In case you missed it, there is a great article in today’s Los Angeles Times, by Robert Scheer (the title says it all):
WHAT THE WORLD has witnessed this past week is an image of poverty and social disarray that tears away the affluent mask of the United States.
Instead of the much-celebrated American can-do machine that promises to bring freedom and prosperity to less fortunate people abroad, we have seen a callous official incompetence that puts even Third World rulers to shame.
(…)
For half a century, free-market purists have to great effect denigrated the essential role that modern government performs as some terrible liberal plot. Thus, the symbolism of New Orleans’ flooding is tragically apt: Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Louisiana Gov. Huey Long’s ambitious populist reforms in the 1930s eased Louisiana out of feudalism and toward modernity; the Reagan Revolution and the callousness of both Bush administrations have sent them back toward the abyss.
(…)
It is the result of a campaign by most Republicans and too many Democrats to systematically vilify the role of government in American life. Manipulative politicians have convinced lower- and middle-class whites that their own economic pains were caused by “quasi-socialist” government policies that aid only poor brown and black people — even as corporate profits and CEO salaries soared.
For decades we have seen social services that benefit everyone — education, community policing, public health, environmental protections and infrastructure repair, emergency services — in steady, steep decline in the face of tax cuts and rising military spending. But it is a false savings.
(…)
Watching on television the stark vulnerability of a permanent underclass of African Americans living in New Orleans ghettos is terrifying. It should be remembered, however, that even when hurricanes are not threatening their lives and sanity, they live in rotting housing complexes, attend embarrassingly ill-equipped public schools and, lacking adequate police protection, are frequently terrorized by unemployed, uneducated young men.
In fact, rather than an anomaly, the public suffering of these desperate Americans [a permanent underclass of African Americans living in New Orleans ghettos] is a symbol for a nation that is becoming progressively poorer under the leadership of the party of Big Business.
(…)
For those who have trouble with statistics, here’s the shorthand: The rich have been getting richer and the poor have been getting, in the ripe populist language of Louisiana’s legendary Long, the shaft.
(…)
No, these folks are supposed to be cruising on the rising tide of a booming, unregulated economy that “floats all boats.”
They were left floating all right.
Read it all. and again.
This travesty of a so-called relief effort — and the fact that 45% of Americans actually APPROVE of Bush’s response to the devastation — proves that as a country we have all but forgotten what government is FOR. Why everyone needs it. Why programs and agencies are worth spending money on.
I truly worry about young people, those who weren’t even born until Reagan, who have never seen the social good that wise and generous government spending can accomplish. My own 16yo stepson, who identifies as liberal, was exceedingly slow to grasp that FEMA could have been doing more and doing it a lot faster; that having so many NG troops deployed in Iraq made everything worse for the people in New Orleans. He initially called my angry rants “conspiracy theory” and mocked my idealism.
When did expecting FEMA to do its job become “idealism?” If we lose the capacity even to imagine what a real government can do, how will we ever build one?
polls are easily manipulated. Don’t trust a poll to tell you anything other than what the pollsters want to learn.
I reject outright anything the pollsters tell us because the evidence to the contrary speaks volumes.
For Lowering Expectations
This 45% approval just shows to go you how well he’s done in that department.
< /snark…no, wait, the snark never goes off…
I truly worry about young people, those who weren’t even born until Reagan, who have never seen the social good that wise and generous government spending can accomplish. My own 16yo stepson, who identifies as liberal, was exceedingly slow to grasp that FEMA could have been doing more and doing it a lot faster; that having so many NG troops deployed in Iraq made everything worse for the people in New Orleans. He initially called my angry rants “conspiracy theory” and mocked my idealism.
On ’60 Minutes’ Sunday eve, one segment was on what they called the ‘Echo Boomers’ — kids born during the Reagan Era who are just now coming of age. Their general traits:
(1) Trusting of government. Obedient to authority.
(2) Trust their parents — program noted that these kids have been coddled by ‘helicopter parents’ who are always hovering over them.
(3) Team oriented; individualism is downplayed. As a result, they do not strive to innovate.
(4) Obsessed with short-term gratification and instant results — the ‘video game’ culture where every action gets an immediate response. Almost incapable of long-term planning.
My shorthand for their conclusions would be: pod-people.
Wow… great opinion piece. I’m afraid Scheer is right on the mark. I also think that the incompetent and self serving Bush admin and his Republican party does not have the courage to face these facts and will choose to believe it does not exist until it’s too late. So much for ‘perception is reality’… I’m thinking reality is reality, whether you perceive it or not.
