The long-discontinued cartoon Pogo was famous for one particular insight that Pogo– an amiable, philosophical opossum–shared with his friend Albert the Alligator: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
No kidding.
Is the American public ill-served by a media that has abandoned journalism for propaganda and celebrity? Whose fault is that?
Who clicks on the links about missing blonds in Aruba or Kim Kardashian’s latest selfies while ignoring well-sourced, comprehensive news reports? Who tunes in to talk radio and Faux News in order to have urban legends repeated and prejudices reinforced? America’s media is a business; it responds to the market and gives us what we demonstrably want–entertainment, not credible, verifiable information.
Are the interests of voters and citizens alike ignored by the squabbling fools in Congress? Who elected them?
And whose apathy will re-elect most of them, even after ongoing demonstrations of their inability to compromise, negotiate or do the public’s business. Even after it becomes embarrassingly clear that many of them have zero understanding of the Constitution they’ve sworn to uphold. Even after it becomes abundantly clear that they are doing the bidding of their donors rather than concerning themselves with the interests of their constituents.
Yep. We have met the enemy, and it is most definitely us.
I was pondering a post about Netanyahu’s speech and its rapturous reception by the chickenhawks in Congress, but Fred Kaplan at Slate beat me to it:
Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before Congress on Tuesday was a disturbing spectacle: shallow, evasive, short on logic, and long on cynicism.
The Israeli prime minister pretended to criticize the specific deal that the United States and five other nations are currently negotiating with Iran, but it’s clear from his words that he opposes any deal that falls short of Iran’s total disarmament and regime change. He pretended merely to push for a “better deal,” but he actually was agitating for war….
It’s worth noting, for now, that Netanyahu has been consistently wrong on this whole issue. He denounced the interim accord, signed a year ago, as a fraud that wildly favored the Iranians and that the Iranians would soon violate anyway; in fact, it’s been remarkably effective at freezing Iran’s nuclear activities, while freeing up a small fraction of its sanctioned funds. For the past 15 years, he’s been warning that Iran could or would go nuclear in the next year—and yet, here he still stands, in a Middle East where the only nation with nuclear weapons is his own.
I agree with Kaplan–and with the sober analysts (including, importantly, military leaders in Israel) who have warned that this Bibi/Boehner bit of political theater not only undermines the longstanding partnership between the U.S. and Israel, but misrepresents the threat posed by Iran.
But what Kaplan and others haven’t addressed is even more disturbing: the Republican worldview–prominently on display during Bibi’s speech–that celebrates impetuous saber-rattling, prefers armchair “warriors” (let’s you and him fight) to thoughtful diplomats, and approaches all potential conflicts through a lens with only two categories: good guys or “evil doers.” It’s a worldview that valorizes strongmen like Putin, war criminals like Cheney and shallow, self-righteous “leaders” like Netanyahu.
It’s a worldview that prefers the simplicity of the bumper-sticker to the messy complexity of the real world. It’s childish– and it’s incredibly dangerous.
Some of what Pew’s research tells us is unsurprising: political participation is highest at the “poles”–both ideological liberals and ideological conservatives participate more than their less ideological fellow-citizens. The category they call “consistent conservative” is heavily dominated by rural folks. When it comes to raising children, conservatives prioritize responsibility, faith and hard work, with faith identified as particularly important; while responsibility led among all five of Pew’s ideological categories, religious faith was chosen by significantly more consistent conservatives than all other groups.
These findings tend to confirm what most observers would have expected. The surprise–at least, to me–came from the conclusion that “Consistent conservatives participate in politics at higher rates than most other ideological groups.”
Half of consistent conservatives, for example, said they had contacted an elected official within the past two years – the highest level of any of our five groups. (The corresponding figure for all Americans, by the way, was 28%.) Consistent conservatives also ranked high on other measurements of political engagement, such as donating money (26%), attending campaign events (24%) and volunteering on a campaign (12%).
