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CounterPunch
September
25, 2002
American Journal
The Dogs of War, the Bears of Wall St.
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
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.
Today's Features
Gary Leupp
On the
Contemporary Relevance of the Manchurian Incident
Will Youmans
Campus Watch: Vigilante Thought Police
Uri Avnery
The Murder
of Arafat
Steve Hendricks
Wild,
Wild West of Politics:
Being Green in Montana
Philip Farruggio
Democratic
Party Shams
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Another
Oil War
Rev. Robert Bowman
What Would
Jesus Do?
Lawrence Davidson
Web
War Comes to America
Chris Meyer
Six Weeks
of Quiet?
New
Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- Hunting Commie Perverts:
The Scarlet Professor
- DC's Best Political
Mind; DC's Most Dangerous Man;
- Dershowitz the Torturer:
Guess Why He Wants Clean Needles;
- Lese Majeste: That's
Against the Law Too;
- The Greatest Endorsement
AAA Will Ever Get;
- Merle Haggard on Civil
Liberties;
- Dullness Hailed: The Press on the Defeat of McKinney,
Traficant and Barr;
- National Review Puffs
into Town.
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September
21 / 22, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
An Entire
Class
of Thieves
Tom Gorman
The Press & Sabra
and Shatila
Amelia Peltz
Anniversary with Life
in Palestine
Susan Martinez
By the Hand
of the Father
Ben Tripp
Advice from
a Polemicist
Adam Engel
From Above:
Forgetting bin Laden
Chris Clarke
The Ann Coulter Test
Tariq Ali
Doing as the
Romans Did
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Bush Victory
in Iraq
Ralph Nader
Greed Without Limits
Thomas Croft
The Life of Jim Cummings
Anthony Gancarski
Concerned Citizen:
a serialized Novel,
Episode One
Wolff, Dailey, Metres
& St. Clair
Poet's Basement
September
20, 2002
Joan Hoff
Debating
War:
the Forgotten Tradition
Norman Madarasz
Lessons from a Cyncial Master Jean
Chretien's
New York State of Mind
Mitchel Cohen
Toxic Wastes
and
the New World Order
Peter Lee
Why Bush
Wants This War
Bruce Jackson
20 Questions
About Bush's
War Against Arabs
Krystal Kyer
Greenwashing the Marketplace
September
19, 2002
Ron Jacobs
Cheney's
Vermont Breakfast
Ilija Trojanow
/ Ranjit Hoskote
Who Cares
for Human Rights?
It's a "Just" War
Jordy Cummings
How
to Silence
Pro Palestinian Voices
Salam Rahal
The Rape
of a Nation
Richard Falk
& David Krieger
War with
Iraq:
It's Not Bush's Decision
Ralph Nader
How Congress
Can Fight Corporate Crime
Kurt Nimmo
Bush Senior:
Hating Saddam, Selling Him Weapons
September
18, 2002
Rep. Cynthia
McKinney
Goodbye
to All That
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Cancerous
Air
Born Under a Bad Sky
Ben Tripp
Smoking
Gun
of a Hatchet Job
Peggy Thomson
20 Years
After:
Sabra and Shatila
Thomas Mountain
September
1982
Sabra and Chatila (Poem)
William Cook
Yet Another
Bush Doctrine
Kathleen Christison
Israel's Other Voices
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By
Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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