When Democracy Weakens
By BOB HERBERT
As the throngs celebrated in Cairo, I couldn’t help wondering about what is happening to democracy here in the United States.
Yes. You could have helped wondering. And in all likelihood, you did. But you’ve got a deadline, and you’re trying to mask your utter incompetence in foreign affairs with your utter incompetence in domestic issues. Worst of all, I already know with absolute certainty that it’s going to be fucking stupid.
I think it’s on the ropes.
Says the mouthpiece for the party that’s losing.
We’re in serious danger of becoming a democracy in name only.
We are a democracy in name only; the United States of America is a republic. Those who have successfully navigated 4th grade civics are expected to understand this basic fact.
While millions of ordinary Americans are struggling with unemployment and declining standards of living,
The existence of poverty does not indicate a failure of democracy. This isn’t even an A+B<>C thing. This is a pineapple + socket wrench <> feral cat.
the levers of real power have been all but completely commandeered by the financial and corporate elite.
First, how is one vote per citizen an insufficient distribution of First. for this to indicate a weakening of democracy, I challenge Bob Herbert to name a time when the “levers of real power” were not wielded by the elite. Second, how is one vote per person insufficient
It doesn’t really matter what ordinary people want.
Not when you, a member of the elite, insist on telling the “ordinary people” what they want.
The wealthy call the tune, and the politicians dance.
But the politicians are wealthy. This whole ballad of the impoverished is really falling apart on him.
So what we get in this democracy of ours
It’s a republic.
are astounding and increasingly obscene tax breaks and other windfall benefits for the wealthiest,
The wealthy, who still pay a higher effective income tax rate than anyone else.
while the bought-and-paid-for politicians hack away at essential public services and the social safety net, saying we can’t afford them.
Has this guy even looked at the debt clock?
One state after another is reporting that it cannot pay its bills.
With the exc eption of Texas, pretty much all of them have been Democrat-controlled for years. Illinois. California. New York. New Jersey.
Public employees across the country are walking the plank by the tens of thousands.
In his last column, Herbert made the same asinine point last column. The public sector has shed a total of 2.05% of its jobs. For the most bloated bureaucracy on the planet, this is unacceptably low.
Camden, N.J., a stricken city with a serious crime problem, laid off nearly half of its police force.
Without knowing the internal machinations of Camden, NJ, why should the same ineffectual police apparatus be kept in place when it is so clearly a failure?
Medicaid, the program that provides health benefits to the poor, is under savage assault from nearly all quarters.
That’s because it’s obscenely expensive, and people should be able to provide their own healthcare.
The poor, who are suffering from an all-out depression, are never heard from.
We have more avenues today to hear from the poor than ever before. Twitter. Facebook. Massively powerful political organizations like ACORN assert that they speak for the poor.
And here’s the important repudiation of Herbert’s central thesis that American “democracy” is somehow slipping away: they vote.
In terms of their clout, they might as well not exist.
You could say the same thing about Joe Biden.
The Obama forces reportedly want to raise a billion dollars or more for the president’s re-election bid. Politicians in search of that kind of cash won’t be talking much about the wants and needs of the poor. They’ll be genuflecting before the very rich.
Is Bob Herbert just now finding out that Democrats are the party of the rich? Check out the list of Obama’s top donors in 2008:
University of California $1,591,395
Goldman Sachs $994,795
Harvard University $854,747
Microsoft Corp $833,617
Google Inc $803,436
Citigroup Inc $701,290
JPMorgan Chase & Co $695,132
Time Warner $590,084
Sidley Austin LLP $588,598
Stanford University $586,557
National Amusements Inc $551,683
UBS AG $543,219
Wilmerhale Llp $542,618
Skadden, Arps et al $530,839
IBM Corp $528,822
Columbia University $528,302
Morgan Stanley $514,881
General Electric $499,130
US Government $494,820
Latham & Watkins $493,835
All the banks on this list from JP Morgan to Citi benefitted from Obama’s reckless devaluation of the dollar. Meanwhile, General Electric’s ex-CEO is now in the White House. The reasonable conclusion is that we need to take power and money away from the whims of indebted politicians. This is what the Tea Party is all about.
In an Op-Ed article in The Times at the end of January, Senator John Kerry said that the Egyptian people
Oh, we’re back to Egypt again. I was wondering if the whole Egypt thing was even relevant.
“have made clear they will settle for nothing less than greater democracy and more economic opportunities.”
First, John Kerry has no clue what he’s talking about. This thing in Egypt is more likely to turn out an Islamist coup than it is to turn out a genuine democracy movement.
Americans are being asked to swallow exactly the opposite. In the mad rush to privatization over the past few decades, democracy itself was put up for sale,
I don’t think he realizes it, but this is precisely why the United States is a republic instead of a democracy: to impede the tyranny of the majority. What was privatized never should have been nationalized in the first place.
and the rich were the only ones who could afford it.
I think there’s a clear moral to this story: get rich.
