Bicentennial Man: Ford '76 and Beyond
- Thread starter KingSweden24
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Nice to see the Soviets showing some fight in them and expanding their influences in other regions. Shame they couldn't capitalize the oil prices, might have given them some breathing room.
Just have to appreciate the play on words with Bicentennial Man referencing both the 1976 PoD and the novel by Isaac Asimov.
Yeah, Israel’s position is a lot more precarious without Saddam looking East. This is the time when the Lebanese Civil War really went into overdrive, too, and the Osirak bombing occurred…
The thing with oil extortion is that it’s the gun that only fires once, and OPEC looks at least a little weaker when prices don’t correspond to production cuts through 1981-82
Thank you! I’m a sucker for wordplay both clever and cringe so I’m glad the title speaks to you haha
also Sadat is going to be on a very hot seat in the Arab World, Syria is pissed about Egypt fucking them over in 1972 and Saddam wants to be the defacto leader of the Arab world. If Iraq and Syria are able to work together and are able to successfully frustrate Israel it is going to put Sadat in a very uncomfortable and awkward position.
And unfortunately for King Hussein I wouldn’t be suprised if Jordan is first on Saddam’s list to bully into his sphere if not support a movement against Hussein. They grew close in the 80s but that was mainly because of Iran
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Cant say I know a ton about those inter-relations in the 80s but yes, Sadat is going to find his relationship with DC very, very valuable
I am curious If u think that the Carey administration would support Saddam if he invaded a Khomeni-led Iran. On one hand I’d like to think not but with the Warhawks in the defense department and Secretary of State I’m 50/50
I really wonder what the Baathists are thinking of doing in Jordan. Hasn’t the PLO already been extinguished in the country?
Without being bogged down in Iran he would declare war after Osirak.
This
in the event of Saddam going to war with Israel King Hussein would have no choice but to let his army pass through Jordan and if Saddam demands it, the Jordanian milittary would join the Iraqis.
Maybe not annexation, but definate Finlndization on Jordan's part. Hussein warned Israel about the Yom Kippur war but still sent an armoured brigade to Syria to contain the Israeli counter offensive.
Probably not support Saddam, but you'd probably see a lot more support of anti-Khomenei organizations in Iran in tandem with the Iraqi invasion. My enemy's enemy, etc
Yeah that's a good question. I believe so, but the Middle East between 1973 and 1991 is sort of a giant black hole to me that I struggle to understand. I've endeavored to learn more about it in the writing of this project, but this is where help and ideas are huge.
For whatever reason I thought Osirak was later in the 80s. Yikes. Well, I may have to delay it purely for narrative reasons, but yeah you could see the Middle East go up in flames ITTL without an Iran-Iraq War, just for entirely different reasons. A Lebanon without Hizbullah getting arms and money from Tehran is probably a very different dynamic, too. Maybe another Arab-Israeli War over Osirak in 1982ish, coinciding with Israel's thrust into southern Lebanon? And then King Khalid bin Saud is about to die that year too...
If you think about it, by avoiding the Revolution, Iran is sitting pretty just letting all its near-abroad strategic competitors either tear each other apart or eat themselves alive. Not that that country doesn't still have very real problems and divides between the capital and rural areas but talk about just sort of falling into a good position geo-strategically!
Wikipedia actually has articles dealing with country to country relations.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq–Jordan_relations
Good stuff. From a cursory read, sounds like King Hussein and Saddam were getting chummy already by the late 1970s; a Jordan-Iraqi-Syrian-Lebanese coalition against Israel could be a thing, for sure. Probably easier for Israel without having to worry about Egypt on their flank.
