The Forbidden Forest

In North Carolina last week, Bill Clinton made the Democrats swoon and long for the good old days when the economy hummed and the federal budget boasted a surplus, and the most pressing national question was whether or not Clinton lied about an Oval Office dalliance with an intern.

The passage of years hasn’t diminished Clinton’s silver tongue and down home charm – he can still cast a spell on an audience, make them forget history, believe in fairy tales.  

My wife watched Clinton’s speech at the Democratic National Convention; I listened from another part of the house. While appreciative of Bubba’s oratorical flair, I couldn’t forget the inconvenient truth that it was “New Democrat” Bill Clinton who supported the North American Free Trade Agreement, ended “welfare as we know it,” signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act and dismantled the Glass-Steagall act, effectively eliminating the firewall between investment and commercial banking and ushering in an era of reckless and unaccountable financial deregulation that would culminate less than a decade later in an economic nosedive nearly as severe as the Great Depression of the 1930’s.

Clinton planted the seeds and George W. Bush nurtured them, and now, twelve years on, ordinary people who work for their living find themselves standing outside a forbidden forest, surrounded by high fences topped with razor wire and No Trespassing, Keep Out signs posted every ten yards. Trespassers Beware. On the far side of the forest a better future awaits, but only a select few understand the ways of the forest and know a path through it.

Alchemy happens inside this forest: the wealthy get wealthier and while their influence and power grows, their accountability to their fellow citizens diminishes. Having paid handsomely for laws written in their favor, they have nothing to fear from government regulators or the legal system or the masses. They are untouchable, free to wheel, deal, scheme and steal, to force the sale of assets once owned in common at a profit, and to measure every social function or service by the price a rigged market deems it to be worth.

Life is grand on the far side of the forbidden forest.

The night after Bill Clinton energized the faithful, Barack Obama promised to lead us all to this nirvana if we only close ranks behind him and strive together. Though not as spell-binding an orator as Clinton, Obama is no slouch before the teleprompter, and his call for unity and patience and faith was momentarily appealing – like the Obama of 2008 – except when Truth reared its head and those with functioning memories remembered that this is the same Barack Obama who forsook the desires of the people who worked so hard to elect him, the people he now needs in order to defeat his rival and retain his crown.

This is the same Barack Obama who tosses his towel at the first sign of resistance from the GOP; the Obama who supported – and continues to support -- deficit reduction hysteria at a time when more government spending is needed to jump start the economy; the Obama who expanded the surveillance state; the Obama who unleashed Drone warfare; the Obama who has done precious little about climate change – the most serious issue facing the planet; the Obama who let criminal bankers off the hook; the Obama with nothing to say about the War on Drugs or the startling number of Americans incarcerated in federal or state prisons.

As it seems to every four years, the choice facing voters boils down to one between bad and worse, between the lesser of two evils, between two equally absurd and fantastic fables. The rhetorical question – are you better off now than you were four years ago -- is a false one, because on any number of fronts we are worse off, and not only because of Barack Obama. When one party in a two party system dedicates itself to negation on rigid ideological grounds, progress is impossible.