Again – conservativism is not, nor has it ever been, a sane political doctrine. It is built on hatred, bigotry, inequality, repression, and lies. Economic and social conservativism, both work out the same. We need to stop treating Conservatives like they hold valid beliefs, because they don’t. They believe in wars of aggression, in the fundamental inferiority of anyone who’s not a white male, in robbing the poor to give to the rich, in destroying our habitat, and in preventing progress at all costs.
We’ve seen the damage that allowing these cultists to run our governments has caused.
Conservatism is just a name. The root causes go deep, deep into our society. This did not happen over night or even over half a decade. It is our history and we haven’t learned a thing.
Let’s start with recent history. It is politicians of every stripe, look at the legislation for the past several decades. Notice anything? It has not mattered which party was in control, look at the media and financial industry consolidation under Bill Clinton. Enron, WorldCom, Citibank, HealthSouth just happened to get caught.
Put aside Bush’s tax cuts for a moment. Let’s look at who is really paying taxes.
This is not a cult, or a group of neocons. Sure, they’ve been the biggest, boldest, and baddest, but they are a symptom, not the disease. We are seeing an extension of the entitlement, ego and empire that pushed west, killing whatever and whomever dare come between us and our god given right to own. In that sense, we have always been “compassionate conservatives”. We have always justified our greed. What has changed is scale. The consolidation of power over dwindling resources. Take the images from the Superdome and the Convention Center and blow them up to global scale.
I’m going to have to disagree. This cult of greed – which has indeed been growing for centuries – is the cause of the behaviour which you document. Our acceptance of it as a political philosophy is what has allowed the rich to rob the country, destroy 50 years of progress, and do their best to return us to the Gilded Age… Or earlier.
…..and what if there was a terrorist attack on our country instead of a act of god???!!!! What if now we have yet another act of god out there!!??? What if we find ourselves in a disaster of sorts with disease control??!! What if, and if we could depend on the federal government to do anything, if at all. All of this is making us wonder….I know it is me. This is simply blowing my mind to even think of the what if’s! The DHS has been a farse in the first damn place in the make up as it is now. When we have incompentent ppl such as these political ppl doing things and I mean republicans an democrats alike, what do we expect? I think it isi time we all stand u p tot he federal, state and local government and demand answers to our questions…now is the time for answers not nonsense. Look folks we could nto have withstood another terrorist attack even if minor, it appears.
A hurricane is an act of nature. Allowing people to die of neglect is an act of man.
For 25 yrs. they have preached their siren song of tax cuts. We should not be surprised that they have no exit strategy in Iraq because they have never had a complete and sane strategy to replace the lost tax dollars. Vague promises of more revenue through more growth, which never seems to replace the lost income. Dangerous cutbacks enacted scatter shot wherever they think they can get away with it. Often they don’t have the political will and just continue to borrow money. The government is first supposed to protect its citizens we seem to have lost that ability. The debt, natural disasters, wars that make us less secure and create terrorists. This is the legacy of the ill conceived neocon experiment.
and it is happening in every industry. Merck’s heart attack in expensive pill form, Ford’s spontaneously combusting vehicles, Firestone’s bargain blowouts, hospitals pulling technicians out of heart rate monitoring rooms to work on …. billing.
I work with trial lawyers and see lives sacrificed for profit in every case. We know it’s not new, Silkwood, Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action all true stories. My own very pro-business state has cancer clusters because of several industries pollution. Know what the state did? “Lost” several years of mandatory cancer statistics due to a “computer glitch”. Oops.
What we’re seeing in not capitalism, we’ve witnessed a complete and total corporate coup. The FDA, the CDC, the EPA, the FAA, the Department of Labor, the Department of Justice… all arms of the octopus. The saddest thing I see is that juries, regular working people, still have faith in their government protecting them. “How could this be true? Wouldn’t the government stop them from polluting our land, our air, or water?” “Wouldn’t that be illegal?” and the saddest of all, “Well, if we hold them accountable, it will mean higher prices for us, and some people will lose their jobs.”
This is where we are, this is our reality. Wake up America, not only will your government not protect you, the lives and livelihoods of your neighbors and your loved ones are completely expendable, just the cost of doing business.
I think that a govermnent working in this way is central to capitalism. Capitalism creates a privaliged few, who the oppressed many would not normally tolerate. Capitalism NEEDS a government that will protect the rich from the poor.
Lately, thats about ALL our government has been doing, giving up any pretence of doing things like “education” and “health care” and “social programs.” Fuck that stuff! If the rich dont need it, its cut, cut, cut!
From here on out, the government is just a security force for the ruling elite, at home and abroad.
(and if you dont like it, you can rot in guantanamo)
No, debraz is right: the economic system is the US is not capitalism in any recognisable sense. It is a system which is heavily regulated and subsided in favour of the management of corporations, not the owners. There is no free market involved. The ultimate owners of the means of production are not the main beneficiaries, the managers are. It is hidden behind free-market rhetoric, but that’s as much a lie as anything else they say.
