Wild West Show

By Lewis H. Lapham

[This article by the editor was published in: Harper’s Magazine, September 2003.]

It is not easy in any given case-indeed it is at times impossible until the courts have spoken-to say whether it is an instance of praiseworthy salesmanship or a penitentiary offense.

- Thorstein Veblen

When President George W. Bush moved into the White House in the winter of 2001, he let it be known that he intended to run the government as if it were a business, and two years later I don’t know who it comes as a surprise that the ten-year federal budget projection has been reduced from a $5.6 trillion surplus to a $4 trillion deficit, or that our splendid little war in Iraq turns out to have been sold to the American public in the manner of a well-promoted but fraudulent stock offering. The man has been true to his word, the corporation of which he deems himself chairman and chief executive officer not unlike the ones formerly owned and operated by his friends, fund-raisers, and fellow bandits at Enron and Arthur Andersen. The administration’s economic and military schemes rely for their success on budget analysts who rig their balance sheets with sham transactions (for African uranium), false data (establishing Saddam Hussein’s connection with Al Qaeda), offshore special-purpose entities (to contain the otherwise invisible weapons of mass destruction).

The acknowledgment in early July of the president’s misstatement about the African uranium prompted the members of Washington’s political theater company to strike strong poses of indignation and dismay, to call for congressional investigations, and to bar the tennis balls of blame around the Sunday talk-show circuit. Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor, told the cameras at FOX News that the suspect information had come from the British government; on NBC’s Meet the Press as well as on ABC’s This Week, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that “it’s not known” what is or was “inaccurate,” and to watch the ministers of state search for ways around the truth was to be reminded of the swarm of thieving corporate executives hustled into courtrooms over the past two years in the hope that they might recall what happened to Global Crossing’s once-upon-a-time $47.6 billion of market value or to the 59,000 employees who used to work for Kmart. Nine times out of ten they met the questions with answers matched in quality to Vice President Dick Cheney’s best guess as to the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden.

Because the Bush Administration’s modus operandi resembles that of a corrupt monopoly (publically owned but privately managed), much of its domestic and foreign policy can be understood in terms of the hidden surcharge and the dishonest annual report. Fraud is another word for freedom, “to make a killing” the highest form of patriotism or praise. Mark up the price of the American military occupation of Iraq from $2 billion to $4 billion a month, or guide WorldCom into the desert of a $9 billion accounting error, and whether it is Donald Rumsfeld or Bernard Ebbens explaining the arithmetic to Tim Russet or a judge, the story follows a by now familiar script-the once trusted brand-name corporation becomes entangled in the nets of perjury and graft, assets worth $100 million depart for points unknown, the stock price falls from $95 to 30 cents a share, the company’s pensioners cast adrift in open boats with a cup of rainwater and a scrap of raw fish. The high-end executives meanwhile cash their stock options at the best possible price, reward their own grand and petty larcenies with severage payments in the amount of $30 million or $40 million, retain the apartment in Paris and the bank account in Zurich, go off to Colorado with the golf clubs and the skis. Transfer the procedure from the private to the public sector and the government fattens the defense budget by sending the soldiers and the tanks out to pasture in Iraq, clears the Pentagon’s inventory of weapons no longer stylish, and distributes the reconstruction contracts to Bechtel, Halliburton, and any other friend of liberty willing to lend a hand with the oil derricks around Baghdad and the balloons at next year’s Republican nominating convention.

The administration’s current taxes law could have been written (possibly was written) by a caucus of fund managers at Merrill Lynch or Goldman Sachs, less a matter of poor policy than of outright theft and solidly grounded on the time-honored principle beloved by generations of Wall Street stock touts-steal from the poor to feed the rich, and if asked to explain the mechanics of the deal, talk about family values. When the president proposed the legislation last February, he said that 92 million Americans would receive an average tax reduction of $1,083. A fine sentiment that Veblen undoubtedly would have recognized as an instance of “praiseworthy salesmanship,” but like the statement about the African uranium, not true and probably better understood as a “penitentiary offense.” For families with incomes of between $30,000 and $40,000 the dividend reduction amounts to $24; in the safer parts of town where the wine comes in a bottle with a cork, John Snow, the secretary of the treasury, receives a refund of $275,000; Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, the sum of $184,000. The high-end campaign contributions meanwhile shop for another beach house in sunny Florida, and President Bush tours the country with a message from the Bible; poses for photographs in front of signs bearing the motto CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY, saying to the newly out-of-work clerks and factory hands assembled in the convention center, “I believe people have taken a step back and asked, What’s important in life? You know, the bottom line, and this corporate America stuff, is that important? Or is serving your neighbor, loving your neighbor like you’d like to be loved yourself?”

