If you've read Karl Marx you can probably imagine a solution to the US debt ceiling crisis. The government is poor but giant corporations are rich. Why doesn't the Obama Administration appropriate the necessary sums from private companies and wealthy individuals via taxes or nationalisation? The Post answers: "But while the country is flush with assets, it doesn't mean the government can seize them to pay for public debt."
Why not? The article doesn't say. Nor does it use the dreaded phrase "no one seriously thinks that..." But it's there all the same. Because the US doesn't officially countenance socialist economic solutions, advocates of European-style socialized medicine were dismissed by President Obama as naà ¯ve (and not Serious). Even when the federal government transferred hundreds of billions of dollars to banks and insurance companies during the 2008-09 meltdown, calls for accountability were dismissed as unrealistic. Not pragmatic. Nationalisation? Definitely not serious. Clownlike, really.
As Daniel Larison says, the track record of the Serious Ones is atrocious. And yet, on one story after another, even relatively minor ones, the US media continues to turn yesterday's "no one thinks" into today's "everyone knows."
In 2006 Trevor Bormann told ABC-TV viewers that the world would never again see the famous statues blown up by the Taliban at Bamiyan: "Archaeologists and restorers are now cataloging every significant piece of rubble but no one seriously thinks the Buddhas can ever be rebuilt."
Here's Joanna Kakissis of National Public Radio, less than a month ago:
"At the time they were blown up, the statues were the largest Buddha carvings in the world, and it seemed they were gone for good. But today, teams from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, along with the International Council on Monuments and Sites, are engaged in the painstaking process of putting the broken Buddhas back together."
It won't be as easy to rebuild Americans' trust in their journalistic institutions.
Cross-posted from Al Jazeera
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