Consider the following items in the news.
A McCain economic adviser, Phil Gramm, calls Americans a nation of whiners at a time when the evidence for the collapse of the economy is all around.Loss of jobs, whole cities and counties underwater in debt,people losing their homes to burdensome debt.
What is worse is that the man Phil Gramm was also responsible along with his wife Wendy for the massive debacle of Enron and continues to spout the same bromides that he uttered when he stood up in Congress and deregulated energy trading from SEC scrutiny and allowed it to be traded like a commodity.
After protesting for several days that a bail out of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is not in the works,Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke, announced that that is precisely what they plan to do tomorrow,July 14.
What is happening after a steady assault on ordinary people’s sense of reality by the powerful and well heeled in our society is that the social fabric is being torn apart.That fabric or at least the perception that the ruling class has the people’s interest at heart is what confers the legitimacy in a Democracy.
That is slowly being eroded.
At some point,it would no longer be enough to keep repeating mantras like Bush does and actually deliver in performance what you say.
In another post I have noted that we have come to resemble the Soviet Union in many ways as it neared its end.
One such glaring resemblance is how disconnected from the worries of ordinary people that men like Gramm or McCain are.
Most people do not expect truth to emerge from the mouths of these men.Even a landslide election will no longer matter unless their actions and the results make a material difference in the lives of people.