Why Obama Should Embrace Teddy Roosevelt - Substance and Style

 

Unsurprisingly, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce issued a letter today criticizing President Obama as being "anti-business." This to a president who rescued the auto and finance industries and set in motion an unprecedentedly enormous stimulus package for the overall economy. Unreason has knows no bounds.

Obama has much of the blame on his shoulders for not striking back at the fiendish money hounds who want George W. Bush's tax cuts for the rich to be extended at the end of the year and want a rollback on crucial legislation such as health care reform, and a dead stop put on emissions restrictions. The President seems to have mislaid his trump card, his inspiring oratory,

If the status quo were so wonderful, why do we find ourselves in such a huge, seemingly unsolvable mess?

Just before the Panic of 1907, another point in our history when capital had been hyper-concentrated in the hands of a few, in a speech in Indianapolis on Memorial Day, Teddy Roosevelt skewered the "predatory man of wealth" who was increasingly using his power to manipulate labor, prices, and liquidity. (J. P. Morgan was the archetypal "man of wealth," but he was only one among the oligarchy, the cabal.)

Roosevelt said in full:

One great problem that we have before us is to preserve the rights of property, and these can only be preserved if we remember that they are in less jeopardy from the Socialist and the Anarchist than from the predatory man of wealth. There can be no halt in the course we have deliberately elected to pursue, that policy of asserting the right of the nation, so far as it has the power, to supervise and control the business use of wealth, especially in the corporate form.

Paralleling the unwarranted attacks in the business press on Obama, the Commercial and Financial Chronicle (click) began to refer to T.R. as "the irritant." (Fittingly, the monthly Chronicle, founded in 1839, went out of business immediately after the stock market crash of 1987.)

Roosevelt was anything but anti-business. Nor is Obama, of course. Both have a reasoned approach to regulation and taxation. What the big business community wants ultimately is to have all fetters removed so that they are free to prey on the stupidly greedy (as during the housing bubble), the sick, the poor, and the working classes. Today, most likely the term "working classes" includes you. 

We need look no farther than the tempest over health care reform, the vulturous behavior of the financial sector, the outlandish prices for pharmaceuticals, the cost of our wars, and the wanton destruction caused by BP in the Gulf to see where the Republicans and corporatism have gotten us.

The Chamber of Commerce in its role as attack dog for corporations, wants deficits to be rolled back precipitously. Meanwhile, according to Reuters, "U.S. businesses are holding onto some $1.8 trillion in cash." So, if business won't spend, and government is basically out of cash or should not take on new debt, what exactly is the prescription for economic recovery?

When the Republicans were in charge of the country through the better part of the first decade of this century, real income for the average American declined over $2,000. George Bush's administration created exactly zero net private sector jobs. 

The right wing agenda is no less frightening as the midterm elections approach. The mainstream Republican wants to do away with Medicare; privatize Social Security while raising the retirement age to 70; they are against extending unemployment benefits; against legislation that would forbid another Wall Street bailout; against the inevitable green economy; and for a return to offshore drilling at it was before the Gulf catastrophe. And that's the mainstream right!

Teddy Roosevelt called the unholy amalgam of purely self-interested corporations of his era the "malefactors of great wealth." 

Right now, the top 1% of people in the United States own over 30% of the wealth in the country. The bottom 50% owns less than 20%. 

The Republicans speak for the top 1% (and more). 

Obama and the Democrats need to step up and start speaking for the rest of us. And hey, Mr. President, start shaking your fist and crying out for justice all around.

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High Speed Trains and One Mule

I am only quasi-pleased that the president is parceling out $8 billion dollars for the development of high speed trains around the country. It is really a paltry amount. It represents .00056 of total U.S. GDP. Let's say you have a two income household that brings in $100,000 per year and you want to replace some important infrastructure element in your house, or improve your transportation choices. Spending a similar percentage would give you a budget of $56.38 out of your hundred grand.

Liberals should be behind an enormous expansion of rail infrastructure - not just passenger, but freight as well, but the latter is another story. According to a number of sources, IF we had a rail system on a par with France's, it would provide 500 million passenger rides per year and require 1,000,000 workers to run, service and maintain the system. Now there's a jobs program for you. By contrast, Amtrak employs about 18,000 people. For a really excellent look at the potential for rail in America, check this out at The Infrastructurist.

Yet the right wing is rabid in its opposition. We can put it down to their usual stale pieties about government spending, waste, jeremiads against "socialism," and their slavish devotion to the oil industry. (As if the Interstate Highway System is not a communal venture!) However, I'd like to go deeper and lay it at the feet of a misguided hyper-individualism that is rooted in the values of the Old South. While the Northeast, Midwest and California were modernizing agriculture in the 1890s, the Old South was still dogging along with small family plots and the remnant of the rotted plantation culture that was dependent on slave labor.

Today's automobile culture is roughly comparable to the one-mule, postage-stamp farm of the post-bellum South. And the people who work on this new automobile version of such a farm, stuck in outrageously uneconomical, environmentally unsound machines, are really simply driving their one mule and hoping it lasts through the spring planting. So, the right wing clings to this outmoded way of thinking. It is deeper than political philosophy. It is a cultural philosophy deeply embedded and fraught with all sorts of common, pre-World War prejudices. Anti-cosmopolitan comes most readily to mind. Fear of the outsider - ewww I might have to sit next to a stranger on a train. Fatalism about the future also pops up when I consider this old, worn out way of thinking.

Listen to Harry Nilsson's "Nobody Cares About The Railroads Anymore"

Broader, almost revolutionary thinking is required if we are to hope that our children and grandchildren have jobs, a clean environment, and quick and easy ways to travel, at least regionally, if not cross continent.

But the future is not looking rosy as we dawdle and dither, held hostage to the old one-mule farm mentality.

The U.S. currently has one high speed corridor, Boston to Washington, of about 500 miles. Even if we were to build ALL the proposed high speed corridors on the national wish list, that would only amount to 4,000 at most. (By the way - in the U.S., "high speed" means an average of 79 mph on a system. In Europe, it's 120 mph.)

China, whose land mass is about the same as the U.S., has embarked on the second largest public works program in all of history, following only the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System in size. China plans to spend more than $1 trillion on expanding its railway network from 48,466 miles today to 68,350 in 2012 and 74,564 in 2020. China’s more pertinent goal is to invest in 8,000 miles of high-speed rail by 2020. They invest $1 trillion, while we argue and backbite over $8 billion.

By the way, the cost of the two wars in south Asia has now reached $955 billion.... hmm... just about what China plans to spend on its rail infrastructure. See this website: The Cost of War. Look for your area.