October 2008 archive

I’ve always been a religious man

I ‘ve always been a religious man

but I met the banker and it felt like sin

he turned my bailout down

The Banker Man, he let into me

let into me, let into me

The Banker Man, he let into me and spread my name around

He thinks I ain’t got a lick of sense cause I talk slow and my money’s spent

Now, I ain’t the type to hold it against, but he better stay off my farm

Cause it was my Daddy’s and his Daddy’s before

and his Daddy’s before and his Daddy’s before

Five generations of an unlocked door and a loaded burglar alarm.

Lots of pictures of my purdy family

lots of pictures of my purdy family

lots of pictures of my purdy family in the house where I was born.

House has stood through five tornadoes,

Droughts and floods and five tornadoes.

I’d rather wrastle an alligator than to face the Banker’s scorn

Cause he won’t even look me in the eye

He just takes my land and apologize

with pen, paper, and a friendly smile, he says the deed is done.

The sound you hear is my Daddy spinning, The sound you hear is my Daddy spinning

The sound you hear is my Daddy spinning over what the Banker done.

Like to invite him for some pot roast beef and mashed potatoes and sweet tea

follow it up with some banana pudding and a walk around the farm

Show him the view from McGee Town Hill

Let him stand in my shoes and see how it feels

to lose the last thing on earth that’s real

I’d rather lose my legs and arms

Bury his body in the old sink hole

Bury his body in the old sink hole

Bury his body in the old sink hole under cold November sky

Then damned if I wouldn’t go to church on Sunday

Damned if I wouldn’t go to church on Sunday

Damned if I wouldn’t go to church on Sunday

and look the Preacher in the eye.

~Drive-By Truckers, “Sinkhole”

1. The Guardian reports a Draft agreement promises troop withdrawal by 2011.

   US troops will withdraw from Iraq by December 31 2011 and American and British soldiers deployed there in the interim period could face prosecution in Iraq’s courts for serious, premeditated “off-duty” crimes under the terms of a draft status of forces agreement outlined yesterday by officials in Baghdad and Washington.

   “The draft agreement… is intended to replace the UN security council mandate that legitimised the US-led invasion in March 2003, and subsequent occupation…

   It must be ratified by the Iraqi parliament before the end of the year. Passage is far from guaranteed… Some of the deal’s terms may also prove controversial in the US.

2. The Washington Post reports Gen. David Petraeus mounts strategy review to focus On Afghanistan and wider region, including Pakistan, Iran, and Iraq. “The effort in Afghanistan is going to be the longest campaign of the long war,” he said.

   The strategy assessment will begin next month and take 100-days to complete. It’s goal is to create a “new campaign plan for the Middle East and Central Asia… military officials involved said Petraeus is already focused on at least two major themes: government-led reconciliation of Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the leveraging of diplomatic and economic initiatives with nearby countries that are influential in the war.”

Four at Four continues with Bush officials breaking the law, a historic win for Mexican migrant laborers, and a bonus picture.

Crossposted from Progressive-Independence.org.

The Chinese strategist Sun Tzu cautioned against fighting wars on multiple fronts, and for good reason; it has the tendency of dividing and exhausting one’s forces, thus leading to inevitable defeat.  So it is that the Progressive Movement in America fights not one but two enemies: the fascist corporations and their dogs in government, and itself.

I was reading a column by Dave Lindorff at Smirking Chimp in which the writer goes through all the various lame excuses for voting against his own beliefs and interests.  I know them for what they are, because I used them in 2004 when I held my nose and voted for Democrat John Kerry.  That’s a mistake I’ll not repeat again.

Take a journey with me as I dismantle the excuses given, one by one.

The ongoing economic meltdown is terrifying, but at the same time many of us have no real idea of what’s rolling down the pike at us.  

There are many aspects of the crisis and the coming recession which are impossible to predict. One impact though, will be unavoidable: crippling budget crises at the state and municipal levels, driven by falling real estate values, layoffs, business closings, increased borrowing costs and recession.

What Happens When the Banks Don’t Lend

To get a sense of what this could look like, it is instructive to look at what happened to New York City starting in 1975, when bank credit dried up and a fiscal crisis kicked in that was to last more than a decade. Remember that this was a budget crisis isolated to a single city, rather than the generalized collapse of the banking system we are seeing now.

The immediate background is that by the early ’70s, the City’s budget was deep in the red, kept going with fiscal jiggery-pokery especially in Mayor Lindsay’s second administration and under his successor, Mayor Beame. The back story is more complex of course, having much to do with federal policy since the Eisenhower administration which directed resources to suburbanization at the expense of city and country–money for interstates, not mass transit and railroads, subsidizing vast auto-dependent tracts of single houses on what had been farmland–you know the deal.

What plunged the City into crisis was the large banks refusing, collectively, in March, 1975 to extend credit to New York any longer, declining to roll over loans and boycotting the City’s bond auctions. The Beame administration moved to lay off 25,000 city workers and defer contractual raises for others, cut services, increase the transit fare and institute tuition in the City College of New York system.

