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.
The first comes from one of the most important political books of the past decade, Democracy Heading South: National Politics in the Shadow of Dixie by Augustus B. Cochran III, which I've written about a number of times.. His main insight is that American politics circa 2000 is strikingly similar to Southern politics circa 1950, with different structures fulfilling similar (dys)functions, like lungs vs. gills. Here's Publishers Weekly with more:
Cochran, a native Georgian labor lawyer and professor of political science at Agnes Scott College, uses V.O. Key's 1949 classic, Southern Politics, as a blueprint for analyzing fundamental structural pathologies in contemporary American politics, which he does with chilling clarity. "Key argued that because Southern politics lacked strong, responsive parties, was based on a narrow electorate, and was designed to perpetuate white supremacy, Southern electoral institutions lacked the coherence, continuity, and accountability that could make Southern politics rational and democratic." Just as this politics hobbled the South's ability to become an industrial democracy, Cochran argues, its contemporary structural twin is crippling America's ability to become a postindustrial democracy, with policies shaping global market forces to serve the common good.
"Specifically, the maladies of the Solid South included elections that ignored or blurred issues; weak, elitist and even demagogic leaders; a proclivity to avoid problems and coast along with the status quo; rampant corruption and policymaking by deals; voters who were confused and apathetic; an appallingly narrow electoral base, including low turnout among even those lucky enough to be enfranchised; a resulting tilt toward the elites, while the have-not majority got taken for a ride." Explaining this list's familiar ring, Cochran fuses insights from an impressive range of fields, tracing the interaction of money in politics with historical processes of party realignment and carefully nuanced racial politics to produce a poorly aligned national two-party system that bears many one-party characteristics. Attentive to differences as well as similarities between the Old South and American politics today, Cochran's argument is subtle yet sweeping, profound yet almost self-evident once his powerfully coherent picture is completed.
What's most crucial here is the way that money and media-driven "bipartisanship" today mimics the dysfunction of the one-party South in 1950. Both render impossible a democratically-responsive, reality-based politics capable of moving forward the society, polity and economy.
The second part of my answer comes from a just-published paper I haven't yet had time to read properly. But it's by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, whose book Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy was in effect a direct logically extension of Cochrane's book, showing how conservative forces operating through the GOP took advantage of the decayed political system that Cochran described to shift the GOP's balance far to the right of where its voting base was. The new paper--"Winner-Take-All Politics: Public Policy, Political Organization, and the: Precipitous Rise of Top Incomes in the United States", linked to by David Kaib in a comment last Thursday--essentially expands the scope of their analysis to encompass how the entire political system had dramatically disengaged with the values, interests and concerns of the American people as a whole.
One of the key points that they make is that under the existing political system, what matters most is not the position of the median voter, but rather the position of key powerful special interests. "Well, duh!" you may well say. But making common sense rigorous is no easy task. Fleshing this out somewhat, here's the paper's abstract:
The dramatic rise in inequality in the United States over the past generation has occasioned considerable attention from economists, but strikingly little from students of American politics. This has started to change: in recent years, a small but growing body of political science research on rising inequality has challenged standard economic accounts that emphasize apolitical processes of economic change.
For all the sophistication of this new scholarship, however, it too fails to provide a compelling account of the political sources and effects of rising inequality. In particular, these studies share with dominant economic accounts three weaknesses: (1) they downplay the distinctive feature of American inequality--namely, the extreme concentration of income gains at the top of the economic ladder; (2) they miss the profound role of government policy in creating this "winner-take-all" pattern; and (3) they give little attention or weight to the dramatic long-term transformation of the organizational landscape of American politics that lies behind these changes in policy.
These weaknesses are interrelated, stemming ultimately from a conception of politics that emphasizes the sway (or lack thereof) of the "median voter" in electoral politics, rather than the influence of organized interests in the process of policy making. A perspective centered on organizational and policy change--one that identifies the major policy shifts that have bolstered the economic standing of those at the top and then links those shifts to concrete organizational efforts by resourceful private interests--fares much better at explaining why the American political economy has become distinctively winner-take-all.
I'll have much more to say about this later in the week (fortune willing), but I didn't want to let Greenwald's observation fly by without drawing attention to the fact that the collapse he's describing is not simply a suddenly phenomena that came out of nowhere. Nor is it something we have to endless debate without ever getting anywhere. There very cogent thinkers who've devoted a lot of thought to what's going on and what's behind it.
If we want to be serious and want to be effective in responding to elite attempt to destroy our civilization, then there a lot of folks with good information, but a very small group of folks who are miles ahead in thinking through how it all fits together.
STATE BLOGS
