George Washington couldn't tell a lie.
Richard Nixon couldn't tell the truth.
And Ronald Reagan couldn't tell
The difference 'tween the two
The Friday before the election--Halloween--Michael Moore appeared on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman. Among other things, she went through his ten proposed decrees for a new administration's first ten days in office, one which was this:
AMY GOODMAN: Michael, your sixth presidential decree for the next president's first ten days is to defeat al-Qaeda and the next generation of America-haters by building wells.
MICHAEL MOORE: Well, there's over a billion people on this planet that don't have access to clean drinking water. You know, what if we made it an American mission to make sure that the entire third world had clean drinking water? One of the statistics I read was it would cost about $10 per person in the third world of people who don't have the clean drinking water right now. So, that's--geez, that's $10 times a billion people? $10 billion. That's just October in Iraq. For the money that we're spending in Iraq in October, we could provide clean drinking water to most of the people that don't have it. And I, as an American, would rather be known by the people who are struggling to survive in the third world as the country that gave them clean drinking water or gave them other things that they need to help them in their daily existence to survive. I think most Americans would rather be known for that. Instead, we're known as the invaders and the occupiers and the people who prop up the regimes in these countries, and I'm tired of that. I'm really tired of it.
This proposal is, quite frankly, an act of genius--defending America by drawing on our deepest and truest strengths, rather than responding exactly as al Qaida would have wanted it, destroying our freedoms as well as our good name. If anything could show the way out of the terribly self-destructive path Bush chose in response to 9/11, it is precisely this sort of sweeping, simple, yet visionary act. If he has the wisdom and courage to take Michael Moore's advice during his first days in office, Barack Obama will almost certainly be well on his way to fulfilling some of the most extravagent hopes that he and his election have inspired.
No, I'm not being premature here. If you want to win an election, it does help to have some idea what governing will mean. Republicans are accustomed to having little or no relationship between the two. But we don't want to be like them, now do we?
Last night on Bill Moyers Journal, Moyers had a long conversation with former GOP uber-guru, Kevin Phillips (here, skip down). In the course of that conversation, Phillips identified a number of significant problems facing a potential Obama presidency. A few he specifically identified in this manner, others were problems facing America as a whole. For simplicity sake, I'm going to streamline the list, and focus on four of them, grouped as follows:
(1) The Democrats have no idea what they're going to do. No one does, because this is not like 1929-1932. This is worse. It's worse because we were the emerging dominant world power then, and we're at the end of our dominance now. Our prosperity depends on world markets, and we've run up a huge debt with them.
(2) The Democrats will be taking power (hopefully) in midst of the melting down process (not so hopefully), rather than toward the end of it. And we're taking power before the political/analytical debate has come anywhere close to thrashing things out.
(3) The Democrats are tightly connected to the gang that caused the problem in the first place. The Bob Ruben wing. This is particularly inhibiting to the necessary process of standing back and trying to figure out what's needed for the country, not just them. This is the vision problem.
(4) The Democrats are deeply divided internally. As Phillips put it, "the flesh of the Democratic Party carries a lunchbox. But the new soul of the Democratic Party wears a pinstripe suit." This is the political problem.
The notion that history moves in cycles, or waves is an ancient one. In this diary set, I'm looking at the coinciding impact of two waves that are part of longterm cycles, as well as a third one indicative of global transformation that's been under way for several decades now These three waves all converge on this November's election, and in doing so, they confront a wall--the intensely fortified network of rightwing organizations and their "moderate" and "centrist" enablers.
The first part dealt with the roughly 32-40 year cycle of American Party Systems, the next part will deal with the recent wave of "post-materialist" values. This part deals with the rise and fall of successive world powers--Spain, Holland, Britain, and now us--described by former GOP uber-guru Kevin Phillips in Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich.
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