never even really notice that two wars were being fought in their (our) name in two distant countries.
So these wars have been financed purely through borrowing. Hence the national debt, which was on its way to being erased at the end of the Clinton presidency, is now headed up toward $10 trillion. You better believe that these two war-linked phenomena of the government being badly indebted (including to a number of foreign creditors) and the US public having been encouraged to go out and spend, spend, spend have both contributed mightily to the current financial crisis.
Bush’s extremely ambitious project to remake the whole world (or important parts of it) in America’s image has proved to be an expensive and damaging fiasco. It was a project that was prefigured in the earlier writings of the neocons who determined so much of his foreign policy for him. Their big project was for a “New American Century.” However, in a twist of history, the very success the neocons had in storming the citadels of power and seizing important portions of the reins of government into their own hands led to the waging of these two wars and other acts of unilateralist arrogance around the world…that ended up ensuring that the “New American Century” would end 93 years early.
Personally, I strongly doubt that a whole new “American century” was ever possible… At some point over the decades ahead, the US would almost certainly, neocons or no neocons, have lost the pre-eminent “Uber-power” role it has played in global affairs since 1945. But the raw graspiness and arrogance that the neocons showed on the world stage certainly hastened the end of the NAC.
So now, as I started writing a bit last week, we need to Re-imagine a future for America that is very different from the triumphalist kind of place the neocons imagined and tried to bring into being.
I see Steve Clemons has started doing a bit of this re-imagining, too. He blogged today that, “America will have no choice but to add to its cumulative debt — and to invest in itself, particularly national infrastructure — as a way to keep Americans working and to stimulate important parts of the near and long term real economy.” …Which was just about exactly what I was writing last week, too.
A more modest, down-to-earth, and caring America– and one with much better physical and social infrastructure than we have here today. Now that is a project worth working for.
And along the way, we need to shed some of the very bad habits we’ve picked up over past decades. Habits like these:

1. Maintaining a truly enormous military, in no way proportional to our real weight in world affairs, and using it in a usually fruitless quest to control and dictate to distant others.
2. Subverting the idea of a “level playing field” in global trade by giving $250 billion annually in subsidies to US agricultural producers, primarily those associated with Big Ag.
3. Allowing a quite anti-democratic perversion of public life by allowing money to play a massive role in politics. REal campaign funding limits– opr the public funding of political campaigns– need to be enacted now. Otherwise actors like Big Ag, the military-industrial complex, and the truly Frankensteinian “financial services sector” will all simply continue buying legislators and hog-tieing the country’s democratic processes in that way.