AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL COULD BE A LOT BETTER—I've been reading a fascinating book: America 1933 by Michael Golay. It's new, but the era it covers is the few years just before and after The Great Depression that began with the stock market crash of 1929—and the parallels between that period and our current one, now roughly six years after what some are calling The Great Recession, are chilling.
"The physical wounds were gross, if not often mortal," Golay wrote of the effects of the Depression. "Stunted, underfed children; men and women in the full tide of life who wore the peevish, wizened, and defeated expression of the aged and infirm; young men who hadn't worked in years; the middle-aged cast adrift, stranded with scant hope of ever working again; young women forced to ply the ancient trade of the streets; old people abandoned, derelict."
Is that doubt I'm sensing? That would depend on how well-informed you currently are about politics—and as Reader's Digest used to put it, "Life in These United States."
"How desperate were Americans as the Depression deepened?" Golay asked, then answered, "Recent scholarship suggests their sufferings were broader and deeper and more widespread than previously had been believed... By March 1933, 13 million Americans would be jobless, fully 25 percent of the laboring population. As many as a third of working people were reduced to short time. The U.S. Steel Corporation's Homestead, Pennsylvania plant, with 5,235 men on the payroll in 1929, employed 424 full time in March 1932... Industrial production had fallen 50 percent from its 1929 level... Early in 1933, a national survey put the estimate of the homeless in the United States at 1.5 million, many of them living without light, heat or water in ramshackle communities knocked together out of wooden boxes, metal cans, cardboard, and tar paper and derisively known as Hoovervilles... Five thousand banks would fail by the end of [Hoover's] term. In the fall of 1932, only one in every four jobless men received any relief at all." [Emphasis added] And during the entire decade of the 1930s, newspapers and radio commentators spent hundreds of hours and thousands of column inches trying to convince Americans that prosperity was "right around the corner"!
Need a modern-day comparison? Besides the bankruptcy of the once-thriving Detroit, that is...?
"The people who run U.S. Steel have not had much reason to celebrate in a long time," wrote Adam Davidson in the NY Times in December of 2012. "Once the icon of American manufacturing, the company became shorthand for the country’s industrial decline. For decades, it ignored innovation and was undercut by cheaper Asian producers and outflanked by U.S. start-ups. Its brief glory in the mid-2000s turned out to be fueled by housing-bubble excess; and its stock price has dropped nearly 90 percent since late 2008."
For more—A LOT more—check out The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap by Matt Taibbi. Reading that book reminded me of something that I have had in the back of my mind for quite a while: One of my favorite TV shows is Law & Order, but lately, I'd begun thinking, "What happens to all of those people whom the cops 'pull in for questioning' and sometimes lock up for days at a time, but who ultimately prove not to have been involved in the crime in any way?" Now, obviously, Law & Order is fictional—but real cops all over the country do that stuff all the time, as is well-documented in Taibbi's book, and in real life, just being arrested for something, even if the person didn't do it, is enough to cost that person his/her job or thwart job opportunities, possibly get him/her evicted, car repossessed—any number of bad outcomes that most people never even think about... unless you're poor, black, Hispanic, female, "mouthy" or any combination of those. (And then there's this.)
Any of the above sound familiar? Probably not, if your "news sources" are broadcast and cable news programs, and even most newspapers, almost all of which are owned and run by rich conservatives, and staffed by "reporters" whose idea of coverage of national issues is to publish nearly meaningless "he said, other he said" exchanges—and most of the "he"s (there are very few "she"s among the elite punditry) are conservative. In fact, the best sources for the real news that affects the people you know and care about, besides websites such as DailyKos, ThinkProgress, FAIR.org and Media Matters for America, are The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and John Oliver's Last Week Tonight—and they're supposed to be comedy programs!
But what's going on in America as the midterm elections approach is anything but funny. Thanks to Supreme Court decisions like Citizens United v. FEC, McCutcheon v. FEC and likely, in the not-too-distant future, some case based on Susan B. Anthony List v. Driehaus, American politics is owned by people who are far richer than you or I will ever be—and the overwhelming majority of them support Republicans, and more specifically Tea Party Republicans.
Before going further, let me note that Democrats are hardly saints in all of this. Many Democratic politicians are just as anxious to get their "piece of the action" as are the Republicans and their cronies, so with the connivance of some Dems, good legislation that could rein in the same types of loans and investments that caused the 2008 economic meltdown, that could break up "too big to fail" banks and corporations, that could begin to reverse man-made climate change, that could provide decent healthcare for all citizens, that could provide quality education (including college) for all youth, that could keep all children from starvation, gets shot down, amended to uselessness... or is never even introduced in the first place.
