As we enter our ninth year of the War in Afghanistan with an escalated force, and continue to occupy Iraq indefinitely, and feed an endlessly growing Surveillance State, reports are emerging of the Deficit Commission hard at work planning how to cut Social Security, Medicare, and now even to freeze military pay. But a new New York Times article today illustrates as vividly as anything else what a collapsing empire looks like, as it profiles just a few of the budget cuts which cities around the country are being forced to make.
He then goes on to quote from the Times article:
Plenty of businesses and governments furloughed workers this year, but Hawaii went further -- it furloughed its schoolchildren. Public schools across the state closed on 17 Fridays during the past school year to save money, giving students the shortest academic year in the nation.
Many transit systems have cut service to make ends meet, but Clayton County, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta, decided to cut all the way, and shut down its entire public bus system. Its last buses ran on March 31, stranding 8,400 daily riders.
Even public safety has not been immune to the budget ax. In Colorado Springs, the downturn will be remembered, quite literally, as a dark age: the city switched off a third of its 24,512 streetlights to save money on electricity, while trimming its police force and auctioning off its police helicopters.
But perhaps what was most affecting was the way the article ended. After talking about police cut-backs in Colorado Springs, the article concluded:
At the same time, the city joined others - from Fitchburg, Mass., to Santa Rosa, Calif., and began turning off streetlights. Several recent studies have suggested that streetlights help reduce crime - something residents here say is obvious.
Natalie Bartling, a new mother, could not believe it when the light outside her home was shut off in April. Ms. Bartling, 38, had successfully lobbied for the light five years ago after a wave of vandalism and petty thefts hit her middle-class block. So this time she called daily until the city agreed to turn it back on.
"When it got shut off, it was like missing something," she said on a recent night, standing under its glow. "Part of your life."
At the same time that the GOP is up in arms all across the land over non-exist immigrant crime waves in Arizona and the existential threat of houses of worship in Manhattan, this is what it's doing in Colorado Springs: turning off the lights on civilization.
That's hardly surprising, of course. It's what conservatives have been doing for hundreds of years now. The "Tea Party's" roots aren't in Boston Harbor, they're with the Southern slaveowners, who saw no need for them to be taxed to pay for other people's roads and schools.
What is surprising is that Democrats are barely raising a peep--despite what a boffo campaign issue it would make. They're barely raising a peep, because they're in on the deal, as Obama's ultra-anti-democratic Catfood Commission so clearly demonstrates.
Greenwald goes on to former IMF Chief Economist Simon Johnson in The Atlantic last year "about what happens in under-developed and developing countries when an elite-caused financial crises ensues"--which is, basically, that the oligarchs get bailed out and everyone else gets squeezed, "at least until the riots grow too large," Johnson warns.
"The real question is whether the American public is too apathetic and trained into submission for that to ever happen," Greenwald counters. But another very real question is how we ever got to this place. Because even if we did get riots to stop the worst of the elite looting, without understanding where the problem comes from, the chances of fixing the root of the rot remain slim to none.
We seem to have reached a watershed moment these past two weeks. We've had long enough to process what happened with the Town Hall thuggery, and how it fits into the larger framework of the Democrats' delusional bipartisan fantasy strategy. The GOP has had sufficient time to start building on it, with their McCarthyite attacks on ACORN, and snookering the spineless Dems into going along with them. (Not to mention threatened followup attacks on SEIU). In response, progressives seem to have finally awakened to the fact that we're on our own, and we need to have our own independent strategy that's not subordinate to Obama, and that directly contradicts the Versailles norms by which only Republicans are allowed to be forceful and moralistic--let alone apeshit, batshit, and zombieshit crazy. In light of this, I want to take a look at two broad topics this weekend-perhaps more if I manage to start feeling better. But the top two concerns hare are getting a handle on realignment and the devolution of conservative/GOP lies. Both tie back in part to frontpage diaries earlier this week, but I've got a bunch of other thoughts about them as well-pre-existing intellectual conditions, if you will.
