[THS] !! David Michael Green: To Hell In A Handbasket

[Peter Webster]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24933.htm

To Hell In A Handbasket

By David Michael Green

March 08, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- I live in New York. To say that the
politics of my state are dysfunctional would be like saying that Adolph Hitler could
sometimes be not such a nice fellow. It’s all true, of course. It just doesn’t do just
justice to the scope of the crimes committed.

We have a governor (as of this writing, anyhow) who just got blasted by the New
York State Commission on Public Integrity for lying to them under oath in their
investigation of him. But that’s okay. Before that, he accepted the favor of free tickets
to the World Series, which is what he lied about. But that’s okay. Before that he was
putting pressure on a woman who was the victim of domestic violence to go away
and shut up. But that’s okay. The person who was beating and choking her was one
of his top staffers. But that’s okay, before that he and his wife were involved in all
sorts of tawdry but unspecified sex and drug related scandalous behavior. But that’s
okay. He’s the governor who came in after the last governor had to resign because
he was laundering money in order to visit high-priced hookers. But that’s okay.
Everybody in Albany is out of control, including one state senator who cut his
girlfriend’s face open with broken glass, and a former leader of the Senate on trial for
wholesale corruption. But that’s okay, because none of them actually do anything,
anyhow.

Which, considering the sheer scumminess of this lot, could very well be a good thing.

It’s certainly a common thing. I grew up in California, which seems determined not to
be eclipsed by New York or anybody in the dyfunctionality department. California
once had the nation’s top school system. But it cost money, so they gutted property
tax revenues and made it nearly impossible for the state to ever raise taxes again.
Now the schools are making Mississippi’s look good. California once had a great
Supreme Court, too, which was the envy of other states in the union. But the justices
weren’t killing enough inmates, so some nice folks engineered a then-unheard of
thing and got the public to recall half the bench, replacing them with pro-death
penalty (oh, and incidentally, pro-corporate) new judges. California also once had a
decent and politically very moderate governor. But then Enron came in and created
power black-outs in order to drive up electricity prices on the grid, and so he to was
blamed and then recalled too, replaced by a movie actor who played a tough but
loving cyborg from the future. Now, in his new role as governor of California, he
plays the leader of a nascent third world country, fiscally so chaotic it’s about ready to
qualify for IMF bailouts.

As for Texas, I don’t live there and I didn’t grow up there, either. (I did kinda like
Stevie Ray Vaughan, though. I don’t know if that counts for anything.) But them folks
are about to re-elect a governor who just last year was talking about how so very
heavy is the yoke of the federal government that Texas just might have to secede
from the union. Er, rather, secede again, I should say. Funny, though. He didn’t
mention how the states where you find the most tea-partiest type of politics tend to
be the ones bringing home the bulk of the federal bacon. As the Seattle Post-
Intelligencer noted in 2005, only five blue states are net recipients of federal
subsidies, while only two red states are net payers of federal taxes. Imagine my
surprise at the hypocrisy of it all, and at recent revelations that lots of the
Neanderthal Party’s members fulminated in Congress expressing their outrage at the
stimulus bill, while simultaneously bragging at home about how many federal dollars
from it they were able to funnel into fat local projects.

And then, of course, nominally presiding over New York, California and Texas is the
United States federal government, about as pathetic a sight as one is ever likely to
see. Groaning under the weight of enormous problems, almost all of them entirely of
its own making, it is completely unable to act in any fashion other then to exacerbate
those problems further while denying their existence. It’s true that the Founders of
this country set out to create a system of government that would almost never be
able to do anything, and boy were those fellas good. Just in case, though, the
current lot of kleptocrats in the Republican Party have done them one better,
grinding a system that’s already ground to a halt all the way into reverse. Except
when they have the keys to the government, of course. At which point they employ
the legislative equivalent of bunker buster bombs to kick out the jambs and rape the
country with impunity.

Meanwhile, there’s another party in Washington, too. You may have heard of them.
Heck, they even control the government, though you’d never know it. They’re pretty
much committed to not doing anything, ever. And, if by some inadvertent mistake
they actually do take action of some sort, they’re equally devoted to doing it ineptly,
ineffectively, and on the terms of their adversaries.

