A headline over an Evan Thomas story in this week’s Newsweek (3/8/10) tells us: “We the Problem: Washington Is Working Just Fine. It’s Us That’s Broken.”
Thomas blames, among other things, “our ‘got mine’ culture of entitlement,” adding:
Politicians, never known for their bravery, precisely represent the people. Our leaders are paralyzed by the very thought of asking their constituents to make short-term sacrifices for long-term rewards. They cannot bring themselves to raise taxes on the middle class or cut Social Security and medical benefits for the elderly. They’d get clobbered at the polls. So any day of reckoning gets put off, and put off again, and the debts pile up.
Now that’s the problem—the middle class needs to pay more taxes, and everyone should get less from Social Security. These are very familiar “hard truths” you hear from corporate pundits. Thomas goes on to finger “the college hookup culture,” and suggests that Obama should give in to Republican demands on “tort reform” in order to make progress on healthcare—an offer Obama has actually already made, with no discernible response from Republicans.
The blame-the-people narrative was echoed in Jon Meacham‘s editor’s note, where he advised that we should “own up to the reality that Washington is not an abstraction but a mirror. Our political life is a reflection of who we are, no matter how unattractive we may find the image looking back at us. Washington is an expression, not a thwarting, of the will of the people.”
It’s odd for journalists to conclude that Washington politics is a perfect expression of Americans’ political views. If it were, one would have to think that Congressional approval ratings would be somewhat higher, and that political outcomes would be very different. The public consistently favors higher taxes for the wealthy, for example—but don’t hold your breath waiting for pundits to take up that cause.
Meacham goes on to illustrate this misguided notion by comparing Obama’s healthcare reform drive with George W. Bush’s push to privatize Social Security. The two are apparently similar in that they were both about reforming the system, and Americans prefer the status quo. It’s hard to know what to say about that, though one could point out that the threat to the country’s fiscal well-being posed by the rising costs of healthcare are significantly greater than anything having to do with Social Security.
Meacham also warns readers not to idealize the past, though, since urgent political problems weren’t solved back then either:
The first report predicting a crisis in Social Security was released 35 years ago, but the fabled bipartisanship of ages past produced only incremental fixes. If more had been accomplished, it would not be an issue today.
That crisis was handled with tax increases that created a multi-trillion dollar surplus for Social Security. The only reason Social Security remains “an issue today” is due to journalists like Meacham making it one, usually by misleading people about the program’s imminent collapse.
So brazen in their contempt for the people!
If Washington was truely a mirror of the people, we’d have had a national health care system since Truman. On most of the major sociopolitical questions, the majority of the population lies,decidedly, to the left of the Democratic Party. How these two pundits could arrive at their absurd conclusions,in an era of corporate dominants, shows how embedded the corporate mind-set is in the media.
But Newsweek’s RIGHT; by comparison, People is a magazine with no gravitas!
JTM
They have a point. We get the government we want and often deserve. People like Anne Coulter exist and flourish because people buy their books and listen to their arguments to their outrageous statements. If we truly cared about the quality of our Congress and government the fools and thieves and lap dogs of corporate America and toddies of people of Russ Limbaugh would not be in Congress.
To John: this were true if elections were not decided by money and reporting by the media was fair and balanced. To even make it onto a ballot takes a huge amount of resource and as FAIR shows with depressing regularity, there is no news outlet that would deserve the label ‘fair and balanced’! So we pretty much have the government that suits the ones who pay for it. Whether this the government that the majority wants or deserves is quite another question.
People are not the idiots that some republicans think they are. People are the idiots that some republicans think they are. It is very disheartening that the Democrats who do want the best for Americans allow hateful republican senators to hold up everything worthy to help Americans. It is true that people have no sense at all and have no sense about what is right and wrong. There are a lot of real lame brain morons in the republican party who are scared of their own shadow unless republicans are in power giving everything to the corporate bigshots.
I’m relieved to know that I wasn’t the only one “who gaged” when I read those two pieces in Newsweek. They followed a familiar American theme, “Always blame the customer.” Of course, I never understand either why American people have consistently voted against their own best interests.
First my liberal creds: Voted for Obama; give money to Amnesty International, ACLU, have installed CFC lights, am kind to small animals. Need I point out when we start to bash the Republicans that Republicans are American too? O.K., I admit I enjoy a good cryptofascist thump now and again, but let us remember that many Americans are Republicans and they are not all bad. Let’s not become the ugly doppelganger of the Republican Hate Mongers.
