October Surprises

by Alexander Cockburn

• A lockout at every port on the West Coast, with the owners begging George Bush to help them break the Longshoremen's union (ILWU) by imposing a cooling-off period under Taft Hartley and threatening to bring in the armed forces to work the ports.

  Meanwhile, Bush's Homeland Security bill is on life-support because many Democrats have stigmatized it as a savage assault on labor's ability to organize in the federal sector.

• A white-lipped economy. In the second quarter alone, pension wealth fell by over $469 billion or 5.3 percent. House prices cushioned the blow a little but still left a net decline in wealth of 3.4 percent in one quarter, with its successor shaping up to be just as bad. There are uncertainties over the house price boom, plus rising unemployment. Bears rampage through the market.

  Meanwhile, leading economic indicators and housing starts have fallen for three months in a row. Oil prices are up 40 percent since the start of the year.

  We've now seen seven straight quarters of declining investment on plant and equipment, and a sharp drop of the growth of consumer spending over the past four or five months. There's increasing public awareness that the performance of many of America's mightiest corporate names has been based entirely on fraudulent numbers.

  Last week, federal prosecutors announced that they were opening a criminal probe into Xerox's accounting practices. Xerox stock promptly fell 71 cents to $5.96. WorldCom revealed that it probably misreported $9 billion in revenue, not $7 billion.

  Numbers from the telecommunications sector now lack any credibility, and given the fact that overcapacity in that sector is over 90 percent, the stage is set for total collapse. Not just WorldCom, but Verizon and the others.

  Now move on to financial-service companies that abetted all the fraudulent shenanigans of companies like Enron and WorldCom. Consider their exposure in multi-billion-dollar suits from pension funds that ended up holding the bag.

  The retail industry is having a miserable season, and a shutdown of every port on the West Coast is scarcely going to help.

  The official rate of profit on capital stock in the non-financial corporate sector as a whole is (now) at its lowest level of the postwar period (except for 1980 and 1982).

  If this were Bill Clinton, the commentators would be flaying him alive for wag-the-dog attempts to use war talk as a way to distract attention from economic bad news. Thus far, Bush has remained aloft on his magic carpet, but he's losing altitude steadily while Wall Street chews its lip, foreign denunciations pour in, and the German Social Democrats and Greens exult in the way Bush handed them an entirely unexpected victory with his Iraq bluster.

Probably the nearest thing we have to a senior statesman is that brilliant Democratic politician, Senator Bobby Byrd, whose monuments strew West Virginia.

The only opponent Senator Bobby Byrd of West Virginia has to fear is death itself, so in Congress he speaks with a frankness rivaled only by the Texan libertarian Rep. Ron Paul. Byrd has excelled himself in speeches on the Senate floor.

Byrd denounced Bush's proposed Homeland Security Agency as a ramshackle, hastily conceived outrage to constitutional protections, a way of undercutting the hard rights of federal workers, all in a mission thus far entirely undefined.

In another speech, Byrd gave Bush some derisive whacks on the topic of his warmongering against Iraq: "The president was dropping in the polls, and the domestic situation was such that the administration was appearing to be much like the emperor who had no clothes." Byrd described the coming of "the war fervor, the drums of war, the bugles of war, the clouds of war."

If the economy continues to slide, Bush and his circle will face a truly desperate gamble, trying to figure whether a $200 billion war on Iraq will save them or just plunge them into the mother of all messes. It could just be that the true picture, in Hollywood's idiom, is Bush tied to the track, hollering, "War," as the economy rolls right over him, and then over the cliff.