1 Boring Old Man

Bush’s economic policy now looks as disastrous as his foreign adventurism

Now here’s a chilling moment of convergence. In the same week as the conflict in Iraq passes its fifth anniversary, a big financial beast, the Bear Sterns bank, goes belly up on Wall Street. Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz estimates the war has cost $3 trillion and still counting. Nouriel Roubini of NYU’s Stern School of Business comes up with a similar $3 trillion price tag for cleaning up the meltdown in global financial markets. As the old joke goes, we’ll soon be talking real money here.

Like most such estimates both are still hotly disputed, but no one says that resolving either problem is going to be cheap. Fewer people will die as a result of the overheated loans market, though if it forces a lot of important people to take their minds off the climate change agenda, not even that will be true. Weekend reports suggest that icebergs are now melting almost as fast as the Bears Sterns share price, sold for $2 apiece, 6% of its book value.

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What have they got in common? Well, the Bush administration is the obvious factor, though, as the Guardian’s Larry Elliott points out in a gloomy column today, Alan Greenspan, much-lauded then-chairman of the mighty Federal Reserve, pumped up the US economy in 2001 to spare it the hangover earned during the dotcom bubble – "the most irresponsible behaviour of any central banker in living memory," says Larry.

Ben Bernanke, the current Fed chairman, has spent a lifetime in academic study of the lessons to be drawn from the Great Depression, which must be handy now. Hopefully, he also kept an eye on the Japanese housing collapse and decade-long flat economy in the 90s. I’m hopeful that Americans are still more original in their thinking than the Japanese and can talk themselves out of similar trouble.

But it’s not looking good. In which case the younger Bush’s two administrations face a double whammy indictment from history – disastrously managed foreign and economic policies – always assuming those melting icebergs haven’t drowned or starved all the historians. That could mean a place in the Very Bad Presidents Hall of Fame, up their with Warren G Harding and Ulysses S Grant – both boom ‘n’ bust presidents with dubious friends…

I guess we have to read the Guardian and other Foreign Press analyses to hear the truth about our country. We’re sure not going to hear if from our government. They’ve made up so many stories, I’m not even sure they know they’re doing it. Cheney’s in Iraq talking about what a swell idea that was, while I saw President Bush say on T.V. something like, "We’re monitoring the situation and will act accordingly" referring to the economy. I presume that they still think that there are some people somewhere who give a damn what they think or still live in some rarified part of the country where people think that the fact that they’re monitoring things actually matters. Like they were monitoring the Iraq War so closely that right before it got toally our of hand, they threw in a bunch more troops, or that they helped keep a bankrupt bank from going belly up for who knows what reason the day after Bush was talking about the government being "hands off" with the economy.

A lame duck is an elected official who loses political power or is no longer responsive to the electorate as a result of

• a term limit which keeps the official from running for that particular office again,
• losing an election, or
• the elimination of the official’s office, but who continues to hold office until the end of the official’s term.

Lame duck officials are in the peculiar position of not facing the consequences of their actions in the next election, meaning they are generally considered not accountable for their actions. They also tend to have less political power as other elected officials see less advantage in cooperating with them. On the other hand, lame duck executives, particularly Presidents of the United States, are notorious for issuing a series of executive orders or making appointments during their last days that they would not otherwise have made if it would have influenced the vote against them… In the literal sense, it refers to a duck who is unable to keep up with its flock, making it a target for predators.

But, in one sense, they are lame ducks, "They also tend to have less political power as other elected officials see less advantage in cooperating with them." It’s not a good place for us to be right now. Crisis Management usually needs someone in charge [an Executive] rather than a committee [Congress]. And our Congress has been reduced to having no real power except to say "no." Even my favorite course of action, impeachment, would have to go pretty deep to be effective, and would tie us up for longer than just waiting for the election. So, our lame government is going to spend the next ten months justifying and compounding its seven years of disasterous mistakes. And the Democrats are entangled in a pissing contest that neither side seems inclined to quit. Ms. Mullins said that the time at the end of a Presidential term was not very safe, because nothing much ever gets accomplished. It was 1952 and all of her fifth graders thought that electing a General [Ike] was great. He got all of the votes in our class’s mock election. I think Ms. Mullins was a Democrat and worried about us and the world. What did she have to worry about? Just nuclear holocaust and Global Communism.