Government Shutdown Déjà vu—Little New in Game of Economic Chicken With Murfin Verse

Playing chicken with of government shutdown and economic catastrophe. 

The United States narrowly averted a government shut down at the last minute yesterday.  If it seems like we have been there before you are not mistaken.  Going back to President Bill Clinton’s fights with Congressional Republicans in 1995 there have been 5 total or partial shutdowns laying off hundreds of thousands of Federal employees, closing vital services,  disrupting the lives of millions, and costing billions of dollars.  In 2013 a total shutdown to spite President Barack Obama lasted 15 days.  In 2018-19 the former Resident of the United States helped engineer the partial shut down of his own government lasting 35 days believing that voters would hold Congressional Democrats to blame.  He was wrong.  The stench fell on him and his party.     

A chart showing the length of government shutdowns since 1976 from just before the 2018-19 crisis ended at 35 days.

This time around with the Senate evenly divided requiring all Democrats and the Vice President to vote pass funding legislation to finance the government for its next fiscal year Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell threatened to force Democrats to pass the authorization without Republican support knowing that two obstreperous allegedly moderate Democrats might not vote for the measure.  As the clock ticked down to the last moments and after furious negotiations an agreement was made.  Republicans were afraid to take the blame again while allowing their kamikaze crazies to make their symbolic vote to blow up the economy.

The Senate and House both passed a short-term appropriations bill that would keep the government running through December 3. The Senate approved the legislation in a 65-35 vote, with 15 Republicans joining all 50 Democrats. The House passed the bill by a 254-175 margin as 34 GOP representatives and every Democrat supported it.  Essentially they just kicked the ball down the road setting up a possible new crisis in two months.

A shutdown crisis was narrowly and temporarily averted this week but like a Christmas Carol ghost will be back to haunt us in December.

Earlier Democrats tried to fund the government and suspend the debt ceiling as part of the same bill. Senate Republicans blocked the legislation, even though extending the ceiling doesn’t authorize new spending. Approval would let the Treasury to cover its existing obligations.

Failure to raise the debt ceiling by October 18 when the Treasury will run out of money to pay its obligations and cause the nation to default on its debts for the first time could trigger a “financial apocalypse”  including a stock market crash, banking collapses that would trigger a world-wide depression, soaring interest rates and chocking off business and consumer credit, an massive unemployment.

So naturally some Republicans seem content to let that happen to bring the whole system crashing down so that it can be replaced by supposed Randian utopia in which powerful elites can plunder undisturbed. 

All of this storm und drang comes as Democrats struggle to unite their progressives and alleged moderates in passing both Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill and his far more ambitious $3 trillion budget reconciliation bill including provisions like free preschool and community college, child-care subsidies, and an expansion of Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing care.

Eight years ago today I posted a blog entry on the 2013 crisis that seems just as apt today.  Here it is.

Always reckless and feckless Texas Senator Ted Cruz was a major catalyst for the 2013 government shutdown which turned out to be a political disaster for Republicans.

Back in the ‘50’s guys with duck tails and souped-up Chevys played two kinds of games of chicken on the dark blacktops outside of town.  The classic game had two macho, testosterone fueled knights run full speed at one another until at the last minute one swerved out of the way, pee dribbling down his Levis.  Or not, in which case there would be a swell double funeral.

A rarer variant was immortalized in James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause—a side-by-side drag race toward a cliff.  As you will recall, Dean applied the brakes at the last second.  The other yahoo sailed serenely over the cliff to a fiery crash and oblivion.  Last night was that kind of game.  We could almost celebrate the cleaning up of the gene pool by the Republicans’ grandiose self-immolation, except that the rest of us were tied up, bound, and gagged in the trunk.

The long awaited/dreaded government shutdown is a signal to pundits and bloggers to analyze and opine with abandon.  The conduits of the interweb are clogged with it as I type.  The product ranges from right wing hair-on-fire hysterics and pants-on-fire lies, to solemn platitudes and phony even-handedness of the professional talking heads, to liberal/left commentary torn between blindly backing the President to sniping at him and unloading lots of impractical advice on him.