I have no problem with capitalism at all. We’ve gone from trust busting to trust building with the government’s help – that’s the problem. Two completely different purposes have merged to the detriment of all and to the health of true capitalism.
That the US appeal for disaster funding (whether cash or kind) from outside the US, and acceptance of, especially, 3rd world donations, could totally undermine any further tax-cutting cronyism from BushCo?
You can be forgiven, Sven, since you don’t live here in the US.
But the local media coverage is just full of volunteer stories–particularly, even more than the Red Cross, just the individuals-helping-out kind of thing. I don’t watch it all that much, so I can’t say for sure that there’s been no mention of aid offers from other countries, but I can say that I haven’t seen a single mention of it, much less a whole segment.
So, expect a cognitive penetration of this information of about .0000001 microns into the collective consciousness of the American public.
Once again, myth triumphs over truth. Anyway, if those countries really cared about us, they’d return all our POWs!
Paul is right Sven I’m truly sorry.
I’ve listened to the neocons bitch about how much the world owes them a thousand times over. The neocons will take every penny offered from nations with GDPs 1/50 of the U.S. and not lose a minutes sleep. Hell they’ll cut taxes the day they get the money. Bush and the neocons think they are literally God’s gift to the world. It makes me sad to think people overseas may think we are still human.
have put me right – thanks!
I don’t even think there was an appeal for outside help. The rest of the world practically begged to be able to help, because it was the right thing to do or for other reasons, and it was reluctantly accepted. I have no idea how much that information was distributed.
None that I know of. But worse was that countries who offered aid were initially rejected, told they weren’t needed.
Then on top of all that Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly were spreading propaganda to the effect that there were no countries who had offered aid. (Sorry no links on that, but someone who used to be a friend called and yapped about it, and I know where he gets his “news.”)
Lately there’s been some news as to Canada and Mexico being allowed to assist. So far, no public reply to Hugo Chavez’s kind offer of Cuban trained Drs, or cheaper heating fuel for the poorer people of this country.
Thank you Jerome for spotting this great article which so neatly summarises the political economy of the recent failure of American government.
Last week, many Bootribbers commented that they hoped Hurricane Katrina (perhaps viewed in conjunction with the lack of an Iraq ‘solution’) would be the turning point for Bush’s credibility. Unfortunately this optimism has been dented in the last couple of days by the 45% approval rating for the Bush response.
Perhaps we get carried away, living in our well-informed, well-educated, materially comfortable blogosphere. Perhaps the bulk of Americans have only focussed on the human interest angles presented by the media. The criticisms of the Administration’s response presumably only lasted a couple of days in the US TV and radio ‘news’. What we have been discussing here is the views and analysis from the op-ed pages, the more in-depth current affairs interviews etc which 99% of the population don’t see.
But I think there are grounds for hope, and certainly grounds (and fertile soil) for action.
Yesterday morning I caught an interview on ABC Radio National’s Breakfast program (RN is the ‘serious’ radio network of Australia’s national public broadcaster)with James Fallows (Atlantic Monthly) and Paul Braithwaite (Executive Director, Congressional Black Caucus). [To listen click the icon against ‘Katrina politics’ under ‘Monday 6 Sept’ here.]
One of them suggested that the impact of southern flooding in 1927 was a substantial factor leading to the subsequent 50-year Democratic domination of southern US politics. This idea seems to me to link, timewise, with the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, Huey P Long’s populist public works program, and could possibly be a contributor to the New Deal agenda/recognition of the value of government programs and intervention in the economy. Naturally the Depression must get the major credit for the New Deal.
I’m very ignorant about US history and would be interested in Tribber’s reaction to this thesis.
But my ultimate point is the fertile ground which now exists. There is huge scope for all of us to discuss with relatives, colleagues in workplaces, neighbours, casual acquaintances in shops, etc, the fundamental point being made by Robert Scheer: tax cuts have cut government spending – this diminishes our community’s collective security, whether from failure of levees, disease epidemic, or violence by under-educated and unemployed ghetto-dwellers.
Naturally the most fertile soil for this argument right now will be in Louisiana and neighbouring States. (Do you think 45% of Louisiana residents are happy with Bush?) But some people will listen elsewhere. The argument that government is bad & government equals too much taxation has been blasting away for decades. The only way to counter the brainwashing is to argue back, using examples that people can relate to in their everyday lives. Hurricane Katrina, sad as it is to say this, is an enormous opportunity to show concrete examples of the impact of the neocon ideology.
Rome wasn’t built in a day. Someone must have campaigned for the New Deal in the 20s and 30s. Let’s go do it.
Great article. I just hope that in a week or two’s time the majority of citizens are not just too happy to “put a lid” on what was opened up.