If theres a viable legit Lebanese-Iraq-Syrian alliance against Israel than Sadat better hope his economic reforms work wonders cause I’d imagine many Egyptians won’t be happy that Egypt has seemingly backing down to Israel
Then again, Egypt got Sinai back, which solves Sadat a lot of problems
A Hundred Days of Action - Part I
A Hundred Days of Action - Part I
The late 1970s economic crisis was easily the most severe postwar downturn and thus the worst macroeconomic conditions since the Great Depression; that high inflation came, counterintuitively, partnered with double-digit unemployment across the Western world was what flummoxed policymakers more than anything. Though nobody knew it yet, in the United States the worst was already passed by the spring of 1981, with inflation having peaked in October of 1980 and unemployment reaching its highest level - nearly 12% - in March of 1981, and the next twelve months would be marked by the slow, arduous decline of both indicators to more manageable levels before the economic recovery began to be felt for the first time starting in the second half of 1982. [1] The recovery of 1982-84 would eventually be seen as the bookend to the horrible macroeconomic conditions of a ten-year stretch begun by the 1971 Nixon Shock, exacerbated by the 1973-74 oil crisis, and then just when it looked like the worm had turned, the chaos of the Panama Shock and small-scale oil crisis in Venezuela, Iran and Saudi Arabia in 1979 to go along with debt defaults across much of the developing world, particularly in Latin America and East Asia, in 1980.
The Carey administration viewed alleviating the immediate pain that would be felt by the cranking up of interest rates through the end of the year - a process begun belatedly in late 1979 by Arthur Miller's Federal Reserve - as their first priority, indeed the one that had won them the election against Ronald Reagan. The Carey campaign had aggressively courted the Greatest Generation's reliable voters and their fond memories of FDR by drawing very explicit parallels between 1932 and 1980 economically and culturally, and shaped that message to younger, more conservative Silent and Baby Boomer voters by portraying Carey as a gruffer, tougher and more modern update of America's longest-serving President designed for the meaner, leaner 80s. As such, any opportunity to cast Carey as FDR, Version 2.0 was taken with aplomb, and so began the marketing campaign around "A Hundred Days of Action," hearkening back to FDR's own first hundred days.
The backbone of the Days of Action of course would be the Economic Stabilization Act of 1980, which would feature two of the pillars of "Careynomics" - counter-cyclical infrastructure spending to bring down unemployment and targeted demand-side tax cuts for 65% of Americans to boost their pocketbooks in the near term. While both of these policies were, by definition, inflationary, they would be combined with continued interest rate hikes and thus designed to "balance the scale," in Carey's words. The President appeared before a joint sitting of Congress on February 22nd, at the invitation of Speaker O'Neill, to explain his vision, and then gave a follow-up address from the Oval Office a week later to the general public, outlining the "three planks" of the ESA: energy independence, infrastructure improvements, and small-scale tax reform. Combined with a variety of executive orders - one per day for a hundred days, each targeted at a different piece of the economy or federal regulatory environment - he termed it a "rescue package for every American." The response was positive, but skeptical. Carey enjoyed a honeymoon period approval in the low 70s and polling suggested he was trusted by the American people, but they had heard Gerald Ford declare that the United States would "Whip Inflation Now!" back in 1975 and, everybody had seen how well that had gone. The difference, of course, was that Carey by his nature was not one to sugarcoat things. In his Oval Office address, in his famously blunt style, he stated: "Things are likely to get worse before they get better, but I am confident that by this time next year, we will start seeing green shoots in this very difficult environment, and the spring after this grim economic winter will come soon enough."
While Republican politicians mocked the "Springtime for America" messaging from the White House, Congress got going on assembling the package, and the first major test of Carey's Presidency in managing the massive big tent of various Democratic factions began. O'Neill had a massive majority but well over fifty right-wing "boll weevil" Southern Democrats, most prominently led by Richard Shelby of Alabama, who were often more conservative than many of their Republican colleagues and were likely to be difficult to drag into whatever final vote occurred. The Senate was a different animal entirely. Though there was a veto-proof majority of Democrats, that majority featured very conservative Southerners, and even though many of them were relatively young and recently elected - with the major caveat being Mississippi's two octogenarian lifers in Jim Eastland and Jim Stennis - they were still fairly skeptical of major new spending programs, unless that spending was lavished on their home states [2], and they were part of the same majority that included progressive firebrands like New York's freshman Elizabeth Holtzman, who within weeks of being sworn-in was already being talked about as the future of the American left and the likely first female President of the United States.
