I've thought for a long time that the closest historical parallel to the current economic and political perplexities in the U.S. is the situation the U.S.S.R. faced shortly before its demise in the early 1990's. As the Soviet Union did, we have a central government that is in many ways an unimaginative gerontocracy (particularly in the Senate), and which is almost completely unresponsive to the everyday problems of American citizens. The Soviet Union had its favored oligarchs and Party members, and we have our favored corporations and the revolving door between Washington D.C. and the influence peddlers who control national policy. Our press is nominally free, but there is a Pravda-like conformity of the Big Media to certain agreed story lines for any given issue. Most recently, for example, we saw the nomination of Tom Daschle to run Health & Human Services go crashing down in flames; what we mostly heard about were his lapses in "optics;" he was a little too obvious about being a pampered lobbyist and didn't pay attention to the tax implications of riding around in a limo all the time on a fat cat's dime. What was less discussed was that this was the guy Obama chose to revamp the creaking, disintegrating health care "system" in the United States, this former Senator who had grown enormously rich by working for Big Pharma and medical insurers since John Thune did him the favor of retiring him from the Senate. Tom Daschle was going to put an end to the outrages which Michael Moore lacerated in "Sick-O?" Look, I've got some shovel-ready infrastructure called the Brooklyn Bridge I'd like to sell you for $10 billion, financing available from the government.
I don't think President O likes the analogy between his situation and Gorby's, but it may be apt just the same, so much so that Google Images even has a picture of Barry with a port wine birthmark ready to go, as above. Mikhail became the West's favorite Commie of all time, to the point where you forgot, almost, that he was a Red. Gorbymania swept the world, in fact. The Soviets had glasnost and perestroika, and Barack has "change." "Change" was never quite defined in Obama's campaign, but we welcomed him, first and foremost, because whoever was elected would not be Bush anymore. We weren't asking a lot of tough questions, especially since he was running against another Angry Old Man from the Senate with antiquated ideas, a shaky grasp on contemporary America and a sort of omni-directional aggressiveness.
It wasn't Gorby's idea to break the Soviet Union apart. Garry Kasparov, former chess genius and current Russian activist, never saw Gorbachev as anything more than another Central Committee apparatchik with charm and a new line of baloney. It's not Barack Obama's intention to preside over the disintegration of the United States, either. That's why his first instinct was to gather around him, like defensive ramparts, the stolid, time-tested Clinton Politburo to advise him on how to light a fire under the U.S.A.'s previous go-go consumer economy.
In the living quarters of the White House, Barack must have a dart board with Bush's face as the target because I can't imagine how dismal it must feel for Obama to spend the first three weeks of his glorious ascension dealing with something so soul-killing boring as this "stimulus" "package." This is what it's come to, thanks to decades of neglect while the U.S.S.A. rotted from the inside out. Obama is presiding over a loan app. He needs to re-fi the United States, so first he has to pull together a business plan for his creditors in Beijing and Tokyo and Riyadh to pore over. ("$27 billion for highways? Too much. Knock that down.") The bowdlerized, diluted, universally-viewed-as-useless piece of dreck the Ancient Mariners in the Senate came up with will (a) increase the national debt enormously while (b) maybe delaying the inevitable for a little while.
I read in Paul Krugman today that without the stimulus bill the U.S. GDP would contract about $2.9 trillion over the next three years, to which one might say, first: and your point is? That is less than $1 trillion per year, or about 1/15th of the present American GDP, which is 25% of the world's GDP. So about 6.67% contraction per year. Not to be flippant or hard-hearted about this, but we can't abide that? We don't have the internal resources, the innovative spirit and adaptability, to figure out how to arrange things differently so we can have an envirnomentally-sustainable economy? We have to go back to that ruinous "growth" economy because there are no other options, or we're too impatient to figure out what they are? We prefer the reckless alternative of going broke trying to defib the corpse of the American consumer economy?
That stimulus bill just looks awful. Note how they starve, as always, mass transit and my own hobby horse, inter-city high speed rail. We never do anything fun. Government spending aimed at certain high-tech innovations (such as solar and wind energy, desalination, and the aforementioned choo-choo) would get us somewhere and create a lot of jobs. But not business tax cuts. Not more freeways and offramps.
Congress just can't do it, anymore than the Politburo or the Presidium or the Central Committe could do it, past a certain point of collapse. Congress is locked into certain failure modes it cannot escape. Maybe some people are born Gorbymaniacs (that would be Mikhail himself), others achieve Gorbymania and some have Gorbymania thrust upon them. I think O may fall into this last category.
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