Views » November 14, 2008 » Web Only

Knowing When To Walk Away

By David Sirota

It wouldn’t be the George W. Bush we all know if our shamed president didn’t spend his remaining White House days in a final fit of polarization.

That’s what Bush’s moves this week are clearly about: dividing — not uniting. The New York Times reported that during his first meeting with Barack Obama, the outgoing president suggested he might support Democrats’ economic stimulus package and aid to struggling automakers if party leaders “drop their opposition to a free-trade agreement with Colombia.” While Bush later denied an overt quid pro quo, one was obviously implied.

Strange behavior? Yes and no.

Bush is the Texas Hold ‘Em addict who raised on the largest tax cuts in contemporary history, re-raised on two wars and went all-in with an attempt to privatize Social Security. So yes, from a brinkmanship standpoint, it seems bizarre that in exchange for a massive legislative effort to right the entire economy, the cowboy president may insist on a tiny trade deal that — at best — promises a boost of “less than seven-hundredths of one percent to U.S. gross domestic product,” according to the Brookings Institution.

But, then, Bush is the protege of Karl Rove and the son of George H. W. Bush. So no, his Colombia demand isn’t weird at all — nor is it as small a wager as it appears.

Bush understands what happened in 1993 when his father left an almost-finished North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the lap of Bill Clinton’s incoming administration. He knows that business interests subsequently pressured Clinton into joining with Republicans to pass the pact over his own party’s opposition. His Rove-trained mind gets what The Nation’s John Nichols reported: that the payout came with a 1994 election whose NAFTA taint delivered “a dramatic drop in turnout among members of union households,” decreased “Democratic support in traditional areas of strength” — and thus birthed the Republican Congress.

Bush wants to replicate this Three Card Monte — and the Colombia trade pact is his ace in the hole.

The deal would reward a right-wing Colombian regime under investigation for links to paramilitary gangs, drug cartels and anti-union brutality. Like NAFTA, it includes few labor protections, meaning it will enrich Bush’s corporate donors by forcing Americans into a wage-cutting competition with low-paid foreign workers. And, most important to Bush’s legacy, the pact could bust Democrats before they ever have a chance to unify.

NAFTA proved that trade is the most divisive issue inside the Democratic Party. On one side is the party’s Wall Street wing that supports free trade. On the other side is its progressive wing that wants our trade policies reformed. Lately, the latter has increased its clout. As globalization became a major campaign theme in the last two elections, the watchdog group Public Citizen reports that free trade critics replaced free trade proponents in 69 House and Senate races. These new populists, along with Democrats’ more senior progressive incumbents, comprise a powerful new voting bloc promising to reject deals like the Colombia agreement and protect labor and human rights.

Therefore, if Bush successfully uses the economic emergency to hustle a faction of Wall Street Democrats into supporting the deal, he will have potentially engineered a 1994 redux: Democratic infighting, a demoralized progressive base, and these newly elected fair-trade Democrats humiliated — and thus electorally endangered — by their own party standard-bearers.

Certainly, with the president betting the economy on the Colombia deal, this is a difficult, high-stakes situation for Obama. But amid all the conflicting opinions he’s hearing, he has the sound advice of country music’s great political sage Kenny Rogers, who counsels that gambling greatness means knowing “when to walk away.”

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• Reader Comments

  Thanks Brother!

  BusshRoveCheneyCo (a mythical yet all too real polycephalic monster) are taking advantage of the huge potential for fraud in between what we believe our government is for, and what they’re willing to do.  That’s the potential energy store of the Big Lie.

  IMO, busRoveCheneyCo are feudalists, not democratic republicans. it’s the ideology! Focusing only on the external arrangement of things is reminiscent of choosing the “nature” side in the old ‘nature vs. nurture’ false choice dilemma.

  Whence come economics? “Are we forgetting our Joseph Campbell?” asked the immortal Dr. Joel Fleischman of Northern Exposure.

  I’ve read that some Wall Street CEOs get $35K an hour. How can one person possibly add that much value to the world every hour?

