Big Government and the Big Easy
Norman
Ball asks: Does this country's leadership still possess the ingredients
of character to make possible today what it accomplished for other
nations fifty years ago?
“…each proposal must be weighed in the light of…the
need to maintain balance between the private and the public economy;”
--- from President Dwight D. Eisenhower's “Military-Industrial
Complex” speech, 1961
New Orleans languishes today in a state of economic
disrepair. With disruptions to the normal balance of life so complete,
the traditional paths to economic recovery—aid, grants, job
programs, private charities—cannot take hold. The self-healing,
virtuous circle has been severed: no jobs, no people, no people,
no jobs. When economic activity comes to a dead stop, what or whom
steps in as the Prime Mover?
America is a nation of near-boundless resources. The material needs
posed by New Orleans's plight are eminently surmountable.
Given the abysmal public sector response to Katrina's aftermath,
the question begs asking: Does this country's leadership still
possess the ingredients of character—spirit, leadership and
ideology—to make possible today what it accomplished for other
nations fifty years ago?
Indeed an example exists in recent American history that dwarfs
New Orleans in every logistical metric. The manifold challenges
posed by WWII and its aftermath ushered in a golden age of public
service in America. Intent on doing whatever was needed to secure
the larger effort, the best and the brightest gravitated towards
government. Money was an afterthought. Greed was still a deadly
sin, hardly an ethos. This public spirit was put to the test again
rebuilding a ravaged Europe at war's end. America faced the
New Orleans' catch-22, but on a vaster scale. Yet the question
was the same: how does a society rescue its traumatized economy
from the death-spiral of low employment and profoundly disrupted
supply?
Summarizing Dean Acheson's watershed foreign policy speech
of May 1947, David McCullough, in his biography Truman,
says this:
The stricken countries of Europe needed everything and could
afford to buy nothing. Financial aid was imperative, but, as Acheson
stressed, the objective was not relief, it was the revival of
industry, agriculture and trade.
This was market-making of the highest order. Nothing of its magnitude
had ever been attempted before. Exceeding even the revolutionary
era (forever besmirched by the stain of slavery), the nation has
never been endowed with such an array of morally sound men. George
Marshall, Harry Truman, Dean Acheson, George Kennan and Dwight
Eisenhower threw themselves into winning the peace with the same
intensity displayed during the war. Realizing the private sector
lacked the resources to launch products and markets with
crucial simultaneity, these gray-haired titans of public service
crafted the Marshall Plan, or as it was formally known, the European
Recovery Program.
This effort, combined with the two pillars of post-war entitlement,
the GI Bill and the VA Loan, got the world back to business in a
hurry. The government's central role was soon forgotten in the mad
dash to prosperity. How forgotten? Today it's fashionable
for the beneficiaries of this massive public sector initiative to
rail against the evils of meddlesome government.
The Republican Party, chafing at the massive $17 billion price
tag, opposed the Marshall Plan initially. But then, so did the Left,
specifically the American Progressive and the American Communist
parties. Traditionally, when a fundamental imperative looms large
in America, there is a pragmatic strain that rises up, dispatching
ideological purists. For a number of reasons, ideological exactitude
lends itself more to intellectualized, perhaps even effete, European
politics. In their heart of hearts, Americans believe in common
sense. After hard lobbying from Truman, the Marshall Plan passed
with near-unanimity in 1948.
Political parties are loath to champion a hero not of their own
stripe. Neither Right nor Left is prone to recite the following
ideological inconvenience: the American government was the unabashed
hero of the WWII era. Neither the industrial class, nor the
American proletariat alone could have triumphed over fascism. In
a sterling example of the whole exceeding the sum of its parts,
the system of arrangement, the governing principle i.e. the
government itself provided the crucial element for success.
So a belated "hurray" for government!
Captains of industry are not renowned for their generosity of spirit.
