Tuesday, December 07, 2004
Smoke Without Fire
Quote of the Day: "We have long rested comfortably in this country upon the assumption that because our form of government was democratic, it was therefore automatically producing democratic results."--Robert LaFollette, 1911.
It ain't. Take the rush to dismantle Social Security. If we had a rational conversation about it, we'd understand that it's not in the dire straits the Bush gang says it is. And then, we'd weigh the alternatives and arrive at an intelligent plan for its future. But instead of encouraging such rational behavior, the Bush gang is treating Social Security like Iraq, Book II--oh my god oh my god it's in terrible, terrible trouble and we have to privatize it RIGHT NOW or the consequences will be so bad really bad really awful my god you can't imagine. Meanwhile, while they're thinking up worst-case scenarios for Social Security, a real economic crisis is getting treated like inside baseball that matters only to wonks. What I don't know about economics could fill volumes, but I know Stein's Law, first formulated by Nixon economic advisor Herb Stein: "Things that can't go on forever, don't." And we can't keep borrowing money to finance every conservative scheme--like another trillion just to cover the "transitional costs" of the unnecessary privatization of Social Security--without eventually collapsing the infrastructure that makes such borrowing a decent risk for the lenders. A couple of weeks ago, a Morgan Stanley economist said there was a 90 percent chance of "economic armageddon" involving the U.S. economy in the near future. That's a real armageddon, folks--not the Biblical one the wingnuts are waiting for. But that very real fact is considered wonk food unfit for mass consumption.
If our democracy was producing democratic results, we wouldn't be getting beaten over the head with a microscopic minority opinion about what constitutes "decency." Mediaweek reported that in 2003, 99.8 percent of all complaints to the FCC came from one organization: the Parents' Television Council, which hasn't seen anything that didn't offend its membership since Leave it to Beaver went off. (In fact, the very phrase "Beaver went off" would probably give them the fantods.) Writing in The Nation, Robert Scheer wonders how it is that in a nation as moral as this one, Desperate Housewives is the number-one show on TV. If the moral conniption that reelected Bush wasn't so much smoke, wouldn't it have been canceled by now?
"Things that can't go on forever, don't." Maybe we ought try consoling ourselves with that instead of being afraid of it. It's hard to imagine that we won't find out pretty soon whether it's true.
Quote of the Day: "We have long rested comfortably in this country upon the assumption that because our form of government was democratic, it was therefore automatically producing democratic results."--Robert LaFollette, 1911.
It ain't. Take the rush to dismantle Social Security. If we had a rational conversation about it, we'd understand that it's not in the dire straits the Bush gang says it is. And then, we'd weigh the alternatives and arrive at an intelligent plan for its future. But instead of encouraging such rational behavior, the Bush gang is treating Social Security like Iraq, Book II--oh my god oh my god it's in terrible, terrible trouble and we have to privatize it RIGHT NOW or the consequences will be so bad really bad really awful my god you can't imagine. Meanwhile, while they're thinking up worst-case scenarios for Social Security, a real economic crisis is getting treated like inside baseball that matters only to wonks. What I don't know about economics could fill volumes, but I know Stein's Law, first formulated by Nixon economic advisor Herb Stein: "Things that can't go on forever, don't." And we can't keep borrowing money to finance every conservative scheme--like another trillion just to cover the "transitional costs" of the unnecessary privatization of Social Security--without eventually collapsing the infrastructure that makes such borrowing a decent risk for the lenders. A couple of weeks ago, a Morgan Stanley economist said there was a 90 percent chance of "economic armageddon" involving the U.S. economy in the near future. That's a real armageddon, folks--not the Biblical one the wingnuts are waiting for. But that very real fact is considered wonk food unfit for mass consumption.
If our democracy was producing democratic results, we wouldn't be getting beaten over the head with a microscopic minority opinion about what constitutes "decency." Mediaweek reported that in 2003, 99.8 percent of all complaints to the FCC came from one organization: the Parents' Television Council, which hasn't seen anything that didn't offend its membership since Leave it to Beaver went off. (In fact, the very phrase "Beaver went off" would probably give them the fantods.) Writing in The Nation, Robert Scheer wonders how it is that in a nation as moral as this one, Desperate Housewives is the number-one show on TV. If the moral conniption that reelected Bush wasn't so much smoke, wouldn't it have been canceled by now?
"Things that can't go on forever, don't." Maybe we ought try consoling ourselves with that instead of being afraid of it. It's hard to imagine that we won't find out pretty soon whether it's true.