Those of us who wonder who elects the scientifically illiterate, the religiously intolerant “Christian Nation” folks, and the other assorted crazies have our answer.
Are you one of those soft-headed “libruls” who want to decriminalize pot? If so, add this to your list of arguments.
A new study compared all kinds of substances, and found that pot is more than 100 times safer than alcohol.(They didn’t take the “munchies” and consequential obesity into account, however…) Researchers found that booze is actually the deadliest substance of all, and–based upon their findings– recommended that US law enforcement focus a lot less on pot-related crimes.
Those are the top-line findings of recent research published in the journal Scientific Reports, a subsidiary of Nature. Researchers sought to quantify the risk of death associated with the use of a variety of commonly used substances. They found that at the level of individual use, alcohol was the deadliest substance, followed by heroin and cocaine.
So, put that in your pipe and smoke it. (Okay, a little inappropriate humor there….)
For the past thirty years, at least, criminal justice scholars have documented the flaws in American drug policy. The drug war has been a costly, monumental failure–in addition to its clear failure to reduce hard drug use, it has decimated communities of color, ruined countless lives, distorted foreign policy…and the beat goes on.
Drug use is not the same thing as drug abuse. And drug abuse should be addressed as the public health issue it is, not through the criminal justice system. (You’d think we might have learned a thing or two about overreaction during Prohibition…)
When ideology and “morality” trump evidence and common sense, you get profoundly stupid policies. We do “profoundly stupid” a lot.
Lest the title of this post confuse you, I’m not talking about the fair trade goods that stock the shelves of shops run by well-meaning nonprofits. That movement—to insure that craftspeople abroad are paid fairly for the goods they make—is well intentioned and important, but it isn’t the subject at hand.
The operation of a market economy—capitalism—rests upon a definition of what constitutes a fair trade. It is usually framed as the amount that a willing buyer and a willing seller, both of whom are in possession of all relevant information, agree is a fair price for the goods or services in question.
There are, rather obviously, economic areas where markets don’t work. Health care (no matter what GOP congressmen insist) is one of those, because the buyer and seller do not both possess all relevant information. Economists call this “information asymmetry.” As a practical matter, when one party to a transaction has important information that the other party doesn’t have, the party with the information has an unfair advantage.
There are other situations where markets can be manipulated. One of the most common involves externalities.
Economists use the term “externalities” to refer to the costs of an economic activity that aren’t paid by either party to the primary exchange, but are instead “offloaded” to someone else—typically, taxpayers. The most common example is pollution: a local factory produces a toxic chemical in the process of manufacturing its widgets, but rather than properly and safely disposing of that chemical and including the cost of disposal in the price of the widget, the factory owner dumps it in a nearby river.
The seller makes a bigger profit, and the buyer gets a better deal on his widget purchase. Meanwhile, we taxpayers pay to clean up the river.
Most of us have no problem identifying this as unfair all around. Such practices distort the marketplace, allowing people who break the rules to profit at the expense of the rest of us.
In today’s economy where the lines between public and private are being increasingly blurred, where private-sector companies ask for—and receive—government subsidies and favorable regulations, where the corporations that can afford well-connected lobbyists enjoy privileges that are unavailable to the mom and pop store on the corner, externalities are harder to detect.
America is in real danger of losing real capitalism. Increasingly, what we have is corporatism, and that’s a very different animal.
Corporatism has been defined as the socio-political organization of a society by corporate interest groups. And all signs are that we aren’t stopping there; the words “oligarchy” and “plutocracy” are more frequently heard in American political discourse these days.
Today’s plutocrats and oligarchs are the rich and superrich who effectively dictate economic policy. And they make the widget factory guy look like a piker.
When markets work as they should, where they should, they really do operate as Adam Smith described; the “hidden hand” improves life for all of us. When the system has been corrupted—when, in transaction after transaction, we socialize the risks and costs and privatize the profits—the only people who prosper are the “haves.” And the greedy.
