America's Bitter Harvest
Howe, Irving
If anything like a national mood can be discovered in America, then we ought to be facing a moment of harsh sobriety. The party is over; the plates are broken; the debts unpaid. After the Crash....
...Usually, as in Greece several years ago, a junta would be formed by military officers intent upon removing a legally elected government...
...and then, once the market crashed, the Federal Reserve Board rushed in with billions to "stabilize" the market...
...We'll come back to this next issue...
...Isn't it time a few strong liberal and labor voices were raised again...
...But what was special about the Casey-Poindexter junta (and did it WINTER • 1988 • 5 really keep Ronnie Reagan and Ellie Abrams in the dark...
...monitors were to be scattered through the land to calculate the value of whatever private relief agencies might give, so as to reduce welfare checks...
...It has become easy to mock the yuppies...
...And let's be honest: the contagion of false values spread far deeper than the affluent...
...What happened on Bloody Monday, October 19, 1987—the panic of the market—came as Reaganism's concluding whimper, the collapse of portfolios and delusions...
...Whether the market crash will be "corrected" or lead to a recession, no one seems as yet to know...
...A legally elected government spawned an illicit shadow to violate the law, fulfilling the Reagan agenda, whether or not he "knew...
...Suddenly Wall Street and all its "experts" wanted the government to climb right back on — quickly, quickly, they cried...
...But a touch of reality has broken into the country's consciousness and pretty soon—who knows?— someone may discover that unbridled capitalism is a pretty rotten affair...
...Poor lambs, they really thought it would go on forever: the paper profits piling up, the stock averages rising day by day, while industries collapsed and deficits grew...
...Within the administration, the representatives of the traditional establishment, figures like Howard Baker and George Shultz, have become stronger...
...of a junta, that is, a secret and illegal body dedicated to deceiving both the Congress and the American people, and to breaking the laws in behalf of a reactionary fantasy...
...In these years of the fast buck and screw you, Jack, of arbitrage and corporate raiding, of presidential aides and friends lined up in dockets to be tried for various crimes, the moral cretins of Reagan's administration announced—just about a week before the market crashed—their intention to deduct from welfare payments whatever trifles of help private agencies might render the poor...
...As in the 1920s, it seeped through large parts of the country...
...The junta would then rule in the name of national honor or emergency...
...A few days after I write, but considerably before you read, the congressional committee's report on Contragate will appear...
...was that it was the creature of major figures within the government...
...Gloomy Peter Peterson (see the Atlantic, October 1987) runs ahead with an establishment economic program: foreseeing bad times, he proposes a regimen of cuts in social services and restrictions on wages, quite as if he were the International Monetary Fund "disciplining" a wretched Third-World country...
...How could anyone tell...
...It was almost like a replay of 1933 when, after FDR became president, the mine operators rushed to Washington to beg the government . . . to nationalize the mines...
...Other countries have had juntas...
...Whatever happened to get the government off our backs...
...With his usual care, Draper has amassed the evidence, from official sources, which shows that the Contragate affair was not an aberration by a few loonies but that it resulted from the creation within the Reagan administration by high Reagan officials (Casey, Poindexter, etc...
...It was a shared delusion in the beneficence of "the free market," that mysterious manna Wall Street would shower on all good Americans...
...As Flaubert is reported to have said, Le Yuppie, c'est moi...
...So let me recommend two articles by Theodore Draper (New York Review of Books, October 8 & 22, 1987...
...Reaganism seems just about finished (a lovely irony: the only one who might give it a little lease on life is Gorbachev...
...The ugliness of it all...
...The impact of that report, even in what is said to be a toned-down version, may not register because of the market crisis...
...We have lived through the shabbiest administration in twentieth-century American history...
...Happily, this brutal plan was pulled back: the administration no longer has its way on everything...
...But what were they but a more crass, as also more innocent, manifestation of the dominant values of the Reagan years...
...Pennies were to be pinched from the poor...
...The Reaganite Junta...
...At a time when the real wages of American workers have declined 7.3 percent since 1979, there blossomed among the upper and middle classes a coarse and philistine greed—the dollar equivalent of Reagan, Ed Meese, James Watt, Ann Gorsuch, Rita Lavelle...
Vol. 35 • January 1988 • No. 1
