Dollar Bill, The Fed, & Saudi Oil

Check the record, check the guy's track record
He, was not, appreciated
So drink the draught, drink the long draught
For the Big Priest

Bill Greider’s not long gone, but gone for awhile now and already forgotten, which is a shame. From Cincinnati, then to DC via Princeton, he ended up writing for the Post. He covered the 1972 presidential election along side the Good Dr. Thompson, who repeatedly placed “Dollar Bill Greider" on his honor roll – high praise indeed.

He rose into the Post’s editorial offices. In 1973, he wrote a long piece on the Sunday Op/Ed pages saying Mistah Nixon's crimes were nothing unique in DC. They needed to be treated as such. The only way for justice or reform to occur was an acceptance of the bipartisan culpability for the criminal mess that was the National Security State. Instead, Mr. Nixon was scapegoated, especially by the legions of Boomer draft dodgers who in the following decades would take over the National Security State and lead us to where we are now.

Caddell told me Greider had been groomed to run the Post, instead he left. When I asked him years later why he left, Greider replied, “To save my soul.”

In 1987, he published the first of four incredible books that cut deep into America’s power structure, Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country. Larry Goodwyn, who Bill introduced to me after I raved to him about Goodwyn’s The Populist Moment, had helped frame the book. Greider once said to me Goodwyn always thought he, Greider, never really got the money question, which was funny.

In less than a decade, Greider followed with three more books:

Who Will Tell the People? The Betrayal of American Democracy (1992), a work concerning the growing corruption and dysfunction of American politics and government.

One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism(1997), a journalistic tour de force chronicling American led corporate globalization leaving behind an ever larger swathe of people across the United States, the group ten years later known as Maga.

Fortress America: The American Military and the Consequences of Peace (1998), well, here we are.

Money, the decline of American politics, corporate globalization, and militarism, four great issues of the last half-century, all verboten debate topics for America’s elite. To paraphrase the Great Oz, pay no attention to those people behind the curtain!

Another issue underlying them all was energy and specifically oil. Over the years, I had a lot of conversations with Bill about oil, he’d listen but sort of wave it off, saying things like he knew some old DC guy working with the Sauds and was assured they had lots of oil. On this issue, he was in no way unique, in fact American to the core. He lived in an oil designed world. Over the years, I’ve come to understand the American view of oil is that of a fish about water, “What water?” It simply is.

The US spent, not paid for, all debt, trillions over decades to militarily secure the oil around the Gulf. So this morning, seeing the NYT headline, Saudi Pipeline Attack Risks Disastrous Loss of Millions of Barrels of Oil, I chuckled, a good darkest joke only a few will get, but an historically bad joke all will feel. In California, diesel already approaches $9 a gallon.

In his last book, Come Home, America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of Our Country (2009), Greider went back to the 1972 McGovern campaign for the title and some of the unfortunately discarded ideas. The book promoted the US voluntarily dismantling its economic and military empire to both address the problems in these United States and become a nondestructive force in the global community. It appears the dismantling is no longer voluntary.

Of all our varied and numerous conversations, one thing Greider said haunts me personally these days. I can't remember the issue, but at one point in the conversation, he drew in a breath and said, “Well, you might eventually be proved right about that.” Paused and added, “But they won’t give you any credit," followed by that gravel throated, decades long, pack a day, filterless Camels cackle. No one in American politics understood better the indignity of trying to get Americans to see what they refused to look at.

Peace Bill, you’re greatly missed.

“Joe Costello’s ambition is astounding. He wants Americans to sit down with this book and rediscover our lost democracy. Where did it go? Costello offers some deeper explanations. How would we recover this tarnished birthright? Costello has some smart suggestions. It is an audacious proposition, argued confidently by a true small d-democrat.” – William Greider on OF BY FOR