Sharing credit, especially with the public sector, is tantamount
to requesting a boost in the corporate income tax rate. But the
fact is the profit motive owes its motive force to an a priori
climate of relative stability. Stated another way, business thrives
in, but hardly creates, the polis. Good governance is thus a necessity
for profitable enterprise. Yes, Virginia, business needs government
more than government needs business. For anyone doubting the order
of this sequence, go visit Haiti.
Perhaps America's moral climate—reflected undeniably
in its public spirit—wavered in the ensuing fat years of prosperity.
Thirty years after the Marshall Plan, Ronald Reagan, former GE pitch-man,
would build a legacy on besmirching the public sector. The consummate
shill, Reagan delivered his free-market devotionals with cue-card
discipline—and 3x5 vacuities. As to whether his pitch was
ever vetted for reality, well, veracity is hardly the first-order
concern of a carnival barker. In fact, listening to Reagan, one
might easily have concluded it was the free market—and not
the free world led by free governments—that averted global
totalitarianism.
On the contrary, big business is highly adaptable, getting along
famously with liberal democrats and fascists alike. Though it was
Eisenhower who would coin the term in later years, a military-industrial
complex fueled the Nazi war effort; companies with exotic names
like Ford, GM and ITT. Sound familiar? Yes, they were our
war profiteers too. No sticklers on points of ideology, many venerable
companies worked double-duty. With both sides needing bullets, industry
was often spared the task of choosing sides. Flesh-and-blood public
servants, raised to salute in one direction, were not so fortunate.
Nobody has ever been pulled from a burning building by a corporation.
And yet, there is a certain school of thought that argues today's
corporations are big fuzzy citizens with feelings too. Of course
this is the same school that believes New Improved Tide
has perfected whiter whites. Yahoo and Microsoft, ‘progressive'
companies claming 21st century new paradigms, routinely hand over
search information to the Chinese government. For this, people are
jailed, perhaps even killed. Offering arrogance as a defense, these
companies aver that China is a big market. Whew, thanks for clearing
that up. They also admit, in so many words, that civil
rights are not really their business; software is. After the left-hand-right-hand
shenanigans of WWII, no one should be surprised at the amorality
of the bottom-line-seekers. The question is, do we want an implicitly
unprincipled force to be the organizing principle for our society,
Walmart government at unbeatably low prices?
Today's corporations, no different from yesterday's corporations,
would have America's kids back in coal mines tomorrow if not for
those persnickety child labor laws. Yet there is a plaintive echo
of American exceptionalism in the notion that American children
will never again suffer the plight of nine-year-old rug-makers in
Lahore. After all, this country has "evolved" through
its progressive era. Upton Sinclair exposed the meat-packers. The
muckrakers prevailed. Had there been something intrinsically sacrosanct
about America, surely our industrial base would have clung to the
heartland in a determined effort to make things work. Instead, they
headed off-shore to countries where labor activism looms in a very
distant future. Progressive victories are reversible. Remove government
and Junior would be jack-hammering igneous rock formations faster
than you could say "adolescent black lung."
This is not a treatise for industrial policy or democratic socialism.
Most of us would settle for such rudimentary prohibitions as no
lead in our drinking water. Gulp. It's just that those pastoral
ADM advertisements should be taken with a grain of salt. Corporations
are still the best little whorehouses in Texas. Their anti-social
tendencies must be reined in to better serve the public good. Government
is the only entity capable of doing this.
So exactly what type of system do the corporatists have in mind
for us? By this essayist's reckoning, George Bush Senior's
thousand points of light worked out to approximately one sixty-watt
bulb for every 300,000 citizens. By design, old George's ‘points'
were to be kept in a state of perpetual disconnect; in short, no
organizing principle, no power-sharing grid, no Marshall Plan. This
metaphor of patchy luminosity offers a glimpse into the corporatist
agenda: Isolate the heroes and avert a national movement. Should
the heroes die, as heroes often do, thousands fall back into the
inky blackness where they're easier to control. The abrupt
and mysterious demise of firebrands such as Huey Long and Karen
Silkwood suggests that something in the American ethos is hazardous
to the health of populists.