Anyone who thinks that our government represents the people are half right. They represent the people who can MAKE them listen, by giving or withholding money to/from them. Pretty much NOTHING I care about ever even gets concidered, much less enacted into law. The only thing worse than America is everywhere else I know of.
So raising taxes on the Middle Class and cutting back on Social Security will solve our economic woes? I think I have a couple of better ideas, instead of expecting the two groups who are suffering the most to continue shouldering the economic burden any longer let’s INCREASE Social Security and DECREASE taxes on the Middle Class and offset this by INCREASING taxes on corporations and the very wealthy who own 85% of everything. Why don’t we face the “hard truth” that this is the only thing that hasn’t been tried and will likely pull us out of the economic ditch that the ruling class has put us in. I guess it is also the people’s fault that they stopped buying Newsweek and reading mutton headed editorials.
I can’t help but agree, at least in part, with the conclusion. Repubs/conservatives always want lower taxes, but want to pay for a huge military and massive foreign intervention; they want no protections for the average citizen, but they do want a baseline of healthy *consumers* to help maintain a powerful economy. Demos/Progressives always want higher taxes (on corps and so-called multinationals) to pay for a high level of social services, but don’t want face up to the fact that this will lead inevitably to a massive loss of power in the world, with completely uncertain results.
The problem is, at least in part, that these two scenarios have about equal support; even the so-called ‘swing voter’ swings because they manage to straddle the line and want both in nearly equal measure.
Meanwhile, we all happily invest in those same evil corporations, enjoy the benefits of exported labor and massively centralized farming, etc. It’s all well and good to yell about the evil news programs, but how many people have cancelled their cable (because, btw, you watching e.g. Family Guy is subsidizing Fox News.) How many people have *completely* stopped shopping at Safeway, Albertsons, Ralphs, etc. and only get their food from small retailers, farmers’ markets, and co-ops? Is wearing all fair-trade clothing, doesn’t own any metallic items forged from less than ‘sustainably mined’ ore, Etc, etc, etc.
Companies are always in a race to the bottom, ‘ethics’-wise (though I cringe every time I hear it expressed that companies should have ethics… of course they shouldn’t, any more than dogs or sheep do… they may be composed of people, but they are not in fact people, with all the feelings, connections, etc. that people do –who, it shouldn’t need reminding, also all too regularly fail to be ethical) because they are in a race to the top, profits-wise.
The only solution is strong legislation, made at the behest of a strongly public-minded electorate. As Felix says, this is all true, but… it is in fact a chicken and egg problem. So, either change the news corporations (fat chance) or change the laws (slightly better, but good luck.) I personally think the only way to change it is via a long, hard slog of changing the laws and simultaneously creating public perception that certain actions are disreputable (or worse) and then calling out violators. Or, waiting until people are really, really disgusted… which is, after all, what has historically been necessary.
I have to agree with a lot of points that Dan makes, though I think most people at least partially vote with their wallet. Perhaps the choice we make is not quite as stark as boycotting certain stores, but we do make choices ranging from buying organic food to using recycled materials in our homes and crafts.
I too think it impossible to expect that the market can address some of the evils we see because the markets are no longer free conglomerations of small merchants, farmers, and factories competing. I would guess that many of the corporations operating now would be considered trusts and would have been attacked in the pasts. I think a corporation the size of Walmart earns more money than many governments do. Without legislation and fair enforcement of it there is no limit put on their decisions and citizens don’t vote on their board of directors. They are not elected but yet wield as much power as some heads of state.
When we started to have corporations that were “too big to fail” you knew that we were no longer dealing with businesses per se but to “business states.”
With respect to social security, the bipartisans agreed on a regressive tax increase that was supposed to shore up social security funds, but were treated by the government as general revenue. Now the Republicans and their friends are claiming those Social Security funds we paid for aren’t there anymore, so Social Security benefits have to be lowered. In other words, the govermnet committed fraud and stole social security funds, so the middle class are expected to suffer the consequences, and it is all our fault.
Let’s be clear. The primary cause of our current sky-high deficits is the combination of the tax cuts given to the richest Americans under George Bush, and the exorbitant costs of our two wars of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan. If we just restore taxes to where they were under Clinton and end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and bring ALL our troops home now we will be in much better financial shape. Then we can tackle Social Security and Medicare without having to make any major cuts in them! The easiest way to fix Social Security is to end the upper limit on income for paying into the system – have everbody pay into the system at the same rate on ALL their income.
Mr. Hart is wrong. There’s nothing odd at all in concluding “that Washington politics is a perfect expression of Americans’ political views”. Nobody ever said that such views can’t be contradictory–and Americans are top of the list in that category.
