DEAD PARROT

Number 23 -- Saturday, May 3, 2003

NOW BOARDING FOR THE PLANET OF THE CHIMPS

Bush has a one-track mind, but there are two trains that can run on it. Now that he no longer ceaselessly reiterates "Weapons of Mass Destruction" (and in fact would just as soon avoid the awkward point altogether), it's time to board the other dreary train: "Tax Cuts to Grow Our Economy."

A couple of very strange ideas have recently crept into discussions of the Bush anti-tax campaign. One is that whether or not he succeeds in getting a tax cut enacted, he must pursue it in order to show that he "cares." George H. W. Bush squandered his post-war bounce by appearing indifferent to economic woes at home. George W., so the thinking goes, can avoid the one-termer's fate by enthusiastically embracing a really, really stupid economic idea. As "a leading Republican strategist" told the NY Times (4/17), "What is really crucial is that Bush be perceived as being engaged, that people feel he understands that times are not good, that he is deeply concerned and that he is doing everything in his power to fix it." No matter that few economists outside the American Enterprise Institute and the Club for Growth (see DP #22: "RINO Watch at the Club for Growth") believe that the Bush cut would "fix it." If public perceptions can be satisfied with "tax relief" that lines the pockets of Bush's cronies and contributors, plunges the country into record deficits, and fails (as his previous tax cut did) to create a single job, why quibble about the specifics?

A second peculiar idea in the media's treatment of this story is that Bush has showed a gracious willingness to compromise with his opponents. When he backed off his original demand for $726 billion and allowed that $550 billion would be enough, the Times (4/16) obligingly headlined the move as a "SIGNIFICANT CONCESSION." If I decreed that I would eat an entire pie and then decided that my family could have a quarter of it, I would not expect high marks for conciliatory spirit. $550 billion is too much. The $350 billion that the balky Senate has agreed on is too much. Anything is too much, because the premise that we need another tax cut is wrong.

There's something very primitive about the Republican opposition to taxes. One thinks of Chimp "A" hoarding a pile of sticks and picking out a big one to fend off the covetous-looking Chimp "B." The next step is for "A" to move into a gated community where "B" can't get past the guard house. "A" can then use some of his surplus sticks to fund a think-tank providing ideological justification for the fact that some chimps have many more sticks than others.

Human societies have many needs that cannot be met on an every-chimp-for-himself basis. At their best, human societies have recognized that most wealth is a product of common resources and common endeavors and that it must serve the common good. Taxes are how we harness wealth to that service. None of us likes to write the check--until we remember (most of us) that it will pay for health care and schools and other basic requirements of civilization.

Health care and schools are among the common goods that are seriously threatened today as many states suffer fiscal meltdown for a third straight year. Under current proposals by governors and legislatures, 1.7 million more Americans could lose their medical insurance and many more could have their benefits sharply reduced (Times, 4/28). Hillsboro, Oregon, has already cut its school year by 17 days (Times, 5/1). In Massachusetts, state aid to education may be cut by $150 million (Boston Globe, 4/24) and the oldest public library in America, founded by Benjamin Franklin himself in 1790, must go to the mat for funds with the town of Franklin's police and fire departments. With luck, the library just may be able to stay open one day a week next year (Globe, 4/21).

Republican adviser Grover Norquist has an answer to all this: that reducing services, not creating jobs, is the real PURPOSE of reducing taxes. Lobbying for the first Bush tax cut in 2001, he told NPR's Mara Liasson, "The goal is to cut government in half in 25 years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." When that happens, we can all go live with the chimps.

DP DOES THE NUMBERS

Number of NCAA men's tournament schools whose graduation rate for African-Americans on the basketball team is zero: 13 (Derrick Jackson, Boston Globe, 4/4)

Average African-American graduation rate for all teams in the tournament: 35 per cent

Average cost of meal currently provided by the food stamp program: 91 cents (Times, 4/3)

Projected average cost of meal provided by the food stamp program if House budget cuts go through: 84 cents

Number of cluster bombs dropped by US Air Force during Operation Iraqi Freedom: 1500 (Globe, 5/1)

Number of bomblets in one CBU 87/B cluster bomb: 202 (Ask Jeeves)

Effective blast diameter of a single bomblet: 250-500 feet

Dud rate for bomblets: about 15% (Globe, 5/1)

Approximate number of unexploded bomblets in Iraq: 45,450

Number of detainees from the Afghan war still being held without legal counsel at Guantanamo: 664 (Times, 4/24)

Number of these who are under 16 years old: 3 (Guardian [UK], 4/24)

Number of attempted suicides at the camp: 25

Average salary increase for rank and file workers in US since 1980: 15 percent (NPR, 4/22)

Average salary increase for CEO's since 1980: 600 percent

Cost of "Proud to be An American" figurine expected to be "one of the greatest M. I. Hummel investments of all time": $289.50 (Times [advertisement], 4/25)

Number of weeks (@ 84 cents/meal) that a food stamp recipient would have to go hungry to buy a figurine, assuming he could do so with food stamps: 16

DP REVIEWS

Shortly after Christmas in 1905, former Governor Frank Steunenberg of Idaho swung open his garden gate on the way home from town and was blown to pieces by a dynamite bomb. Investigators soon identified a drifter named Harry Orchard as the culprit, and within a few more days Orchard had made a confession implicating William D. "Big Bill" Haywood and two other officers of the Western Federation of Miners in the planning of the crime. With Republican Senator William Borah leading the prosecution and Clarence Darrow the defense, the Haywood trial in Boise in the summer of 1907 was bound to become one of the most celebrated and far-reaching legal confrontations in the history of the United States.