To tear just one example from the headlines, why is there no Ebola vaccine? We've known about the disease since 1976, and for many, the simple fact that it was confined to Africa—you know: where the black people came from—was reason enough to ignore it. So what if there were 24 outbreaks in Africa, killing over 1,700 people between '76 and 2013? That could never happen here! So why bother to create a vaccine?
Well, the government-funded National Institutes of Health, which annually provides more than 25 percent of the country's biomedical research money, was actually working on an Ebola vaccine as early as 2001, but "Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would've gone through clinical trials and would have been ready," NIH head Dr. Francis Collins told Huffington Post three weeks ago.
"Money, or rather the lack of it, is a big part of the problem," added reporter Sam Stein. "NIH's purchasing power is down 23 percent from what it was a decade ago, and its budget has remained almost static. In fiscal year 2004, the agency's budget was $28.03 billion. In FY 2013, it was $29.31 billion—barely a change, even before adjusting for inflation."
Thanks, fiscal conservatism! I can't even begin to list how many vitally important programs have been cut or deleted in the name of "balancing the budget." But let's examine the dynamic for a moment. Ever since Ronald Reagan took the presidency in 1980, Republicans have accused Democrats of being spendthrifts, of not knowing the value of a dollar, and of spending the government into a debt hole from which, they claim, it may never emerge. Democrats, to their everlasting shame, have accepted this and similar criticisms and in reaction have moved further to the right—not just on the budget, but on nearly every other issue that's important to America's well-being as a country. Thirty years ago, today's Democratic politician would have fit almost exactly the then-current definition of a middle-of-the-road Republican.
Part of the reason for this is that Republicans, especially the very rich "old white guys" like the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, the Walton family, the late Richard Mellon Scaife and dozens more, know they have to spend money to make money—and they spend it on campaign ads, knowing that if they can succeed in packing legislatures (including Congress) and every level of elected official (includng school boards!) with Republicans, they'll be repaid with lower taxes both on corporations and themselves, with budget cuts of vital services like healthcare, food stamps, FDA inspections, unemployment insurance, public defenders and the like, and with lifetime appointments for "right-thinking" federal judges and the Supreme Court. Do you really want some Republican president choosing Ruth Bader Ginsburg's (or any other justice's) successor? Or if she or another one of them dies within the next two years, Republicans stonewalling any decent nominee Barack Obama might make?
And speaking of stonewalling, do you know why Obama appointed an "Ebola czar"? It's because the logical person to oversee the current non-crisis would be the Surgeon General of the United States—except we haven't got one, and haven't had one for over a year. Why? Because Obama's nominee, Dr. Vivek Murthy, despite being highly qualified—he has an MD and an MBA (in Health Care Management) from Yale, is an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School and is an attending physician at a local hospital—he had the temerity to write on Twitter, "Guns are a health care issue," and support a ban on assault weapons... so the National Rifle Association called on their (mostly Republican, but I'm looking at you, Mark Begich!) senatorial cronies and lo and behold, Murthy's nomination was stopped dead... and it's been that way for almost exactly a year now.
And, of course, the other part of the "Ebola crisis" is fear. As any psychologist can tell you, people who are afraid are easily manipulated—and the more afraid they are, the easier the manipulation becomes, especially in the practiced hands of televangelists like Pat "Diamond Mines" Robertson, Rod Parsley and the late Jerry Falwell; linguists like Frank Luntz; and Republican party activists like Turdblossom. The Christian religion "got" that early on, so their clergy invented the concepts of "sin" and "Hell"—and while the parents of us atheists used to threaten that if we didn't eat all our vegetables, "the policeman will come and take you to jail," the churches had an even better argument: Follow our dictates or you'll burn in eternal fire forever.
Of course, that's the message for the proles; pretty much none of the elites—the millionaire/billionaire club—are dumb enough to believe it, which is why they can spend so much time and money screwing over the other 99 percent—which includes most of us.
If you want a prime example, try Kansas. Sam Brownback, once one of the biggest assholes in the U.S. Senate, is now the big asshole in that state's governor's mansion, and in fulfillment of one of his campaign promises, he pushed through the (equally conservative) legislature a personal income tax cut from 6.45 percent to 4.9 percent, and to eliminate small business taxes altogether. Anybody want to guess how well that's working out?
"Kansas has a problem," wrote Josh Barro for the New York Times. "In April and May, the state planned to collect $651 million from personal income tax. But instead, it received only $369 million."
"Meanwhile, Kansas' education and social service funding has taken a big hit," wrote Pat Garofalo for U.S. News & World Report. "...per-pupil general school funding is still 17 percent below pre-recession levels, while 'funding for other services—colleges and universities, libraries, and local health departments, among others—also is way down and declining.'"
There's your conservative paradise—except it ain't paradise for you, only for the rich. And it shouldn't surprise you that Brownback's a big supporter of the Religious Right... and sponsored several Senate bills and convened several Senate investigating subcommittees to look into broadcast "indecency" and the "proliferation of pornography in America."