For months there was a political war over how things would get resolved, with highway workers, cops and other city employees staging militant demonstrations and threatening an October general strike. The NY State government stepped in with aid but the federal government refused until massive pressure from the financial industry was brought to bear.

With everyone staring into the abyss of bankruptcy (and the possibility of a judge writing off the bonds the banks still held or canceling union contracts), the municipal unions made a devil’s pact with the banks, the details of which I leave for another post.

“The Bronx Is Burning”

What I want to remind people of is what happened to NYC once the austerity, service cuts, layoffs, tighter credit, tax hikes and the rest of the bank-sponsored “rescue package” kicked in.

Garbage piled up in the streets, and law enforcement abandoned whole neighborhoods. The public education system, already jolted by the refusal in the ’60s of Blacks and Latina/os to accept a two-tier, heavily segregated system, now faced serious cuts. Class sizes ballooned. “Non-essential” programs like art and music education and vocational training disappeared.

The Transit Authority adopted a policy of “deferred maintenance”–only fixing things when they broke down completely. One leader of the militant opposition within Transport Workers Union, Local 100 at the time, Arnold Cherry, pointed out whenever he spoke that every housewife knows that if you don’t empty the crumbs out of the toaster, eventually it stops working. Not TA management, though–the system veered toward total collapse in the early ’80s.

Meanwhile, landlords in “bad neighborhoods” emulated the Transit Authority, milking their aging apartment buildings for every dime in rent they could collect while “deferring” maintenance, laying off supers, ignoring heating oil bills, and finally abandoning the buildings themselves rather than pay city taxes. Or, given a chance, burning them down to collect the insurance.

This was seared into the national consciousness in the famous blimp shot of a five-alarm fire in the South Bronx during the 1977 World Series while Howard Cosell intoned, “There it is, ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning.” As much as 40% of the housing stock in the borough was destroyed during these years, feeding an impossible-to-ignore homeless population and pumping up rents for vacant apartments in surviving buildings. (The City, meanwhile, was closing firehouses as a money-saving measure.)

Huge cuts in the NYC medical system on top of deteriorating social conditions laid the ground work for what Nick Freudenberg and his co-authors identify as a deadly “syndemic”: the three interlinked epidemics of TB, murder and HIV infection.

Even after the emergency financial aid was paid back, and the City’s budget was balanced and the banks decided they would once again buy long term bonds issued by the city (1981) , the Emergency Financial Control Board kept austerity policies in place and the damage they did to millions of people reverberated through the decade and up to the present. To cite only one example, the City College system which had boasted free tuition for NYC residents before the crisis, now costs upwards of $2000 a semester.

What It Means

I could go on. There are a lot of particular lessons to learn from the New York City fiscal crisis, and how various social forces responded and what kinds of popular resistance developed and worked.

But lesson number one is that this kind of crisis is on the agenda right now, in cities around the country, and once it erupts, there is no quick bounceback. Start trying to size up the situation where you live and figure out who your allies are going to be in the coming years.

Crossposted from Fire on the Mountain.

What The Pundits See And Hear

John McCain On The Attack How Wonderful

He’s A Winner

What The People Who Count Want. That Would Be The Voters

A Discussion Of The Actual Issues

Barack Obama Is The Real Winner    

McCain Presses Obama in Final Debate

 

By JIM RUTENBERG

Published: October 15, 2008  

Senator John McCain used the final debate of the presidential election on Wednesday night to raise persistent and pointed questions about Senator Barack Obama’s character, judgment and policy prescriptions in a session that was by far the most spirited and combative of their encounters this fall.

At times showing anger and at others a methodical determination to make all his points, Mr. McCain pressed his Democratic rival on taxes, spending, the tone of the campaign and his association with the former Weather Underground leader William Ayers, using nearly every argument at his disposal in an effort to alter the course of a contest that has increasingly gone Mr. Obama’s way.

Draft agreement promises troop withdrawal by 2011

 

Simon Tisdall

The Guardian, Thursday October 16 2008

US troops will withdraw from Iraq by December 31 2011 and American and British soldiers deployed there in the interim period could face prosecution in Iraq’s courts for serious, premeditated “off-duty” crimes under the terms of a draft status of forces agreement outlined yesterday by officials in Baghdad and Washington.

The draft agreement, which is intended to replace the UN security council mandate that legitimised the US-led invasion in March 2003, and subsequent occupation, follows months of fraught negotiations. It must be ratified by the Iraqi parliament before the end of the year.

USA

Stocks Sink as Gloom Seizes Wall St.

Bernanke Forecasts Prolonged Economic Turmoil; Dow Plunges 7.9%

  By David Cho and Ylan Q. Mui

Washington Post Staff Writers

Thursday, October 16, 2008; Page A0

Troubling new signs of a deep economic malaise touched off some of the worst stock market losses in history yesterday, a day after the government announced a massive intervention that officials hoped would boost investor confidence.

New data showed that consumers stayed away from malls, nixed plans for new cars and made do with old clothes in September, forcing the largest monthly decline in retail sales in three years. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke added to the gloom, cautioning that the nation should not expect an economic rebound any time soon.