The corporate and financial elites threw astounding sums of money into campaign contributions
And Barack Obama.
and high-priced lobbyists
And Barack Obama.
and think tanks
And Barack Obama.
and media buys
And Barack Obama.
and anything else they could think of.
Barack Obama.
They wined and dined powerful leaders of both parties. They flew them on private jets and wooed them with golf outings and lavish vacations and gave them high-paying jobs as lobbyists the moment they left the government. All that money was well spent. The investments paid off big time.
Truly, I don’t disagree. This is why the government should have less power.
As Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson wrote in their book, “Winner-Take-All Politics”: “Step by step and debate by debate, America’s public officials have rewritten the rules of American politics and the American economy in ways that have benefited the few at the expense of the many.”
At least someone on the left knows what a thesis statement is. It’s a little light on support, though. I’ll blame that on Bob Herbert’s inability to adequately select quotations.
As if the corporate stranglehold on American democracy were not tight enough, the Supreme Court strengthened it immeasurably with its Citizens United decision,
That damn Constitution! It’s always getting in the way of a democracy with its insistence on a republic.
which greatly enhanced the already overwhelming power of corporate money in politics.
I can’t help but think this is just sour grapes because the left got smoked in ’10.
Ordinary Americans have no real access to the corridors of power,
Twitter. Facebook. Phone calls. Marches. Rallies. Petitions. Running for political office. Voting. Raising money—all points of access to the corridors of power.
but you can bet your last Lotto ticket
Seriously? Has the Lotto ticket become the totem of the impoverished? If so, then it must be representative of poor financial decisions, because a lotto ticket holds an expected return somewhere around -70%. By the transitive property of electoral math, does this also mean that Democrats—who overwhelmingly represent the poor—make poor financial decisions?
that your elected officials are listening when the corporate money speaks.
This also speaks to a good argument for term limits.
When the game is rigged in your favor, you win. So despite the worst economic downturn since the Depression, the big corporations are sitting on mountains of cash,
Sitting on “mountains of cash” is extremely bad for a business. It means that investors are dissatisfied because a)that money being held by the company isn’t earning any significant rate of return and b) that money has not been distributed to them through dividends. I hate having to explain this to Bob Herbert. It’s like he doesn’t even read my helpful comments!
the stock markets are up
Again, markets are up only compared to colossal losses. If you bought the S&P index and held from January 1, 2008 until now, you would be down a truly abysmal 8.2%.
and all is well among the plutocrats.
Well, except the Tea Party has significantly undermined the traditional vehicles for power in the Republican Party. For all Bob Herbert rails against the extablishment, he really missed the boat on the anti-establishment Tea Party.
The endlessly egregious Koch brothers, David and Charles, are worth an estimated $35 billion.
Boy, that sounds like the sort of thing we should be celebrating. How many people do they employ?
Yet they seem to feel as though society has treated them unfairly.
Answer: ~80,000.
As Jane Mayer pointed out in her celebrated New Yorker article, “The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry — especially environmental regulation.”
This is a fairly bland overview of the libertarian position. This belief structure holds vastly more support than progressivism. Bob Herbert is really bad at picking quotes. It’s like he didn’t even read this article.
(A good hard look at their air-pollution record would make you sick.)
I can guarantee that Bob Herbert didn’t take a good hard look at anything. He’s not that diligent.
It’s a perversion of democracy, indeed, when individuals like the Kochs have so much clout while the many millions of ordinary Americans have so little.
What? Is the argument here that we need to regulate society to equally distribute an unquantifiable intangible commodity? That’s not democratic. It’s totalitarian.
What the Kochs want is coming to pass.
Freedom?
Extend the tax cuts for the rich? No problem. Cut services to the poor, the sick, the young and the disabled? Check. Can we get you anything else, gentlemen?
Scaled-back regulations on existing industry, eliminated regulations on new business and business expansion, a financial climate that favors stability, a monetary policy that doesn’t debase the currency, and a tax code that doesn’t require millions of dollars spend on compliance.
The Egyptians
Jesus, back to the Egyptians? Haven’t you realized that they’re irrelevant to this article yet?
want to establish a viable democracy,
There is a dearth of evidence that the Egyptians want a democracy.
and that’s a long, hard road.
Americans are in the mind-bogglingly self-destructive process of letting a real democracy slip away.
After an entire article of self-congratulation defending the poor, there is absolutely no evidence of this.
I had lunch with the historian Howard Zinn
What’s the opposite of name-dropping?
just a few weeks before he died in January 2010. He was chagrined about the state of affairs in the U.S.
Of course he was. He was a socialist/anarchist. Those are the type of people that that should be chagrined.
but not at all daunted.
There’s only one thing more deplorable than an old man who clings to a demonstrably failed ideology: an old man who actively recruits the ignorant to his own failed ideology.
“If there is going to be change,” he said, “real change, it will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves.”
I thought of that as I watched the coverage of the ecstatic celebrations in the streets of Cairo.
No comments:
Post a Comment