But here and there you can find a calm and rational analysis of what is happening, why, and various likely outcomes.  I urge you to find them.  They are all better than I could have done.

Instead I am moved to poetry.

Political verse has the shelf life of sushi on a pushcart in Phoenix in August.  It has a long and ignoble history since the days when long satirical ballads were printed anonymously in partisan newspapers, through righteous radicalism dripping with the blood of workers and peasants, to acid penned short pieces in the columns of Puck or The New Yorker. 

This is none of those, but read it fast before it evaporates from your screen.

 

This Morning

October 1, 2013

 

The sun rose this morning

            heedless of deadlines

            of wails and curses.

 

But that doesn’t mean

            we must sit idle

            with Zen-like equanimity.

 

The dew on the grass

            invites the first footprint.

 

The crystal air refreshes         

            our lungs.

 

The wind at our backs

            pushes us to action.

 

What they have done,

            is done.

 

What we will do

            is yet unwritten.

 

We have but one resolve—

            not to be pawns

            on their chessboard

            anymore.

 

—Patrick Murfin

The March for Jobs and Freedom At 50

The 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom got early attention when hundreds of thousands once again jammed the National Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday.  They were motivated not by nostalgia, but by righteous anger that the hard fought gains Civil Rights Movement activists fought, bled, and died for are under concerted nation-wide attack by a nasty and resurgent Right Wing.  The crowd was also driven by greater-than-ever income inequality and the creation of a low wage economy as well as an uneasy sense that the high hopes ushered in by the election of Barack Obama have been thwarted.

A parade of dignitaries, activist leaders, and celebrity entertainers including Civil Rights veteran and gun control activist Tony Benett spoke to the crowd.  The highlight was a fiery speech by Congressman John Lewis, the last survivor among the 1963 speakers.  

Unlike that long ago summer afternoon, the TV networks did not disrupt their schedules for live coverage.  Cable network attention ranged from a continuous live streaming from C-Span, to fairly comprehensive coverage on MSNBC anchored by Melissa Harris-Perry and Ed Schultz, being virtually ignored and attacked on Fox News.

Still, the event did create greater than usual coverage of any protest actions.  Predictably, however, it was mainly cast in the light as a celebration of the original march’s most famous speaker, the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. who has been cast at the sainted hero of non-violence who single-handedly won equal rights.  Clips of his famous speech ran longer than sanitized sound bites from the modern speakers.

This year, some slight attention was paid to one of the most neglected figures of the original march, Bayard Rustin, the Quaker pacifist who was the principle nut-and-bolts organizer of the ’63 event.  Rustin, who was also Gay, was tapped by President Obama to receive a belated and posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom.  Other key figures in the original march, however, remain largely ignored and forgotten.

Like a lot of people back in ’63 I was glued to the television for the beginning-to-end coverage provided by CBS News.  I was a 14 year old in Cheyenne, Wyoming at the time.  I was both thrilled and awestruck.  Listening to Dr. King’s I Have a Dream Speech literally changed my life.

The march originally was the brainchild of an elder of both the Labor and Civil Rights movements.  A. Philip Randolph, President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and of the Negro American Labor Council as well as a Vice President of the AFL-CIO modeled his call for a march on Washington on a similar event he had planned back in 1941 to force President Franklin D. Roosevelt to open up employment in the burgeoning defense industry to Blacks.  Just the threat of thousands of Negros descending on the Capital had been enough to cause the President to establish the Committee on Fair Employment Practice and bar discriminatory hiring in the defense industry.  Randolph wanted to bring similar pressure on President John F. Kennedy and Congress to move on stalled Civil Rights legislation, but also to bring up new issues of jobs and economic opportunity that had been overshadowed by the tumultuous battle for civil rights in the South. 

Randolph brought together the leaders of all of the largest national Civil Rights organizations including James Farmer, President of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); John Lewis, President of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); Roy Wilkins, President of the  National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Whitney Young, President of the National Urban League; and Dr. King, President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to form a coalition to sponsor the march.  It was no small feat because of turf wars, ideological differences, and egos.

