Hermetic Systems and Mad Elephants
Six years later, we are indeed poorer in all the obvious ways, and some not so obvious ones as well. How, then, could the 2010 midterms be the most dispiriting elections of my life, especially when Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News assured us, in the days leading up to the event, that it would have "the power to reshape our nation's politics." Okay, you and I know that's BS, part of the endless, breathless handicapping of the midterms that went on non-stop for weeks on the TV news?
Still, the most dispiriting? After all, I'm the guy who penned a piece eight days after the 2008 election entitled "Don't Let Barack Obama Break Your Heart." In what was, for most people I knew, a decidedly upbeat moment, I then wrote, for instance: "So, after January 20th, expect Obama to take possession of George Bush's disastrous Afghan War; and unless he is far more skilled than Alexander the Great, British Empire builders, and the Russians, his war, too, will continue to rage without ever becoming a raging success."
And take my word for it, when I say dispiriting I'm not even referring to just how dismal my actual voting experience was today in New York City. I mean, two senators and a governor I don't give a whit about and not a breath of fresh air anywhere -- not unless you count our Republican gubernatorial and "Tea Party" candidate, a beyond-mad-as-hell businessman, who made a fortune partially thanks to state government favors and breaks of every sort and then couldn't wait to take out that government. (And when Carl Paladino talks about taking something out, you instinctively know that he's not a man of metaphor.) Okay, that is dispiriting, just not in a lifetime award kind of way.
No, it's the whole airless shebang we call an election that's gotten to me, the bizarrely hermetic, self-financing, self-praising, self-promoting system we still manage to think of as "democratic." That includes the media echo chamber that's been ginning up this nationally nondescript season as an epochal life-changer via a powerfully mad -- as in mad elephant populace ready to run amok.
What Goes Up"
I'm no expert on elections, but sometimes all you need is a little common sense. So let's start with a simple principle: what goes up must come down.
For at least 30 years now, what's gone up is income disparity in this country. Paul Krugman called this period "the Great Divergence." After all, between 1980 and 2005, "more than 80% of total increase in Americans' income went to the top 1%" of Americans in terms of wealth, and today that 1% controls 24% of the nation's income. Or put another way, after three decades of "trickle-down" economics, what's gone up are the bank accounts of the rich.
In 2009, for instance, as Americans generally scrambled and suffered, lost jobs, watched pensions, IRAs, or savings shrink and houses go into foreclosure, millionaires actually increased. According to the latest figures, the combined wealth of the 400 richest Americans (all billionaires) has risen by 8% this year, even as, in the second quarter of 2010, the net worth of American households plunged 2.8%.
And in this election year, dispiritingly enough, it's clear what went up is indeed coming down. It's been true for years in our electoral campaigns, of course, but this year we're talking genuine financial downpour. Up at the top, individually and corporately, ever more money is on hand to "invest" in protecting what one already possesses or might still acquire. Hence, this election has a price tag that "obliterates" all previous midterm records. It's estimated at $4 billion to $4.2 billion, mostly from what is politely called "fundraising" or from "outside interest groups" -- in other words, from that 1% and some of the wealthiest corporations, mainly for ad and influence campaigns. In other words, the already superrich and the giant corporations that sucked up so much dough over the last 30 years now have tons of it to "invest" in our system in order to reap yet more favors -- to invest, that is, in Sharron Angle and Harry Reid. If that isn't dispiriting, what is?
The right-wing version of this story is that a thunderstorm of money is being invested in a newly aroused, mad-as-hell crew of Americans ready to storm to power in the name of small government, radically reduced federal deficits, and of course lower taxes. This is a fantasy concoction, though, even if you hear it on the news 24/7. First of all, those right-wing billionaire and corporate types are not for small government. They regularly and happily back, and sometimes profit from, the ever-increasing power of the (national security) state to pry, peep, suppress, and oppress, abridge liberties and make war (endlessly) abroad. They are Pentagon lovers. They adore the locked-down "homeland."
In addition, they are for the government giving them every sort of break, any sort of hand -- just not for that government laying its hands on them. They are, in this sense, America's real welfare queens. They want a powerful, protective state, but one that benefits them, not us. All of those dollars that scaled the heights in these last decades are now helping to fund their program. For what they need, they only have to throw repeated monkey wrenches into the works and the Tea Party, which really isn't a party at all, is just the latest of those wrenches.
...Must Come Down...
Faced with all our national woes, are we really a mad-as-hell nation? On that, the jury is out, despite the fact that you've heard how "angry" we are a trillion times in the "news." Maybe we're a depressed-as-hell nation. There's no way to tell, even though the anger story glued eyeballs this election season. What we do know, however, is that the rich-as-hell crew are making good use of the mad-as-hell ones.
Amy Gardner of the Washington Post recently offered us a revealing report on the Tea Party landscape. Of the 1,400 Tea Party groups nationwide that the Post tried to contact, it reached 647. Many of the rest may have ceased to exist or may never have existed at all. ("The findings suggest that the breadth of the tea party may be inflated.") What the Post researchers found bore little relationship to the angry, Obama-as-Hitler-sign-carrying older crew supposedly ready to storm the gates of power. They discovered instead a generally quiescent movement in which "70% of the grass-roots groups said they have not participated in any political campaigning this year." Most of them were small, not directly involved in the midterm scramble or even electoral politics, and meant to offer places to talk and exchange ideas. Not exactly the stuff of rebellion in the streets.
On the other hand, the funding machines like Tea Party Express (run by Sal Russo, longtime Republican operative, aide to Ronald Reagan, and fundraiser/media strategist for former New York governor George Pataki), FreedomWorks (run by Dick Armey, former Republican House majority leader), and Americans for Prosperity (started by oil billionaire David Koch) have appropriated the Tea Party name nationally and were pouring money into "Tea Party candidates." And don't forget the Tea-Partyish funding groups set up by Karl Rove, George W. Bush's bosom buddy and close advisor.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