With the Senate being the most difficult piece of the equation, Carey deployed his "secret weapons," as he called them - Vice President Reuben Askew and Senate Health Committee Chair Ted Kennedy, who he leaned heavily on as a whip operation to cajole both the Southern right and the progressive left in the body and be the point men in building a bill. Despite Askew never having served in the Senate, through his close friendship with Senator Lawton Chiles of his home state of Florida - who crucially was the third-ranking Democrat on the Budget Committee, behind Chairman Ed Muskie of Maine and Fritz Hollings of South Carolina - he quickly built cachet on Capitol Hill and within weeks of inauguration looked likely to the most influential VP since Johnson. Kennedy, meanwhile, swallowed his pride and agreed to set aside his push for a national health insurance scheme until the fall. Unemployment and inflation needed to be tamed first.
The man whose buy-in was needed the most, it turned out, was Finance Chair Russell Long of Louisiana. Long was a moderate-conservative who was open to playing ball with the administration. The "cheddar," as Carey put it dryly to White House Chief of Staff Basil Paterson [3], for Long was major investments in oil pipelines, drilling rigs and refinery facilities in the final act to benefit his home state of Louisiana and other oil-producing states. This was an easy sell publicly, of course, as a way to improve American energy independence, but risked angering the burgeoning environmentalist movement that had erupted in the 1970s out of the mostly unsuccessful anti-nuclear movement, and which had powerful adherents such as Wisconsin's Gaylord Nelson and Secretary of the Interior Mo Udall, who would be in charge of much of the issuance of future drilling permits, particularly on federal land. As a result, the expansion of American oil infrastructure was paired with a variety of "new energy" provisions. Ignoring the loud and stubborn minority of anti-nuclear activists, the ESA pushed ahead with dramatically expanding the provisions of 1979's Energy Policy Act, upping subsidies not only for under-construction nuclear power plants but research as well, such as the small modular reactor at Clinch River or Princeton's tokamak project, and diverted billions more to boosting the efficiency of hydroelectic, biomass and geothermal projects both extant and proposed while also shoveling billions into research into improved solar and wind energy technology and granted the FERC broad new powers in avoiding litigation over power line permitting and new transformer and switching stations. In addition to this, the ESA would move into law hundreds of thousands of acres of protected land, increase pollution standards for motor vehicles and power plants under the Clean Air Act, and made the Environmental Protection Agency a Cabinet-level department, the Department of Environmental Protection.
More than anything, though, the ESA - its acronyms chosen to avoid confusion (and association) with the Equal Rights Amendment by foregoing the title "Recovery" or "Renewal" - was an employment bill. The energy provisions were designed to provide new jobs, as was the demand-side management of creating the Employment Services Board, a new body that was designed to target unemployment via job matching, and the Employer Stabilization Fund, which provided cash transfers to employers to have them keep employees on the payroll rather than lay them off, which many on the left - most prominently Holtzman - derided as corporate welfare but begrudgingly acceded to. The ESF was particularly targeted at jobs in the automotive and steel industries, which had suffered grievous job losses in the prior five years, and not coincidentally were heavily unionized and concentrated in important Midwestern swing states which the Democrats had made huge inroads in during the Ford years. Billions more were allocated to the Federal Transport Reserve Fund, which would finance at subsidized interest rates a variety of road, rail and air transport projects to improve the infrastructure for the newly-deregulated transport sector and provide the baseline for innovation in that space - the money earmarked for Conrail in particular provided massive improvements throughout the 1980s to passenger rail travel in the Northeast and helped finance new projects in Philadelphia, New York and Boston.