In the current era of private sector blow-ups and rapacious greed
a la Enron and Worldcom, Reagan's disparaging typecast of the "lazy,
bumbling public servant" (sad corollary to his mythic welfare
queen), becomes all the more scurrilous for its unanswered character
assassination. Reagan's cynical renderings of the typical public
servant made the despairing assertion that, if people are not working
for obscene sums of money, then they couldn't possibly
be working at all. But we call too-large sums of money obscene for
a reason. The suggestion here is that honest labor is not an innate
expression of man, but rather something he barters up, always with
a jealous eye cast to the bottom-line. This sounds like meretricious
self-servitude, man counting himself out like so many pieces of
gold. For many, some of the best things in life are done for free,
without compunction, without monetary incentive.
Equally ludicrous is the idea that, faced with the opportunity
of making just $30 million a day instead of, say, $40 million a
day, Bill Gates would slip into such a dispirited funk that he'd
stop creating software engineering jobs for kids in India. So please,
no tax increases for the poor rich!
"Man-as-economic-automaton" theories tend to denigrate
the preponderance of human endeavor over the ages, lashing them
all to a Form W-2. Before Bill Gates ever thought to build a 60,000-square-foot
home, he was a human stew of passion, incentive and drive. Marginal
tax rates did little to encourage—or dissuade—him from
doing what he appears to do exceedingly well. After achieving their
subsistence needs, people, the worthwhile ones anyway, work for
passion, not money. To say otherwise strips the humanity from human
achievement. As many a starving artist will attest, there is much
more to human aspiration than the mercenary impulse. Only a shill
withholds speech for remuneration.
At this point, Thomas Paine or Patrick Henry might chime in, "We
made free speech free for a reason. Some of us answer to
the ultimate employer, our conscience." Light-years away from
Reagan-Bush corporatism, this stubbornly inalienable aspect of free
speech still strikes some folks as the quintessence of America.
After all, what did our brave public servants fight and die for?
The right to speak in the public square or Ronald Reagan's
right, as paid spokesman, to denigrate public sacrifice while extolling
the virtues of GE? Even in this era of GE-underwritten broadcast
"journalism," we must hope there's still a difference.
As Reagan served his country during WWII in the crucial role of
thespian, risking rashes from face-paint, it's possible the more
perilous and singularly unprofitable contributions made by others
in the war effort were entirely lost on him. Or, as a supply-sider
might point out, dying for ones country all but guarantees a precipitous
fall-off in lifetime earnings. Such is the economic calamity that
awaits public servants called upon to make the ultimate public sacrifice.
In another time, we called them patriots.
When the National Anthem plays, micro-economists should remove
their green-eye shades and avert their gazes in respectful silence.
Defying profit motives, rational expectations and wealth-maximization
theories, thousands of people who gave their lives in WWII were
essentially broke. Yet heroism is not a venerable smokescreen for
economic ineptitude...right?
How else to explain why the greatest contributors to our culture
and civilization, gifted men and women, routinely die in abject
poverty? Perhaps they received horrible estate planning advice.
Perhaps they saw beyond wealth and power, poor bastards.
Produce a private sector resume that boasts the equivalent of The
Marshall Plan, The Manhattan Project, The Interstate Highway System
and the Apollo Program, and this peon to public sector accomplishment
will be abandoned forthwith. Think of that apocryphal moment in
American achievement when a bunch of government bureaucrats navigated
a near-inoperable Apollo 13 safely back to Earth. It's hard
to recall a private sector accomplishment that rivals this moment
of quintessential American genius. Stock options can only gnash
their teeth enviously. Some pages from history demolish the best
right-wing polemics.
One triumph of the Reaganite disinformation campaign is that being
"for government" enjoys all the public cache of root canals.
Even the Democrats have been cowed. No one champions public service
anymore. This is hardly an appeal for government-of-a-million-paper-cuts
or the stultifying omnipresence of a Big Brother involved in all
things great and small. The Orwellian objections to Big Government
are certainly valid and may yet come to pass. Yes, government-led
fascism is something to be feared. But corporate fascism, with a
quiescent government in tow, is every bit as oppressive. And it's
what we have now.