We invariably want more while giving less. We want smaller government–except for our own family. In an unfortunate way the US is a perfect democracy–we absolutely get the politicians we deserve, who are in denial and talk out of both sides of our mouth–like we do.
Example: At the White House Health Summit, Republicans repeatedly declared “We already have the best health system in the world”–when every objective mesasure shows the US is 37th in results and last in cost. Everyone in that room knows this–would anyone say so in front of the cameras? Of course not.
None of them were elected to tell the truth. Or to be courageous. We’re just voting for simple folk like ourselves, with whom we’d like to share a beer.
Sandy Prisant/Prism Ltd.
http://www.wordsmithwars.blogspot.com
In my opinion America is ruled by corporations and the wealthy. I classify politicians who are democrats as moderate republicans. Democrats don’t truly represent the middle class but at least hopefully they throw us back some crumbs. The powers that be WILL have their way with us and they have NEVER and likely not pass ANY meaningful health care reform or raise taxes on the rich or cooperation’s. They own everything!…the “web”, media, politicians, etc. Don’t get me wrong, I do LOVE that FAIR but IF FAIR did what the yellowtimes.org did by attempting to raise public awareness and outrage, this site etc would be shut down! (The yellowtimes posted grotesque pictures of victims of Americas killings and maiming of Iraqi civilians in addition to “counters” of American and Iraqi casualties. Poof they were gone! I LOVE THIS COUNTRY!
the premise of the newsweek column is absurd on its face.its a rendition of the standard country club meme which blames the greedy,ungrateful little people for crisis the country finds itself in.the purveyors of this tripe depend on the bourg.reader adopting a “suck up” kick down” mentality,in which the mark believes the columnist,is taking the forner into his confidence,that some third party is the greedy,unworthy polecat.
newsweek/washington post is a tool of corporate america-it stood silent whilst an election was stolen right on tv,cheered while we invaded another country based on lies,winked as the usa has been ruled by edict for a decade,as three atty gens have used the bill of rights for a cocktail napkin-don’t even get started on how newsweek has licked the boots of the wall streeters who have committed the biggest securities fraud in human history-in broad daylight -with the government doing little more than delivering the ransom note to the little people-yeah,newsweek job was to provide the propaganda to the schmucks while up scaling the style used to deliver the “noble lies”/crackpot realism
what gags we me about the article is the nonsense about “tort reform.” today’s philadelphia inquirer has a column which exposes -for the umpteenth time-how tort reform serves as a distraction to prevent real health care reform-the greedy little people and their ambulance chasing,trial lawyers.according to harvard studies almost all -97% of med mal suits involve verifiable medical error -many of which involve plaintiffs of modest means and damages which are difficult to quantify in purely economic terms-hence the “pain and suffering”component-the pithy manner in which the newsweek columnist urges legislators,who putatively owe their offices to those “little people”-to proffer up the constitutional rights of the latter as poker chips,is insulting to a free people-we don’t have many affirmative rights to begin with.never did.hell,about 20 of our damned us senators represent little more than corporate lobbyists,cow snot,and barbed wire.however,you bet your ass you are”entitled” to your day in court,if you are injured-that’s important to us as individuals,its vital to the public welfare as a whole-only about one percent of the state dockets are given over to med mal-the republic can handle it-don’t internalize Newsweek’s contempt for the poor -this isn’t about the crafty plots of service sector workers,and their lawyers-attempting to build lawsuits which might lead to trans formative monetary settlements.its about how democracy works.
Bravery, that would be chalenging the military industrail complex that has ruled this country since WWII.
That’s where all the money goes. To fight imaginary enemies. The real enemies are are those who keep us living in fear, and step up to take all our rescources to protect us.
Observing the political landscape for many years, and from different views, I have to suggest the idea that we live in a One Party State. Both parties stand for corporate/$ donors, for Israel, for colonialism (under a different label), for protecting the military industrial complex and the corporate media; this is all sold wrapped in a flag, totting a bible in one hand and a gun in the other- all in the name of National Interests, which is a euphemism for sending my comrades (yes I am a retired Army Officer) to fight the rich man’s war (either here or abroad). This is akin to slaves and poor people fighting for the confederacy- it disgusts me profoundly, but not as much as dimwitted morons that keep supporting this corrupt system!!!!
And the fact that Congress instead SPENT the Social Security $URPLU$ of We, the People ALREADY!
matt fajardo: I went to wikipedia and there is no result for a search for yellowtimes.org. Will you start a page for it?