Bush’s Legacy
When I was a child growing up just outside New York City during the 1970s, I learned to be afraid of getting mugged. But this is not that. The criminals I’m talking about don’t bop anyone over the head and steal hundreds of dollars. These criminals slowly take $5, $10, and $20 from me, often with a smile. They pop a surcharge onto my monthly phone bill. They pad my TV bill with services I didn’t ask for. They drain my bank account — drip, drip, drip — when I’m not watching. These hidden fees keep me up late at night like the sound of a leaky faucet. I feel like I have to watch everything all the time, because it’s so easy to miss some statement on some form with some asterisk that means the company can take even more money from me. And when that happens, I suffer from what I call small print rage.
Am I crazy? Or am I just paying attention? One thing I know for sure: I’m not alone.
Bob Sullivan, from Gotcha Captialism, on MSNBC
[Gotcha Capitalism website; Bob Sullivan on Fresh Air]
Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming is Mark Bowen’s account of the struggle that ensued between Hansen and the Bush administration over a basic principle: a government scientist’s right to speak freely to the press. Censoring Science intertwines three separate but closely related stories. The first narrates the step-by-step attempts of a low-ranking NASA press staffer and right-wing ideologue, along with other officials, to censor Hansen. The concatenation of detail is not initially gripping — a timeline of events would have been helpful — but as it accumulates, the case is ultimately compelling. Bowen’s demonstration that censorship spread far beyond Hansen, affecting many climate scientists in NASA and in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is convincing and disturbing.
Michael Oppenheimer, Nature Reports Climate Change, href="http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0802/full/climate.2008.3.html">January 16, 2008
[James Hansen on Fresh Air; Interview with Hansen on Columbia News.]
We’ll be hearing a lot about legacy today and in the next year. Setting aside Iraq War II, Katrina, and other high concept disasters, Bush and company have a rich list of accomplishments. Here are two areas in which their successes are more nuanced, fine-grained, and so perhaps longer lasting.
The first continues a long Republican tradition of refusing to regulate and of allowing their corporate cronies full reign. I think it’s reached some sort of Orwellian tipping point where we no longer expect anything but a kind of ongoing con-game in every transaction.
And the second suggests something of the profound depth of political corruption, down to the level of individual government scientists forced to play the role of political mouthpiece. Once these folks start talking again– this year, or the next– all sorts of things are going to look different.
Obama’s Deceptions
With all the talk about how to stimulate it, you’d think that the economy is a giant clitoris. Ben Bernanke may not employ this imagery, but the immediate challenge–and the issue bound to replace Iraq and immigration in the presidential race–is how best to get the economy engorged and throbbing again.
It would be irresponsible to say much about Bush’s stimulus plan, the mere mention of which could be enough to send the Nikkei, the DAX, and the curiously named FTSE and Sensex tumbling into the crash zone again. In a typically regressive gesture, Bush proposed to hand out cash tax rebates–except to families earning less than $40,000 a year. This may qualify as an example of what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism,” in which any misfortune can be re-jiggered to the advantage of the affluent.
Barbara Ehrenreich, January 22, 2008
On positions from Iraq to health care, the policy differences between Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama are minute. Much of the debate between them has involved making these molehills look mountainous or clashing over who-shifted-when.
The one most significant difference between them can be found in how they would approach the presidency – and how the nation might respond.
Hillary Clinton has been a policy wonk most of her life, a trait she has carried into the U.S. Senate. As her debate performances have shown, she has intelligence and a deep understanding of many issues. Her efforts in New York focused first on learning her adopted state’s issues in detail, and pursuing legislation that would not necessarily grab headlines.
But we also have a good idea what a Clinton presidency would look like. The restoration of the Clintons to the White House would trigger a new wave of all-out political warfare.
The State’s Endorsement of Barack Obama, January 22, 2008
It’s become a kind of cliché that the national media first develops a narrative around every presidential race and then pursues that story at any cost. The outlines of the story are becoming increasingly clear. Edwards is angry and so ineffective. The Clintons are self-serving and divisive. Obama is the peace maker.
The New York Times has endorsed Clinton, so maybe the narrative is not yet fixed. On the other hand, she’s a popular New York Senator, so that’s an predictable exception. What bugs me about Obama is that, as someone like Barbara Ehrenreich reminds us, his rhetoric is more deceptive than substantively progressive.
The Clintons, again as the cliché goes, are wonks and they don’t pretend to be otherwise. They are selling expertise and experience. Edwards is selling a fight that is logically unavoidable. Obama, though, is selling the false idea that progressive policies can be enacted without fundamentally challenging any of the powers-that-be.
The rhetoric of his supporters is telling. “From terrorism and climate change to runaway federal entitlement spending, there are big challenges to be faced,” The Sun endorsement begins (as quoted on Obama’s website), as if all of these things were part of a single syndrome.
“Terror” in this case refers to a kind of rhetorical trick pulled by Republicans to justify what can only be called criminal behavior on their part. “Runaway federal entitlement spending,” is more Republican code for the ongoing decimation of public services. “Climate change” seems to mean corn-ethanol and legalized price gouging. It’s hard to figure what this ‘peace’ is supposed to be, even rhetorically.
shift happens
shift happens wiki
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Get my book at Southern Illinois University Press, Amazon, or Powell's Books.
The C.C.C.C webpage, A Taste for Language: Literacy, Class, and English Studies includes a short podcast interview with me along with links to these reviews:
... by Victor Villanueva in CCC 62.4 (June 2011)
... by Chanon Adsanatham in Teaching English in the Two-Year College 38.3 (March 2011)
... by Scott McLemee in Inside Higher Education (17 Feb 2010)Note: you need to be a member of NCTE, and a subscriber to the relevant journal, to read the reviews by Villanueva and Adsanatham; the review by McLemee is available to the general public.