McCain and Alaska's Toxic Termagant
by
John Maxwell
This article originally appeared in the Jamaica Observer.
"The
Republicans are intent on blaming the victims for the mortgage meltdown."
Crackle! pop! snap!
I'm not talking about cereal. That
would be snap, crackle, pop. Everybody knows that.
Crackle! pop! Snap!
Watching John McCain in action
reminds me of Tom Paxton's Sixties song about the marvelous toy that
"...went ‘Zip' when it moved,
And "Pop" when it stopped,
And, "Whirrr" when it
stood still.
I never knew just what it was
And I guess I never will."
Coupling McCain with Alaska's toxic termagant
presents a fairly terrifying vision for the rest of the world. It's a far way
from John Kennedy's promise four decades ago that the US would be a friend
of people seeking freedom, a friend to
the poor and weak. McCain and Palin present a fundamentalist and revanchist
face to the world, promising an even rougher ride than George Bush as the
Haitians are already aware.
As I said eight years ago, when the
United States elects a president they are also electing a kind of chief
spokesman for much of a world with aspirations light years away from the
parochial vision of civilization imagined by Bush, Cheney, McCain and Palin.
For the rest of us, the US president we hope will be a singer-man for the
world, one who embodies, expresses and guarantees the deepest aspirations of
people for liberty and dignity. That it is why an English worldwide poll has
found that the world wants Obama to win. The preference is almost 100%
across countries as disparate as Norway and Saudi Arabia.
Almost all the public opinion
surveys conducted in the US over the past few weeks show the Republican ticket
steadily losing ground to the Democrats, Obama and Biden. One website is
devoted entirely to analyzing electoral
polling by all the reputable pollsters. According to FiveThirtyEight.com, the odds on
Obama being the next president were better than 90% as of this last week, and their projection was that he would
win nearly 350 electoral votes with at least
52% of the popular vote.
"An
English worldwide poll has found that the world wants Obama to win."
In elections for the Senate the
projection was that the Democrats would win at least 56 seats - not filibuster
proof but close, with the probability
of an overwhelming majority in the House of Representatives.
Major reasons for these perceptions
are the toxic unpopularity of President George Bush whose approval rating is
now below Nixon's just prior to his resignation, the feeling that the US is on
the wrong track (more than 80%) and the catastrophic declines in employment,
living standards and economic security.
Adele Polk, a 90-year-old woman in
Akron, Ohio, shot herself twice in the chest when sheriff's deputies came to
evict her from the house she and her late husband had called home for decades.
Mrs. Polk's mortgage has now been forgiven while she is being treated in
hospital and is expected to recover.
The bankers and financiers are now
among the best hated people in the United States. One sign displayed on Wall
Street a few days ago exhorted the
occupants of the office blocks to "JUMP YOU F**KERS."
Popular opinion is turning savagely
against the people FDR called "malefactors of great wealth" - the saboteurs of the American dream,
con-men whose Ponzi schemes hollowed out the productive center of American
capitalism until the very people they had defrauded were being asked to come to
their rescue, because they were "too big to be allowed to fail" and no one but
the taxpayer had the resources to save them. The bailout means the US taxpayer
will end up owning huge segments of the financial industry. Will they want to
give it back?
In
Illinois' Cook County - effectively,
Chicago - the elected Sheriff has
decided that his officers will no longer carry out evictions unless he is
guaranteed by the mortgage companies that the people he evicts actually owe
money on the houses they inhabit. Sheriff Thomas Dart says his officers have
been evicting tenants from rented houses, people who have paid their rents to
owners who have defaulted. He doesn't think that's fair.
"George Bush's approval rating is now below Nixon's just
prior to his resignation."
All over the US resentment is rising
against the injustice of it all, while the Republicans are intent on blaming
the victims for the mortgage meltdown. According to the GOP orthodoxy, it was
the Democrats in Congress and the federally backed mortgage wholesalers who
were responsible along with the poor people who borrowed to buy houses they
couldn't afford.
What really happened is that the
Democrats did exert pressure on mortgage companies to lend to minorities and
others traditionally segregated outside the mortgage market. The companies
responded by inventing mortgages which seemed affordable, but which rapidly
morphed out of the reach of working class and middle class borrowers who had
not read the fine print on their contracts. It was a scam and a highly
profitable one which might have worked longer had it not been so all pervasive
that it collapsed of its own over-reach. It extracted billions in savings from
the poorest layer of Americans and financed the ability of the scammers to
speculate on the basis of "securities" with values notional at best and
fictitious at worst.
As in all Ponzi schemes, the crunch
had to come when the scam ran out of "greater fools." While the black and
Hispanic communities knew they were in trouble two and three years ago, their
predators remained blissfully unaware, wheeling and dealing as if there would
never be a reckoning.
Now,
even John McCain realizes that no matter how much he and his cohorts have
blamed the working class borrowers, it is important to help them out of
trouble. This is one more flip-flop of McCain, who has been boasting about his
reformist record, even while his real history is of a serial deregulator, a rule smasher, whose fondest
ideals have been for freeing up everything in the interest of the unrestricted
market - a man who never met a rule he approved of.
Now,
faced with the increasing disapproval of the US electorate it doesn't seem that
even the best efforts of Republican bureaucrats will be able to sabotage the
election to the extent where it can be stolen as were the last two. The disapproval is too wide, too deep.
Today, polls show Obama preferred as being a better likely leader, a more
compassionate leader and a more able president. McCain is still preferred as a
warrior who could prosecute the Iraq war, but since most Americans don't want
to be in Iraq that advantage is nothing compared to the feeling that Obama can
best get Americans out of their economic troubles.
John Maxwell a veteran
Jamaican journalist. He has covered Caribbean affairs for more than 40 years
and is currently a columnist for The Jamaica Observer. He can be contacted at jankunnu@gmail.com
Copyright©2008
John Maxwell
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