The day the earth stood still
Tom Engelhardt writes a sobering essay on what lies ahead for us, on this day when it would seem the earth stood still.
He starts by taking seriously an offhand account George Bush gave recently, of what his economic advisors have actually been telling him.
George Bush:
The question facing a President is not when the problem started, but what did you do about it when you recognized the problem. And I readily concede I chunked aside some of my free market principles when I was told by [my] chief economic advisors that the situation we were facing could be worse than the Great Depression.
Englehardt goes on to ask if the apparatus of U.S. government is really in shape to handle the sorts of programs that Obama campaigned on and reiterated in his speech today.
Tom Engelhardt:
But what if the federal government slated to organize, channel, and oversee that spending is itself thoroughly demoralized and broken? What then? […] Who knows what condition the eviscerated Environmental Protection Agency is in, or the Housing Department, or the Interior Department, or the Treasury Department, or the Energy Department after these years of thoroughgoing politicization in which all those crony capitalist pals of the Bush administration and all those industry lobbyist foxes were let loose among the federal chickens meant to oversee them?
Good questions.
Meanwhile the hawks and wolves are already circling, and adding their hatred to the mix — e.g., in comments on the otherwise quite benign FiveThirtyEight.com site. (No slur intended on actual hawks and wolves, of course.)
The press release giving the content of Bush’s last press conference, by the way, is no longer available at the spiffy new whitehouse.gov.
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