See, fundamentalist religion and conservative politics is, if you'll pardon the expression, a "match made in heaven." For "fundies," the benefits of conservative politicians in office are enormous. Whether it's claiming with no supporting facts whatsoever that the U.S. is a "Christian nation," passing unconstitutional laws that require administration-led prayers in public schools, censoring textbooks that dare to challenge the science of evolution or that the Earth is more than 6,000 years old, exempting clergy from the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause, making sexual speech as difficult as possible to obtain or create, thwarting real sex education in the schools, opposing doing anything about climate change, or dozens of other "godly" positions, fundies can count on conservative legislators (and school boards) to rubber-stamp their views into law. And let's not forget that it's conservatives that favor federal and state funding for religious schools through so-called "voucher" programs, which funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars per year into church coffers.
"It is a privilege to vote. It is our Christian duty to vote. So vote your biblical values," wrote Jerry Newcombe on the ultra-ultra-conservative Barbwire.com website. "If enough evangelicals and conservative Catholics showed up and voted biblical values, we could carry this election—and virtually every election. Our nation’s founders pledged their lives, their fortunes, and the sacred honor to give us our freedom. The least we could do is vote—and vote our values."
Thanks, IRS, for not clamping down on the 1600 pastors who broke the law this year by endorsing candidates from the pulpit!!!
And if you're wondering why so many fewer people are buying porn anymore, you can thank The Great Recession for eliminating most people's "mad money"—the money they use to treat themselves to non-necessities—and propelling them toward pirate sites and other free content—and even though some of them may be recovering now financially, they've essentially been trained that they don't have to spend money on the one thing that keeps the adult industry from starving.
For conservative politicians, the benefits of fundamentalist churches and clergy are simple: They can be counted upon to gather together millions of people every Sunday (Saturday for conservative Jews) and have firebrand preachers preach at them about the evils of welfare, of government-led healthcare, of economic recovery through raising taxes on the rich and temporarily increasing the national debt, of the sins of premarital sex, extramarital sex or, really, any kind of sex that isn't one man and one woman in bed with the lights out—and then send those millions out to vote for "the candidates that best express our values." They even put out voter guides featuring selectively-phrased "survey results" designed to make liberals look bad... or appear to support positions the liberals don't actually support. (And when a Driehaus-type case actually gets to the Supreme Court, The Nine have already given strong indications that they won't prevent campaign ads from deliberately lying about their opponents' views, or even his/her past actions!)
Anyway, if you've read this far, I applaud you; you've got more "stick-to-it-iveness" than a lot of people I know—and I won't take up further space with more examples (and there are plenty of them) of why any regular citizen who votes for a Republican on Tuesday might as well have taken a slow-acting poison: Because politics in this country is incredibly fucked up, and while neither political party (unlike many other countries, "third parties" aren't worth a shit in the U.S. come election time) is working to make the situation better—that's going to take citizen activism from people like Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and many, many more (and a lot less of this), organizations like the ACLU, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Center for American Progress, Americans United for Separation of Church & State (to name a few) and movements like Occupy—there's one thing we can be pretty sure of: If Republicans are elected, things are going to get a lot worse for each and every one of us a lot more quickly than if a Democrat gets the seat.
And you want to know what the hell of it is? A recent USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll of 800 adults (not the best sample but a reasonable one) found that if Barak Obama, Mitt Romney and an unnamed third party were facing off for the presidency today, 43 percent of both voters and non-voters would still pick Obama, whose approval ratings are in the toilet thanks to the right-wing media, by at least 20 points—but 53 percent of voters would like to see at least one if not multiple legitimate political parties—parties, one might add, that would need to get as much media coverage as the two already-entrenched ones do.
And why don't the non-voters vote? Well, aside from the 6 or 7 million voters Republican-sponsored "anti-fraud" measures aim to keep off the ballot, 59 percent of intentional non-voters agreed with the statement, "Nothing ever gets done. It's a bunch of empty promises." Fifty-four percent agreed, "It is so corrupt," and 42 percent agreed that "There's not a dime's worth of difference between Democrats and Republicans."
Sadly, those 42 percent have a pretty good point going forward: The Democrats are moving even further to the right, and the Republicans barely have any rightward space left to move into short of outright dictatorship—and I wouldn't put it past them, especially with some conservative and religious commentators (and the NRA) floating the idea that things are so bad now under Obama that full-on revolution is the only cure.
But I'm guessing that you don't believe that—so vote as if your life depended on it! ('Cause it does.)
Or would you rather live up to the estimation by Jacob Coxey, a veteran of the "Great Depression" of 1894 (!!!) who was asked to comment on the Great Depression of 1929: "The American people are still dumb as beetles."