Well, really, nominal adversaries would be a more accurate way to put it, since the
party that once actually used to do something for the public interest every once in a
while has now joined the other party in full-on devotion to the feeding and care of
oligarchs, 24/7. The only difference is the masks they wear. If you’re merely a sick
puppy, you put on the disguise of ineptitude and frustration as you do the bidding of
your corporate masters. If you are, on the other hand, absolutely sociopathic, you
work for the same folks, but you sell it to the numb-nuts you affectionately refer to as
your constituents in the form of protection from fur’ners and fags, instead. Oh, and a
bit of wholesale violence with the invasion of some third world country every other
year or so.

A very good measure of the health of a given polity – especially in a democracy – is
given by the quality of leadership running the joint. That measure is incredibly telling
in the case of the United States, and what it is telling us is grim indeed. Consider the
last three presidents against the comparative backdrop of one of our greats, and his
response to the country’s most serious existential crisis ever, excepting the Civil War.
When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the Germans soon thereafter
declared war on the US as well, Franklin Roosevelt led the country into a massive
national response and a four-year-plus effort combining full-on public support,
massive military, industrial and societal mobilization, masterful diplomacy and stellar
strategic vision in order to defeat the genuine threat of global fascism.

If Bill Clinton had been president, on the other hand, he would have responded by
trying to cop a feel off the Japanese ambassador’s daughter. If George W. Bush had
been president, he would invaded Mexico, bungled the war for seven years, then
invaded Botswana, and sapped the military’s strength by simultaneously bungling
that irrelevant war for six years, all while the Japanese and Germans rampaged
freely, coming closer to American shores every day. And if Barack Obama had been
president, he would have studied the matter for a year, offered to bargain away half
of Europe and Asia in a deal with the Axis Powers, and then, when they spit in his
face for the thirty-seventh time, deployed a half-dozen or so unarmed marines in a
rubber dinghy as America’s military response to the attack.

Our so-called leaders are bad enough, but it gets almost worse at the level of the
American public, who of course also bear the burden of choosing these abysmal
presidents, on top of their own crimes. These latter include utter negligence in
maintaining the gift of American democracy, complete laziness in the most basic of
civic duties, mass corruption of social, political and personal values, and a reliance
upon every form of cheap magic or distraction to avoid basic personal and civic
responsibilities.

And, always, it’s about having everything. At once. For nothing. The same idiots who
have been seduced by cigarette-money-sized tax cuts for themselves, used to justify
a massive slashing of the burden once carried by the rich, are now bitching as
government services implode. The New York Times is reporting that citizens of
Arizona – one of the most regressive states in the union – are now unhappy because
their highway rest stops have been eliminated due to the state’s fiscal crisis. I just
want to grab these people and shake them by the shoulders, politely suggesting to
them that next time they have to pull over in the desert sands between Tucson and
Phoenix and squat by the side of the road, they might want to give a thought or two
to all the money they pissed away in another desert, this one in Mesopotamia.
Likewise, people are now also starting to whine about schools closing and prisoners
being released from jail, also because of budget slashing. And I just want to ask
those bright folks whether they still think all those tax cuts for the already
outrageously wealthy plutocracy were such a good idea in retrospect, after all.

This is just the tip of the spear. American government is in the process of imploding,
and it won’t be long until the pathetically minuscule social safety net that we have will
be shredded as well. Stupid voters who turn to the Republican Party in the next two
election cycles will be outraged at the GOP if it does what it says it will do and slashes
social spending. And, of course, they will be equally outraged if the Republicans
don’t. It just doesn’t seem to occur to these folks that you have to pay for
government services. And why should it, really? The GOP have been selling the magic
of free government since Ronald Reagan brought voodoo economics to the national
stage in 1980, nearly quadrupling the national debt in the process.

And when the financial voodoo remedies somehow amazingly fail to entice the gods
sufficiently to redeem the disaster that is American fiscal policy, desperate political
invocations and supplications to the deities du jour are sure to follow. In fact, they
began long ago. Term limits? Swell! No tax increase pledges? Cool! Tea parties? What
a great idea! Ross Perot and his binders full of government plans gathering dusts on
the shelves of bureaucracies all across Washington? Brilliant! Deregulation? Of
course! Let the market fix everything! Privatization? Why have a government when
you can buy a lousier one for a lot more money, so that profits can be extracted?
Hey, and while we’re at it, why not pretend to fund our schools as the pretext for
government-sponsored gambling through lotteries? Excellent! That’s a threefer! Bad
schools, government-induced addiction, and a rip-off of the public’s money.

The American public is in oscillating parachute mode right now, and my guess is that
it’s going to get worse. Like a desperate patient with a potentially terminal illness, we
careen from one panacea to the next, hoping that the laws of political physics can
somehow be suspended if we just wish it earnestly enough. In observing this pathetic
sight, I am reminded of nothing so much as a cranky adolescent who expends ten
times the energy and grief to avoid doing his math assignment as it would take to
just sit down for twenty minutes and crank it out.