Given the transparency of the Bush Administration’s lies, the unctuousness of its voice, and its unilateral contempt for any rule of law-civil, international, moral, or financial-why is it that we don’t make unto the Lor4d a not-so-joyful noise! It’s neither accident nor coincidence that as the stock market over the last two and a half years has lost roughly $6 trillion in value, so also the unemployment rate now stands at its highest level in a decade (6.5 percent), and the current budget deficit of $450 billion at the highest level in the country’s history. We see before us a government fitted to the specifications of not just any corporation (most of which preserve some sense of obligation to the public welfare and the common good) but an especially rapacious corporation more nearly resembling a criminal syndicate, the risk remanded to the uninformed taxpayer instead of to the unwitting investor. Why then the audible silence in the news media and on the part of our nominally democratic politicians, and how does it happen that no crowd armed with lead pipes gathers in the union halls or the streets?

The customary answer comes in the form of a sermon about our all-American faith in a better future and a brighter tomorrow. The servants of the status quo shift the venue of possible complaint from a criminal to a civil jurisdiction, quieting the murmurs of objection with a flood of reassuring cant about the country’s lack of class-consciousness. The American oligarchy doesn’t prey upon the American democracy because in America we have no such thing as an oligarchy. Perish the thought. What we have in this great country is what the Republican propagandists like to call “the Wild West of economics,” the swinging door of a saloon, on the old Arizona frontier, where sudden fortune might come for anybody with a $5 poker chip and a mule. The words to the wise invariably repeat the lesson taught by Norman Rockwell, Walt Disney, and the editors of the Wall Street Journal. A few liberties having been taken with the paraphrase, the standard text reads as follows:

Being American and therefore blessed at birth with the gene of egalitarianism, we don’t envy people richer than ourselves; nor do we labor in the shadow of the false class distinctions that still cloud the mind of Old Europe. If a CEO earns 500 times as much money as one of his secretaries or assembly-line wo4rkers ($15 million as opposed to $30,000 per annum), it doesn’t mean that the CEO is a selfish thug. The suspicion is invidious and French. The nice man owes his good fortune to hard work and his belief in God. We don’t begrudge him his opulent lifestyle (too snooty, not enough time for his neighbors or his pet toad) because we know that soon, probably sooner than anyone thinks, we ourselves will become rich. In the meantime, while waiting for the report from the assay office or the coroner, we are expectant capitalists, devoid of resentment, happy to be living in a land of great abundance and unlimited opportunity. We are Americans, bless our hearts, just folks who would rather be shopping at Wal-Mart than at one of those fancy stores on Madison Avenue or Rodeo Drive, and anybody who wants to talk to us about class conflict or Karl Marx better damned well know that we don’t hold the notion of a society that looks like some sort of English layer cake.

I don’t question the American generosity of spirit and natural gift of forbearance, but I think the Norman Rockwell portrait two or three generations behind the times, and I suspect that President Bush owes his standing in the opinion polls to our equally American inclination to make the criminal and the outlaw figures of romance. Whether cast as the hero or the villain of the tale, the man at ease with violence bends the rules to fit the circumstances, certain that his always noble ends justify his sometimes less than noble means. If we know the game is rigged, we also like to think that the owner of the roulette table loves his mother and looks like Michael Corleone.