While Chris wrote a diary on Monday, "Wall Street Bailout Thwarting Democratic Realignment", whose main thrust I agree with --that the Wall Street bailout has been massively counter-productive to the goal of building a solid long-term Democratic majority--I disagree with the underpinings of how he's expressed that argument. First off, not all realignments are as clear cut as 1932-1896 was particularly muddled. Second, even 1932 was not immediately as clear cut as it became over the course of time. Thus, while the precedent of 1932 should have been enough to point the way forward quite clearly (massive gov't spending w/ public sector jobs was key), and that example was foolishly disregarded, that doesn't mean that realignment is kaput.
Inevitable Fact--Uncertain Shape
Quite the contrary. I would argue that realignment is an inevitability that we are living through, even though the shape of what we're realigning to remains very much up for grabs, even though it currently looks very disappointing. I would also argue that because we're living through a time of realignment, different rules apply than during normal periods of political struggle. On the one hand, we're likely to see more upsetting primary challenges ala Donna Edwards and Ned Lamont, and these future challenges have the potential to be even more contagious in terms of spreading to other races. On the other hand, temporary compromises and disappointments that would normally signal the ignominious end of reform efforts may well serve to only encourage another round of effort, which will serve to further energize the forces of a progressive realignment.
Neither of these possibilities-the spread of progressive electoral challenges or the followup of more progressive second-round efforts in areas like financial regulation, stimulus funding, and health care reform-are a given. All that I am saying is that during periods of realignment struggles, they are much more possible than they otherwise would be, and we should not, therefore, simply assume that what will happen in the next few years will inevitably mirror what has happened before.
Friday, on Bill Moyers Journal there were a couple of remarkable segments (transcript here). I doubt I'll have time to discuss the segment with Eric Foner, one of America's top historians, but it was really excellent, a sharp contrast to the almost endless mindless blather one routinely hears about Abraham Lincoln. Foner comes at Lincoln as an historian who's written extensively about much more ordinary people of that time, and so he carries a perspective that much more in tune with how the blogosphere sees power today. But I want to focus on the other segment, Glenn Greenwald and Jay Rosen.
What was so good about the segment was not the content per se, which most of us are generally familiar with, but they way they were able to convey it in the tv medium, in a very distilled, but not dumbed-down manner. And I'd like to use that distilled presentation to link what they were saying to a couple of excellent books from the 1990s that can further illuminate the historical background of what we're living through and fighting against.
They began with a discussion of the Daschle affair....
In the wake of the disasterous Bush presidency there are two possible responses. One is that, just like the last time conservatives controlled the country--1920-1932--they are destroying the country. The second is that both sides are to blame. They're both fighting, instead of solving the problems we face. Obama represents the second response, and he is, quite simply, utterly, totally and dangerously wrong. Whatever his intentions may be, action based on this worldview cannot fundamentally reverse the damage that movement conservatism has done to our country. Because of the fierceness of movement conservative opposition, his worldview demands that we change things only modestly in the grand scheme of things.
This is what's at the root of the problems Obama has faced recently, epitomized by his remarks praising Ronald Reagan, however you interpret them. Obama claims he has been misunderstood. But really, it is Obama who fundamentally misunderstands history, and it his misunderstanding that it is the root cause of the confusion he spreads to others. His misunderstanding is based on three inter-related things--a lack of historical knowledge, an acceptance of the dominant political discourse, and a devaluing of material causes and conditions. In particular, the dominant narrative blaming both sides for our political problems, and attributing the cause to bad attitudes in people's heads and hearts, is not just historically inaccurate, it results from a virtual rightwing takeover of the media and many other institutions--a material cause that affects the nature of our political narratives regardless of the actual evidence at hand.
Specifically:
Our problem is not that people are too partisan. The problem is the opposite--there are too many people with divided loyalties, and this has produced a 40-year period dominated by divided government, unlike any other time in our history.
The problem is not that Democrats are too combatative, just like Republicans. There is nothing the Democrats have done that is remotely close to the GOP impeachment of Clinton. To the contrary, the Democratic leadership has refused to even consider impeachment for a list of literally dozens of high crimes and misdemeanors.
The problem is not individual attitudes preventing politicians from agreeing. There are real, fundamental differences, driven by a widening wealth gap, and loss of political power by average people.
Kennedy and Reagan were not transformative leaders. FDR and Nixon were--not necessarily because of who they were, or anything to do with personal charisma, but because they came to power at the true turning points in political alignment--or in Nixon's case, de-alignment.
Let's take these up, one-by-one. The order will change a bit, because of how the evidence flows.
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