That’s the funny thing about the American political malaise. Some of the changes
most necessary for our rescue would not only be easy, they’d be way cheaper than
free. This country could solve ninety percent of its problems by the simple act of
getting money out of politics and thereby (re)turning the American government into
being an instrument for the benefit of the public, rather than a servant for
aggregating wealth on behalf of a predatory plutocracy. Among the immediate
benefits such a change might be expected to realize would be precipitous drops in
military spending and corporate welfare, along with a serious rise in revenues from a
tax system that required the rich to actually pay their share. In other words, for no
cost to the individual American other than getting up off their couches and actually
demanding government for the people rather than for the people’s vampires, the
public could right the ship of state and probably even get a beloved tax cut out of
the deal. But, alas, there is that couch to keep warm...

Really, I’m afraid the kindest thing you can say about America today is that it is so
not a serious country anymore. Churchill joked that you can always count on America
to do the right thing, after it has exhausted all the other possibilities. I’m down with
the second half of the equation, but unfortunately growing increasingly dubious
about the first.

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that there is no substantial economic
recovery – measured in jobs, not GDP or the Dow or Wall Street bonuses – in the
coming years. I regret to say that I think that’s a pretty safe assumption. The
abandonment of workers in America that we’re seeing today is a the final (we hope)
result of a decades-long relentless pursuit of profits in the name of overclass greed
über alles. Who cares about American workers if you can do a job cheaper with a
machine? Why give a shit about shutting down entire communities if you can export
those jobs overseas at a fraction of the cost? Sorry too about those trade treaties that
only helped to exacerbate that tendency! Oh, and too bad we don’t have any money
to dump into community redevelopment or schools or infrastructure. Gots to do tax
cuts for the rich instead. Gots to keep our priorities straight, you know?

In short, we’ve worked pretty hard these last decades to destroy the American middle
class and to hammer the working class and poor, all because the folks who were
really rich decided about thirty years ago that they instead deserved to be
fantastically rich. And, lo and behold, it’s worked! The good years of the mid-
twentieth century in America are now going, in the long view of history, from being a
foundation to a continuing and improved future to instead becoming an historical
anomaly. It was a blip, in between the normal of gross disparities of wealth that
came before it and after it. A thirty year party. A generational experiment that went
badly awry for the boss class, ‘til they returned to clean up the mess.

But it’s hard to give it up, especially since nobody told us it was a one-time deal.
Ironically, our decline based on class thievery soon became become the perfect
condition for its own amplified replication, as the regressive movement in America,
starting with Reagan, began marketing an exacerbation of this effect, masked as just
its opposite and channeling the fear and rage of economic insecurity into hatred and
violence toward brown people, gays, women, etc. Aided and abetted by an
‘opposition’ party that went from consternation to crash to concussion to confusion to
compliance to co-optation to collaboration and then finally to clones, the process has
been really quite remarkable for its diabolical ingeniousness and its near complete
success.

Emphasis on the word ‘near’, though. It’s not over yet, and this is where I think we
begin to get into some really scary territory, and where Churchill’s formula may well
break down. This is a country steeped in violence, political stupidity, racism, sexism,
homophobia, and beliefs in every kind of magic, including – especially – religion. It
feels in my gut, right now, like a very combustible collection of tinder, and I don’t
imagine the revolution, if it comes, will be a particularly progressive one.

I would expect the Democratic Party to get annihilated in the next two election
cycles. Assuming people will even wait that long for serious change, that brings
Sarah Palin, or her equivalent, and gang to power three years from now.

Consider their choices as they take control of the government.

If this new regime does nothing, or reverts to the GOP’s previous form of spending
more, taxing less and borrowing like crazy, they will solve nothing, and will be tossed
out (again) like the Democrats before them.

If they govern like they actually say they will, they will slash spending on social
programs, angering the public furiously, and completely alienating their only real
remaining base, old white people.

Which leaves, to my mind, only a third option, kinda like the one Hitler brought to the
Weimar Republic, then suffering from similar tendencies toward economic despair,
political oscillation and ineffective governance.
That’s pretty drastic, but I guess it comes down to the question of just what one
thinks these people are capable of.

As for me, I say keep you passport current.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New
York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles
(dmg at regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow
him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website,
www.regressiveantidote.net.