The third leg of the ESA was its tax provisions. Carey and Paterson were adamant in negotiations that they would not cut corporate or top-level tax rates, but they did provide a small payroll tax holiday of two years and then a six-year tax cut to marginal tax rates for about 60% of Americans, with a staggered sunset of the rates in 1983, 1985, and 1987. Targeted tax code changes were also included that heavily incentivized the construction of commercial and multifamily real estate in city centers after two decades of construction in suburban areas, meant to revitalize decaying and collapsing urban tax bases; a boom in commercial high rises in city centers was to follow for the next decade. With the three prongs - energy, employment and demand-side tax cuts - the Economic Stabilization Act of 1981 was ready to go, with lots of interest groups unhappy with specific provisions but begrudgingly accepting of other pieces that brought them onboard. Now all that remained was to get it passed, along with a Supreme Court nomination at the same time. Nobody could claim that Carey's first one hundred days didn't have plenty of action...
[1] This is, shall we say, a marked difference from how the early 80s recession(s) went IOTL, where monetarist shock therapy exacerbated and extended the crisis well into late 1983 before the roar-back of 1984.
[2] Oink oink, gimme that pork, baby!
[3] For those keeping track at home, yes, that means we have a Black WHCOS as early as 1981, when there hasn't been one yet IOTL. This arguably makes Paterson the most powerful Black official in US history up to this point
My absence has nothing to do with your writing and more a sense that I'm not nearly as knowledgeable on certain matters. So I'm very glad to weigh in upon something I am actually a little in the know about! PORK! PORK PORK PORK.
Man, Askew and Kennedy would be a hell of a combo, especially with the remnants of the Southern Delegation still making a scene. We're coming up on the inevitable demise of the remaining holdouts like Eastland, Stennis and Long but for now they have a little bit of a stranglehold still. Definitely fascinating to see what some of the infamous losses of 1980 would do in the new decade like Nelson. And did I cheer a little when I saw Chairman Muskie? Why yes, yes I did!
Purely out of interest, I wanted to see what special elections or shenanigans the Senate might see before running for another term. Eastland and Church are the big ones for me, Harrison A Williams's bribes might get found out here, so that's another seat gone as well. But those are three big seats that could be pick ups for the GOP if they play their cards right. In addition to which, there are a few potential defectors that I have worries about (Zorinsky being the big one). So yeah, the coalition seems like it's going to be on very wobbly legs from here on out.
Man, Askew and Kennedy would be a hell of a combo, especially with the remnants of the Southern Delegation still making a scene. We're coming up on the inevitable demise of the remaining holdouts like Eastland, Stennis and Long but for now they have a little bit of a stranglehold still. Definitely fascinating to see what some of the infamous losses of 1980 would do in the new decade like Nelson. And did I cheer a little when I saw Chairman Muskie? Why yes, yes I did!
Purely out of interest, I wanted to see what special elections or shenanigans the Senate might see before running for another term. Eastland and Church are the big ones for me, Harrison A Williams's bribes might get found out here, so that's another seat gone as well. But those are three big seats that could be pick ups for the GOP if they play their cards right. In addition to which, there are a few potential defectors that I have worries about (Zorinsky being the big one). So yeah, the coalition seems like it's going to be on very wobbly legs from here on out.
I guess I didn’t realize that Zorinsky used to be a Republican before he ran! He’s definitely a fly in the ointment but there’s a lot of votes Byrd can lose (and some GOP Senators of the Weicker mold are almost certainly gettable, for that matter. Partisanship was not very extreme back then after all)
Williams is going down before long, Abscam has not been entirely butterflied. There’s some House specials in 1981 to cover with Foley and Udall’s promotions, too
One thing I’m trying to suss out still is how Lebanon would go without a revolutionary Iran pumping millions into Hizbullah. Advantage to Israel and their Maronite friends against the PLO?
I’d imagine that money and weapons would be funded to hezbollah by the USSR-led Middle East coalition (USSR, Syria, and Iraq). At least from your latest update on the USSR it seems they wouldn’t be against aiding religious groups that fit their interests in the middle east and Hezbollah technically does.
Lebanon presents a great opportunity to get Israel into it’s own mini-vietnam so I wouldn’t be suprised if the USSR was able to convince Saddam to aid and help Hezbollah especially since the fear of a shi’ite revolution isn’t nearly as bad with no Islamic Iran. Saddam could also see openly aiding hezbollah as a way to get in good with the Shi’ite Muslims across the Middle East to help portay himself the leader of the Arab world