In Big Trouble (Simon & Schuster, 1997), J. Anthony Lukas recreates the murder, the trial, and their social and political context. Lukas, whose in-depth reporting for his previous book, Common Ground, cast a clear light on the painful twists and turns of Boston school desegregation, has outdone himself here in historical research. Big Trouble is a big book: 754 pages of text plus another 75 of notes and bibliography in very small print. It is also filled with digressions, so that one pauses mid-narrative to learn the history of blacks in the US Army, of detective agencies, of American journalism, of grand hotels, of Walter Johnson's exploits in the Idaho semi-pro league, and of the theatrical touring system that brought Ethel Barrymore to Boise for a night during the trial. Fortunately, these side-trips are so interesting in themselves and so richly suggestive of the era that one never thinks of resenting them.

Though Big Trouble appeared midway through the Clinton years (and its author died by his own hand almost simultaneously with publication), the image it presents of America at the start of the 20th century is weirdly prescient of life under the Bush regime after 9/11/2001.

To begin with, even before Steunenberg opened his gate, "terror" was in the air--a plastic concept that could serve anyone's purposes. For western mine owners it was a convenient stick with which to beat miners who had unionized to win health, unemployment, and death benefits and to improve wages that topped out at $3.50 for a dangerous eight-hour day. (Un-unionized smelters were making $1.80 for 12 hours, seven days a week, and were so poor that they often had to live in tents year round.) Owners used to making unfettered profits in the days before there was an income tax sought to crush the union movement in every possible way, infiltrating it with spies and agents provocateurs, busting its strikes with scabs and outlawing its members with "yellow dog" contracts, buying up legislators and judges wholesale, and, when all else failed, calling for federal troops. Soldiers brought in by Steunenberg to quell a dispute in 1899 confined hundreds of miners in rough bullpens for weeks without charges. The Idaho attorney-general left little doubt about how the land lay: "We have taken the monster by the throat and we are going to choke the life out of it...It is a plain case of the state or the union winning, and we do not propose that the state shall be defeated."

That all the organs of the state stood foursquare for capital (and vice versa) was evident throughout the Haywood case. In fact, despite Borah's categorical denials, funds from the Mine Owners Association heavily financed the prosecution. Moreover, because Haywood and his colleagues could not be legally extradited from Colorado, Pinkerton detective James McParland arranged with Colorado authorities and the Union Pacific Railroad to kidnap them and hustle them to Idaho on a special train. (As Colorado's adjutant general Sherman Bell, who doubled as a mine manager, had said of some union men incarcerated in an earlier incident, "Habeas corpus be damned, we'll give 'em post mortems!") With a single dissenting vote, the US Supreme Court later ruled this vigilante action to be an irreversible fait accompli.

The drama played out in a national climate strikingly similar to today's. Militarism, jingoism, and imperialism were rampant after American conquests in Cuba and the Philippines. There was even a nascent military-sports complex: when 24 college football players were killed during the 1905 season, President Roosevelt opined that "The time given to athletic contests and the injuries incurred on the playing field are part of the price which the English-speaking race has paid for being world conquerors." A supine, sensationalist press echoed the government line and was paid in access. During the feeding frenzy in Boise, AP men consulted the prosecution and its detectives about what to send out on the wire and Governor Frank Gooding arranged exclusive face-time with the government's star witness for sympathetic reporters. And a stampede was on to privatize public resources, with Steunenberg and Borah implicated together in a land scam using bogus front men to buy small parcels from the state and then selling them en masse to timber companies. Borah, who had simply been the lawyer for the scheme, was acquitted and went on to a long career of legislating and philandering in Washington. Steunenberg, who was dead, could not answer the charges. To find out what happened to Haywood, you will have to read Big Trouble.

Incidentally, one feature of American life in 1907 may or may not have its parallel today. In 1907 there was a strong, deep-running current of populism that kept the reactionaries in check and would soon make some substantive gains. When Roosevelt issued a statement that referred to Haywood and socialist leader Eugene Debs as "undesirable citizens" (a phrase tinged with racist contempt for the immigrants who did much of America's hard labor), thousands of people took to the streets wearing buttons that said, "I am an undesirable citizen." Within a few years, US senators had to stand for election (instead of being appointed by state legislatures) and even mine owners had to start paying the income tax. If the demonstrators against war in Iraq have enough staying power, more good things could happen.