In addition Randolph sought support from the Labor movement, most significantly from Walter Reuther, President of the United Auto Workers (UAW).  The White dominated craft unions of the AFL, however, were notable for their absence. 

Bayard Rustin of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and the organizer of the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, an early forerunner of the Freedom Rides that was meant to test a Supreme Court ruling that banned racial discrimination in interstate travel, was tapped to coordinate volunteers and logistics, recruit marchers from across the country and attend to all of the other details of the march while Randolph pulled together political, labor and religious support for the march. 

Other than being a star speaker that day King was not heavily involved in the planning or management of the event. He even left the details of mobilizing SCLC supporters to his aides.

As word spread, it became apparent that the march was going to turn into the largest event of its kind in history.  The media began to pay attention.  On the day of the march, buses poured into the city from sleepy Mississippi towns and from gritty industrial hubs like Detroit and Chicago.  Trains from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were jammed.  Thousands of local Washington residents swelled the throng. 

Organizers put the crowd at more than 300,000.  The National Park Service, in charge because the speakers’ platform was erected at the Lincoln Memorial, said 200,000.  Whatever was the case, crowds filled the Mall far passed the Washington Monument.  About 80% of the marchers were Black, the rest mainly white.  Marchers included many celebrities including actors like Sidney Poitier, Harry Bellefonte, and Charlton Heston—yes that Charlton Heston. 

It was a Wednesday afternoon but the three major broadcast networks broke away from their usual programming of afternoon soap operas to cover the swelling crowd and speeches live. 

Marian Anderson, who had sung on the same steps at the invitation of Eleanor Roosevelt after she was denied use of the Daughters of the American Revolution Constitution Hall in 1939, opened the program with the National Anthem.  Several other performers took to the stage over the course of the program, perhaps most notably Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Mahalia Jackson. 

The Catholic Archbishop of Washington, Patrick O’Boyle led the invocation.  Other religious leaders on the program included Dr. Eugene Blake on behalf of the Protestant National Council of Churches and two leading Rabbis. 

After Randolph’s opening remarks each of the major civil rights leaders took the stage in turn. Floyd McKissick had to read the remarks of CORE’s James Farmer, who was in a Louisiana jail. The youngest leader, John Lewis of the militant SNCC, excoriated the Kennedy Administration for not acting to protect Civil Rights workers who were under regular and violent attack across the South.  Randolph and others who were trying to flatter and coax the President into action forced Lewis to strike the most inflammatory portions of his speech, but what was left was still plenty critical. 

Slain NAACP organizer Medgar Evers’s wife Myrlie was on the announced program to lead a Tribute to Negro Women, but did not appear.  In fact several prominent female figures in the Movement were either not invited or had their requests to be added to the program rejected by Randolph.  In the end the only woman to speak was jazz singer Josephine Baker who wore her World War II Free French uniform emblazoned with her medal of the Légion d'honneur. 

It all led up the last major address—the highly anticipated speech of Dr. King.  If civil rights veterans knew what to expect from the notoriously eloquent leader, millions of Americans viewing at home were in for an eye opening experience.  The speech, built to the thundering crescendo:

Let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring—when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children—black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics—will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

The nation, or most of, it was awestruck and impressed.  That speech, along with the continued televised violence against Blacks struggling for equal access to public accommodation and the vote, helped set the stage for the major Civil Rights legislation enacted in the next three years. 

Today, on the actual anniversary of the march, President Obama will mark the occasion with his own speech delivered from the same Lincoln Memorial steps.  One of the most gifted orators in Presidential history, I am sure that his remarks will be by turns poignant, moving, and stirring.  His admirers will be thrilled and the Right Wing hate machine will be geared up into full attack mode.

But however noble his speech, and perhaps even his deepest personal ideas, the President is presiding over the greatest usurpation of privacy in the nation’s history and the erection of a permanent security state that seems as much interested in monitoring and crushing domestic dissent as it is with any terrorist threat. 

He is also said to be ready to launch yet another military adventure as soon as Thursday—a supposedly “limited” two day air attack on Syria for allegedly using poison gas on civilians in the bloody on going civil war there.  It is not hard to imagine what his fellow recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize might have to say about that.