Three lies

The AIG opportunity

Marc Ambinder writes,

White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel just had to scratch that itch. Speaking for the President and to the New York Times yesterday, he called the contretemps over the AIG news a "distraction" from the "main priority of getting the financial system stabilized." It is worth unpacking these words. Emanuel did not mean to betray an ambivalence about the outrage of the bonuses. Remember: the chief is supposed to be the longest-term thinker in the White House. He knows that the White House either rolls back on its heels, becomes defensive, and yields to the diversion, or Obama uses AIG as an example to catalyze public support for significant regulatory reform.

I read in a number of joints that Rahm's use of the term "distraction" showed an administration that didn't have its talking points together. Ambinder sees it as Emanual understanding that AIG is a tactic, not the focus.

This is more than tough rhetoric: I take this to mean that the administration will use the AIG crisis to take a more active role than it otherwise would have. Wall Street has been waiting for the Treasury Department's plan to mitigate the poison and the credit-market-locking effect of toxic assets held by major banks. The administration's economic commanders would prefer to create public-private partnerships to remove those assets from the books of especially troubled institutions; the government and corporations would share the risks. When Obama says explicitly - "My interest is not protecting the banks," he's scaring that capital away. Why would a hedge fund want to subject itself to the scrutiny that AIG is currently receiving?

One sign that Obama really means this: he called Tim Geithner the hardest-working Treasury Secretary since Alexander Hamilton and is standing by a man who is now thoroughly distrusted by the finance sector of the economy. Make no mistake: you can blame - or credit - CNBC with introducing the notion that, because Geithner doesn't inspire confidence, whatever that means, he might want to think about resigning.

Innerestin'.

You don't need a weatherman...

One of the annoying things about Sarah Palin's (among others) injection of Bill Ayers into the campaign ("pallin' around with terrorists) last year was in fact, Ayers himself. A spectacularly arrogant human being who, if Deborah Soloman's (notoriously unreliable) "interview" is any guide, still not only fails to see the moral risk of blowing shit up, he fails to see the damage the Weathermen's actions did to the anti-war movement as a whole.

How did you feel when Obama publicly disowned you, describing you as a guy in his neighborhood who had committed “despicable acts” when he was 8 years old?
That is not a minority position. I know a lot of people who feel that way, even people on the left.

Right, the Weathermen, which you co-founded, did hurt the antiwar movement by adopting violent tactics and alienating the middle class.
I don’t think that what we did was brilliant. Frankly, I don’t think what anybody did was brilliant.

Do you regret your involvement in setting off explosions in the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol?
Anyone who thinks what we did is despicable should look at the fact that the U.S. government killed three million people in Indochina between 1965 and 1975. That’s really despicable.

So via Yglesias, this brief memoir of the movement, by a fellow WU member, is a refreshing tonic.

By allowing our frustration and revolutionary airs to trump our political common sense, we disowned one of the ’60s-era organizers’ greatest contributions to leftist politics—the revival of what has been termed the “organizing tradition.” This was the tradition, focused on long-term change and bottom-up politics that animated the Civil Rights, Black Freedom, Women’s Liberation and antiwar movements.

This organizing tradition, which the WU abandoned, has a developmental, long-haul perspective and an emphasis on building relationships that endure. It respects collective leadership and holds that the best movement leaders should have ongoing, accountable relations with their bases—the grassroots. Its anti-bureaucratic ethos and preference for connecting issues and organizing around peoples’ everyday lives create an expansive notion of democracy.

This conception of organizing goes beyond mobilizing, disdains vanguardism, requires patience and emphasizes the centrality of building new leadership. The organizing tradition was most fully embodied in the practice of early Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organizers, but also revivified in Women’s Liberation groups and even some SDS chapters.

Out of sheer impatience and an inflated sense of vanguardism, the WU rejected this empowering tradition. Ironically, the WU understood the painstaking work of grassroots organizing as a sign of white privilege. This work required waiting too long while the world was in tumult.

The WU favored more dramatic action that ended up disconnecting the purported leadership from any mass base, leaving it unaccountable (except self-glorifyingly to a nebulous “people of the world”) in its self-defined trajectory. The WU rationalized its practice by attacking any possible base as too privileged, too corrupted by consumerism and imperialism.

Of course, it's easy to look back now and condemn them for their impatience. Yes, the war was raging and would continue for several more years, but the trajectory had changed...Nixon ran as a "peace candidate, after all." Still, the frustration must have been intense, not unlike recent years as the war in Iraq continues against the wishes of the American people. But what the WU and other groups espousing violence did was lend legitimacy to violence and government surveillance against anti-war organizers and to help, along with the non-violent Yippies, fracture the movement. And that's what frustrates me about Bill Ayers and Sarah Palin's successful effort to enshrine him -- he refuses to admit he may just have been wrong. Unlike Ayers, Howard Machtinger grew up.