  Obviously, it’s not about human values, only about how much energy you can sequester, as measured in dollars. The term I was taught for this is “social Darwinism.” Greenspan’s ideology, his religious belief in the infallibility of mythical free markets, has delivered us into this Waste Land.

  http://www.hightowerlowdown.org/node/1801
  “Why was Greenspan so insistent on no regulation? Because he is the hardest of hardcore laissez-faire ideologues, holding a blazing disdain for government. An avowed worshiper of libertarian novelist Ayn Rand, he views public oversight of business as an evil force that deters the creativity of smart elites. ...”

  Until we experience a collective epiphany (that we are beings, not machines) and start acting like the divine vessels of the divine flow that we are, I see us wandering in this Waste Land forever.

  The power of myth is that it shapes the cosmos in which we enact the theater of life. Acting within the same mythos that intended the Newtonian cosmos that grew the social Darwinian psychos who drove us into this catastrophe won’t get us any nearer to the Promised Land.

  Cosmogenesis is Joseph Campbell’s phrase for “making s#1^ happen.” Our intentions materialize our realities, just as my intentions are materializing these words.  Into the inchoate ocean of my intentions, I am dipping these words like cups; over to you, I’m passing them; as you pass your eyes over them, they self-empty into *your* ocean of inchoate intentions, like rain falling back into the body of water from which it first arose.

  Without their ever being spoken aloud, o reader my Reader, you now hear them within you.  Explain THIS with reductive mechanism! ;-}

  Propagandists use words in only a mechanical fashion, shooting message pellets with the violent intention of forcing changes in behavior in the direction they dictate.

  Compare the Pentagon’s Message Force Multiplier Program to deploying snipers: Hide intentions; shoot mouths off; and kill just as directly as pulling a trigger, dropping a bomb or launching a rocket-propelled grenade. Or is “command responsibility” no longer operative?

  Feudalism, I’m saying, has replaced democratic republicanism.

  “Feudalism in this sense is… based on the relation between lords and the peasants who worked their own land and that of the lord. The peasants owed labour service to the lords, who provided military protection and also had extensive police, judicial, and other rights over the peasants. In this view, feudalism came to encompass all aspects of social organization and was characterized as a system that was both oppressive and hierarchical.” [Source: Encyclopedia Britannica, Standard Edition. Chicago: 2008.]

  It’s all about conversion of our Common Weal into private property in the context of a holy war, aka privatizing the profits while socializing the costs.  Many of our fellow Americans still can’t believe it. (We’re making progress though, eh? Thanks in large part to efforts such as yours and *In These Times* I hasten to add.)

  The war on terrorism, and it’s engine, the mythical free market, are today what the Crusades were during Medieval Europe: a perpetual motion holy war cash machine.

  Posted by knowbuddhau on Nov 14, 2008 at 1:54 PM

  For the past three years or so I have believed fully that there would be a political reckoning given two major factors: history’s normal course of pendulum-like political correction and a majority of American’s essential spirit of change, hope and rejection of fear-based politics.

  The biggest fear for me—outside of massive voter fraud tactics coupled with partisan, privatized and non-transparent computer software gaming—was and is to a degree what Democrats we end up with.

  As you all know to some extent there is the Democratic party of big business, lobbyists, entrenched power and top-down “poweirchy”.  And then there is the more progressive and grassroots’ segment.  On the later this is perhaps the most democratic yet revolutionary phenomenon that I have ever seen in contemporary politics. 

  Fundamentally, it was Obamas grassroots’ Internet campaign contributions that helped swing me firmly in his direction, especially in contrast to the Clintons. 

  But as Mr. Sirota makes plain in a number of ways for a number of years, any ingratiation must be seriously considered.  I was happy to hear Obama use two important words recently as it relates to the selection process of his cabinet.  He said “deliberate haste”.

  I hope he really means this.  I especially hope that while I do believe it makes sense to reach out to the other side in consideration of cabinet positions to people like Chuck Hagel—on Iraq singularly—he should be even more deliberate and just as “hasty” when determining what faction of the new and promising Democratic Party members that he chooses to factor in.  Obviously, the more progressive the better. 

  —Because as Sirota clearly establishes the biggest fear we may share is rooted in the idea that Obama’s mandate is more a justification for a shared group of Poweirchy Dems than one for those of us inspired by our very own voices again.

  Posted by southern progress on Nov 17, 2008 at 6:41 PM

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