Left Face! About Face! Right Face!--Think!

My dad read “Time”. My maternal aunt, who didn’t get along with him terribly well, began a subscription to “Newsweek” the year I was born. Both are dead, but I’ve maintained the 1939 subscription to “Newsweek”. You have to read “Newsweek”, I am told. It’s one of the chief opinion makers in the United States.
So I read it. After all, how else could I know what to think? Or, more to the point, how else could I know what I am supposed to think? This week’s issue had an interesting array of stories. After reading them, I really don’t know what to think. So I’ll pass a few of them on to you.
First, there’s the cover. It’s a take-off on a World War I British recruiting poster that we used in World War II. A grim visaged Uncle Sam points at the reader, saying, “I WANT YOU—to start spending!” Below this, in much smaller type it says, “Invest in America – Before it’s too late”.
What stands out is, “Start Spending”. As I recall that was exactly what President Bush asked of America after Nine-one-one and the Tech bubble burst of 2001. Start Spending! (Different man, same policy?) We’re a nation of spendaholics. Is it really best for a reformed alcoholic that he go back into the bar and have another drink? “Before it’s too late”?
I showed this cover to several people. They shook their heads in disbelief. (On page 10 there’s short squib telling us that it’s back to the Cold War between us and the Chinese Navy off China’s coast. The White House says they are “militarily more aggressive”. Aren’t these the people we’ve invested so much in—and we’re depending on to fund our bailout plans?)
The cover story starts on page 27. “STOP SAVING NOW!” the headline takes up half the page. “This new age of thrift is understandable. But for a recovery to take hold, Americans will need to start taking risks again.” The article admits that, most of the risk taking during the past few years was bad.
It was, says “Newsweek”, “simply debt layered on top of debt for the purpose of generating fees and trading profits.” My credit card issuers and the AIG executives don’t seem to have gotten past that state of mind yet. Isn’t it dangerously early to pour more booze down the throats of people who haven’t recovered from their last decade long toot?
But who am I and who are the people I showed this magazine to? What do we know? On page 30, there’s an article on four ways Obama might react to the banking crisis. The thrust of the article is that the big banks MUST be saved. Not to rescue them, we are assured, is just “not smart”.
Who’s really writing this article? A banker? (Jonathan Alter is listed.) They screw up big time; we (that’s you and me) bail them out without undue injury or pain—what’s to stop them from going ahead and “taking risks”, as “Newsweek” advises, and screwing up again so that we can rescue them again?
We took the paddle out of school, and now we’re taking it out of banking and investing. Is this called “No Bank Left Behind?” Is this really like school—the only way we can punish a naughty bank is to send it home for a few days and make it watch TV and play video games?
The only people who’ve been punished so far are stockholders, employees at the layoff level, and suckers who believed an IRA was as good as a guaranteed pension. We’re telling those folks to start taking risks again? With what’s left?
(Has anyone considered Madison’s idea of a National Bank? To replace the others as they collapse? The Fed is already there. Madison’s other idea—something he wrote, the Constitution—worked out pretty well. “Newsweek” doesn’t mention his idea.)
On page 36, an article brings us the encouraging thought that Mexican drug cartel violence is reaching deep into this country. There’s an apparently honest citizen in Phoenix who has been sleeping with two machine guns under his bed for two years. If I lived next door, that would not comfort me.
The next article tells us that fleeing Afghans have brought “Jahid chic” to the Arabic slums of London. One twenty-five year old immigrant is quoted as saying, “The West is destroying the spirit, soul and values of Islam. Muslims should avoid contact with and coming to the West.” Another wonders how immigrants “can wear western clothes, dance and drink, … and see the Taliban as their heroes.”
A column on page 43 tells us that the 9/11 Commission report was based almost entirely on testimony by victims of torture. On page 46, we are told that Kurdistan—long considered the most stable and pro-western part of Iraq—has now gone to blazes, riven with sectarian violence. (One end of the teeter totter goes up; the other goes down.)
A column on page 48 concludes that there is no possible way all the existing green technologies can possibly meet our energy needs. “Hence the need for Nobel-caliber discoveries.” “We need breakthroughs … [but] we are spending only a fifth on energy research that we spent in the 1970s and 1980s.”
After we save all the big banks, get people spending and taking risks again—our troubles still won’t be over. Not by a long shot. Now I know what I SHOULD think. Let me sit down and figure out what I actually DO think.
One thing I wonder: do they really have a clue in Washington? A White House aide (Axelrod) was quoted yesterday as sneering that the American people really aren’t sitting around their kitchen tables and giving any thought to AIG bonuses (after billions in bailout money).
We know HE doesn’t have a clue.