President Bush walks the walk that can be imagined as once familiar on the old Chisholm or Santa Fe Trail, entitled to his cocksure swagger by virtue of his having stolen his election to the presidency. The robbers stand on a par with Enron’s looting of $28 billion from the California state treasury and admits President Bush to the long line of America’s criminal ancestry that descends, with mounting degrees of firepower and computer capacity, from James Fennimore Cooper’s Deer slayer to the Rocky Mountains for traders, John Jacob Astor and the Sundance Kid, the Texas cattle barons and New York railroad kings, John D. Rockefeller, Boss Tweed, and Al Capone, Humphrey Bogart, Huey Long, Lyndon Johnson, Clint Eastwood, Michael Milken, Oliver North, Ivan Boesky, Tony Soprano, and others, as they say at the Academy Awards ceremonies, too numerous to mention.

Where else does Hollywood and the tabloid press find our company of heroes if not among the archetypal men on horseback who wander into dusty wooden towns to burn down the sheriff’s office or eliminate the grinning Mexicans who have been terrorizing the dance-hall girls with their aimless and maniacal gunplay? When Frank and Jesse James held up the Kansas City Fair in 1872, the local newspaper described the exploit as being “so diabolically daring and so utterly in contempt of fear that we are bound to admire it and revere its perpetrators,” comparing the gang to the knights of King Arthur’s Round Table. The national news media in 1960 borrowed the same romantic legend to herald the Kennedy gang’s capture of a government suddenly bright withy the banners of Camelot. The editors of Fortune and Business Week greeted the early success of Bernard Ebbers at WorldCom and Kenneth Lay at Enron with a similar fluttering of mindless awe-fearless CEOs, freebooting captains of commercial enterprise, tough-minded and resolute, driving up the stock price as if punching cows across the Missouri River into Marlboro country and the California energy market.

When too many proofs of government theft or corporate greed accumulate on the ledgers of the news (another defense contractor indicted for fraud, five more chief financial officers found to be in possession of indecent loans), the country’s loyal media outlets stage the equivalent of a prairie revival meeting meant to call down the great spirit of financial reform upon the temples of Mammon. A choir of Harvard economists bears witness to the restoration of investor confidence; Alan Greenspan lowers the interest rate; four committees of Congress set forth to recover America’s lost moral compass; a few sheepish perpetrators appear in handcuffs on CNN, Martha Stewart tied like a sacrificial goat to the post of a courthouse press conference; Sandy Weill, chairman of Citigroup, forbidden to talk to his own research analysts unless in the presence of a lawyer. George Tenet, the CIA director, takes a well-publicized fall for the mistake with the African uranium, and when the New York attorney general’s office levies a $1.4 billion fine on the country’s largest securities firms (among them Salomon Smith Barney and Morgan Stanley6), the newspapers announce “the dawn of a new day on Wall Street.”

The new day lasts for maybe a week or a month. Nightfall descends as abruptly on the New York financial markets as it does on the Brazilian rain forest, and although in our public discourse we like to bemoan the decay of conscience, in our private conversations, variations on the answer, “Yes, but I did it for the money,” satisfy all but the most tiresome objections. Were Al Capone still alive he probably could count on steady work as a talk-show host on FOX News-an elder statesman, garrulous and wise, remembering the good old days in Chicago, offering his opinion as to whether money is better starched and laundered in the Cayman or the Channel islands.

President Clinton made it his practice to pardon friends convicted of felonies; President Bush makes it his practice to appoint them to federal office, and in California Arnold Schwarznegger presents himself as a candidate for governor. To the extent that the romance of crime has become more popular over the last thirty years, in part the result of the continuous panorama of violence running around the glass walls of our news and entertainment media, we make heroes of the politicians and business executives who resemble the bounty hunters wandering in the wilderness o the old American West, predatory and nomadic figures holding to the rule “get in, get rich, get out,” bored by the tasks of government, indifferent to the pleasures of civilization. If occasionally called upon to bring justice to Gold Hill or Silver City, they do so with a terrible and godlike vengeance. After the requisite number of killings, they depart (into the sunset, back to the aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf), leaving to merely mortal men the tedious and un-American chores of settlement and burial. Although I don’t doubt that many millions of voters admire President Bush for the handsome platitudes he distributes under the labels of “moral clarity,” I suspect that an equal number of citizens place their trust in his work and record as an outlaw-maybe not up to the mark of Meyer Lansky or Shane but a gunsel reliable enough to ride with the Clinton gang and fit to hold the horses when the time comes to burn out the sheep herders or rob the train.



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