A Political War Betwen Two Armies of Parasites

By CHRIS POWELL

It is hardly news that politics can be discouraging. Indeed, almost 100 years ago America’s premier cynic, Ambrose Bierce, found politics so phony that his Devil’s Dictionary defined it as "a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles; the conduct of public affairs for private advantage."

But even many realistic people see in the current campaign and the nation’s stark division the worst hatefulness, mockery and smugness ever - a clash of armies of parasites freed of all decency and restraint, clawing for their turf as the country crumbles under them.

The war in Iraq is an issue, but not really the issue it should be, since the Democratic nominee for president, Sen. John Kerry, is stuck straddling it - his position being that the war was a catastrophic mistake, for which he voted and would vote again; that President Bush didn’t send enough troops to Iraq; and that the country should persist in the mistake and get its allies to commit their troops to it, as if there were any chance that they would.

Bush, the perpetrator-in-chief, asks the compelling question, the very question Kerry asked in 1971 when he returned from service in the equally ill-conceived war in Vietnam: How could Kerry, as president, ask anyone to be the last to die for a mistake?

Meanwhile, the president’s rationale for asking anyone to be the first to die - that Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq was about to destroy the world with "weapons of mass destruction" - has disintegrated in disgrace and morphed into a crusade to teach democracy to a culture that has never shown any desire for it - a culture that, indeed, violently resists democracy at every opportunity. It would be more productive to try to teach cats to fly, and a lot safer.

But maybe even the war shouldn’t be the biggest issue. Some Republican members of Congress already talk of the danger of another Vietnam, and expect any second Bush administration to extricate itself quickly. And whether the United States stays in Iraq or goes, our country will remain fantastically bankrupt, unable to come even close to meeting the statutory and policy obligations it has set for itself.

That was the message of a remarkable report the other day by Carolyn Lochhead, in The San Francisco Chronicle - a report that is prompting similar reports by other newspapers that may be tired of the irrelevance of the presidential campaign. The Chronicle reported that government and private analysts alike place the government’s "fiscal gap" - the difference between all future receipts and all future obligations - at $40 trillion to $72 trillion.

The Chronicle noted that a study commissioned by former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill concluded that the gap could be closed only by - immediately and forever - doubling the payroll tax to 32 percent, raising income taxes by two-thirds, reducing Social Security and Medicare benefits by nearly half, or eliminating nearly all the federal government’s functions, including the military function, apart from transfer payments to the elderly.

That is, the president and members of Congress - who at election time pose as omnipotent dispensers of everything good and as opponents of taxing to pay for it _ are cowards. There are no real efforts or difficult choices behind their beneficence; they are merely passing the burden of their beneficence along to the unborn and putting the country into fantastic debt to foreign countries, such as China and Japan, which are buying U.S.-government debt obligations and financing the American lifestyle.

This debt will fall on future generations of Americans, who will never have benefited from it or even gotten a chance to vote on it.

Holding nearly half the debt of the United States, those foreign countries - not Americans - now control America’s destiny. It is just a matter of when those countries will have had enough of letting the United States claim 80 percent of the world’s savings - of letting Americans think that the world owes them a living. This is a dream world.

The real world may soon signify otherwise by coming up with an alternative to the dollar as an international currency, such as the euro or even gold. That may mean a sharp devaluation of the dollar, a spike in U.S. interest rates, vast inflation, and a decline in U.S. living standards as severe as that of the Depression.

This catastrophic debt and the impossibility of repaying it mock everything the presidential candidates talk about - yet it is the one thing that has not crossed their lips. And so America is left to choose only between the interest groups behind the candidates.

That is, it seems to be time to take the country back from the big corporations and the Religious Right - and turn it over to the teacher unions and the trial lawyers.

Chris Powell, a frequent contributor, is managing editor of The (Manchester, Conn.) Journal Inquirer.

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