America needs a new Roosevelt

Between Grant's Pass, a pleasant retirement town in southern Oregon, and the Californian fishing port of Crescent City, chiefly noted for the nightmarish state prison known as Pelican Bay, stretches route 199. It runs alongside the spectacularly beautiful Smith River ravine for some 50 miles.

To drive it, particularly on holiday weekends, can be a teeth-grinding, bumper-to-bumper affair. But this last Memorial Day weekend, on a late Sunday afternoon, I shot through in record time, meeting as little traffic as I normally would at 2am.

For the first time since the national trauma known as the great gas shortage of 1973, Americans are experiencing a collective shock as they adjust to gasoline prices that are now three times higher than they were four years ago. Many families looked at the $4-per-gallon basic price of gasoline and either stayed at home or crept round the corner to the local mall. Hence my pleasantly rapid drive home.

Of course Europeans, paying roughly twice as much to fill their tanks, snigger unfeelingly at American moaning at these prices. But the median family income in Crescent City is about $20,000 a year. A third of the population lives below the poverty line. As in thousands of American towns across the country, there's no slack in the family budget to accommodate a fuel bill that's shot up 300 per cent.

A family of four that decides - as many will this summer - that it cannot afford to drive 1,200 miles from Seattle to Disneyland is making a decision that spells slim business for motels, roadside restaurants and the tourist industry overall. As for long-distance truckers, it now costs well over $1,000 to fill the tank of an 18-wheeler with diesel fuel averaging around $4.20 a gallon. More than 1,000 trucking firms have already gone bankrupt this year.

Roman emperors knew well that political tranquility marched arm in arm with the cost of bread. As energy costs have soared in his term, Bush's popularity ratings have plummeted. Doug Henwood, editor of Left Business Observer, calculated that an "uncanny" 78 per cent of the shifts in Bush's ratings mirrored changes in gas prices. But the political implications are far larger and more long-term than the dismal trend-lines of the 41st president.

Across the past generation, American incomes, below the very rich, have remained essentially static, or have actually got worse. Year after year Americans work harder, longer, for less money in real terms. Political tranquility has been maintained by cheap gasoline, cheap food and, in recent years, the seemingly easy credit and tax deduction on home mortgage interest allowing middle-income families the illusion they owned a home.

But gasoline is no longer cheap, the cost of food is going up, and the subprime crisis has pitchforked thousands of Americans into forfeiture.

There's worse to come. The so-called 'Alt-A' loans, made to supposedly more credit-worthy borrowers and amounting to a trillion dollars, are about to go down the tubes, carrying banks and insurers with them. And this time Ben Bernanke, chairman the Federal Reserve, has no bail-out strategies left. He can't lower interest rates to banks below the current two per cent, a level partially responsible for oil costing almost $130 a barrel. Round the corner looms hyper-inflation.

The sky is dark with chickens coming home to roost. America is in a terrible fix. But you wouldn't know it from the politicians. Obama, Clinton and McCain flourish quick-fix recipes that are as inconsequential as a pop gun aimed at a gunship by an Iraqi child. Whoever is in charge come January 2009 will have to set as drastic a change in course as did Roosevelt in 1933, the last time the political economy faced this serious a crisis.

There's no sign that any of the candidates have advisors at their elbows capable of offering pertinent counsel. Thirty years of vacuous boosterism about the virtues of neo-liberalism and unfettered markets have exacted a fearsome toll on the intellectual capacity of the policy-making elites. ·