Rather, this is a tribute to the grand gesture, the noble human
endeavor of monumental scale. It is the recognition that government,
when allowed to think big, can tackle truly Big Things. Today's
government is overrun by small men with small ideas, custodians
of narrow private interests, who are bought and paid for with private
dollars. From these men, any pretense towards public service, in
the time-honored sense of that calling, is a smokescreen for something
decidedly less seemly. Follow the money trail to chart the animating
principle of their public fervors.
Like Dresden after the war, the Big Easy is a big need awaiting
a grand gesture. In a prior time, Marshall and Eisenhower would
have seized the moment. As it is, the city awaits a public sector
largesse and commitment that may belong to a bygone era. One wonders
whether the city suffers further disadvantage since it beckons from
within. Power, particularly in its current permutation, insists
on staring outward, in search of fresh new axes of evil. Because
New Orleans is in America, it's like a discarded lover, long
since conquered, seduced and subdued. FEMA would do well to take
a lesson from Hezbollah who wasted no time distributing charity
at home.
Instead, our leaders appear bored at the prospect of swabbing the
decks of the Big Easy. After all, New Orleans is a national embarrassment
in which no vainglorious war-hawk wishes to be caught dead. The
photo ops are horrible. These guys live to exude power; not wade,
ankle-deep, in muck and pathos.
So that's where we are. Short of blowing things up, it's
impolitic today to be seen exhibiting much proficiency in government.
As J. Edgar Hoover might opine, a too-hearty appetite for public
service has the smell of communism or worse, flagrant homosexuality.
George Marshall was as brilliant and committed in peace as he was
in war; from Army Chief of Staff during WWII to Secretary of State
in his "second career" as diplomat. Reagan's heirs,
by contrast, must always be seen to be bristling under their public
mantles. After all, they inhabit a role they're ideologically
on record as detesting. Service? We came to town for power.
In order to retain power, we must dismantle service. That is
the weird two-step the Republicans dance to time and again. They
are the great dismantlers, the barbarians within the gates. Pure
poison to the notion of honorable governance, they find the term
itself an oxymoron.
If character is forbearance, few of us can claim the character
of an Eisenhower. Weary veteran of the inglorious realities of war,
Ike knew instinctively that a myriad of terrible toys stored up
in a Pentagon warehouse was an accident waiting to happen. Some
loopy cowboy was someday bound to stumble into hand's reach
of the red phone.
The high art of bloodless posturing and symbolic 'shows of force,'
really what a superpower does best, would eventually overwhelm a
smaller man's sense of inadequacy. An escalation into very
big bangs was practically ensured; bangs the country might not recover
from. For an untested male, the inevitable use of force can be like
the first law of testosterone, as immutable as physics itself. Let's
try this stuff out! There isn't a weapon that's
never been used. President Eisenhower had nothing to prove. Bush,
by fifty, had little to show. So the gun just went off in his hand.
Think of the classroom bully (often the covert classroom coward)
who must wear a halo for the school play. He does so only because
his parents promise him a new bike if he plays nice. That's what
public service has become in the hands of the Reaganites. Their
namesake played an unconscionable role in the assault on public
service. Surely Eisenhower, a warrior of deeds, would have seen
Reagan and his ilk coming. Judging from the cautionary tone of Ike's
last presidential speech, perhaps he did.
There is plenty of blame to go around; Reagan for hoodwinking us,
GE for incubating his glibness. But most of all, the shame is ours
for ignoring the innumerable examples that contradicted the Gipper's
shallow diatribes.
This then has been a tribute to the manifold blessings of good
government which, in the final analysis, can only be underwritten
by a decent people. May history grant us the good fortune to enjoy
good governance again. Until then, the Big Easy waits in an uneasy
shambles.
Bibliography
Military-Industrial Complex Speech, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961,
Public Papers of the Presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960, p.
1035-1040
Truman, McCullough, David; Simon & Schuster; Reprint
edition (June 14, 1993)
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