Systemic Fault Lines

The witless chatter that consumes so much media and congressional air time is never-ending. No matter how often health-care reform is defined, for example, Republicans keep repeating the same talking points about a government takeover that will destroy the doctor-patient relationship and ration health care, ignoring of course that insurance companies are the interlopers, the deniers and the greedy consumers of health-care $$.

The party insists that free enterprise is the glue that holds the country together and that market forces will return it to prosperity. Never mind that free-wheeling money handlers bundled unsound mortgages into precarious investment properties that brought the country close to financial ruin. It’s easier to blame Fannie and Freddie and ACORN. The bad actors accept no responsibility for their malfeasance, and Republicans assure us that regulating market forces is the death knell of future wealth and job creation.

And when it suits their purposes they use the issue of illegal immigration to fire up the base. But as Barbara Ehrenreich put it in her book This Land is Their Land, “There may be reasonable arguments for limiting immigration, but it wasn’t a Mexican who took away your pension and sold you on a dodgy mortgage.” Often the most important factors affecting the lives of ordinary people are lost in misdirected anger. In a depressed labor market there may be jobs citizens are now willing to take and there are undoubtedly employers who hire cheap labor, no questions asked. But it is the failure of our leaders to address these issues that allows disorder to disrupt attention to and enactment of palliative measures.

We continue to be lectured by miscreants who left a minefield of problems in their wake. If it’s not Dick Cheney, it’s daughter Liz babbling the same self-serving pablum. Why is it that when conservative critics try to distract from the failings of the previous administration about everything from international conflicts to health care they aren’t laughed out of public view but are provided instead with a platform? And why do we keep hearing about the success of “the surge” in Iraq when the lull in violence there was due in great measure to the “awakening” by Sunni factions who turned against Al Qaeda? Recently the relative calm there has been shattered by a spate of violence the Maliki government seems incapable of quelling. Does that conform to any definition of success?

There is no end to the strange logic that permeates our public dialogue. In a recent interview, Professor Verret, of George Mason University, told a caller who was distressed about job losses and income deprivation that top executives had suffered too, losing hundreds of millions of dollars. Without a hint of how strangely detached from the lives of regular folks his response was, Verret’s remark confirmed what many people already believe - - corporate executives are way overpaid and their relationship with the society at large is aloof and mean-spirited.

As the health-care debate rages on, it seems unlikely the insurance industry will be forced to play fair with the American people. When investors pressure companies to satisfy their lust for profits, serving the public is just not the ultimate goal. And, when politicians are showered with campaign contributions to protect corporate interests, guess who gets left out.  Lately Republicans are in self-congratulatory mode over their role in establishing the Medicare Part D prescription drug plan even though no additional revenue was generated to pay for it and big pharma gobbled up big profits. That costly, unfunded mandate was pummeled through Congress then but a public option now is deemed too expensive by legislators suddenly grown fiscally responsible.

We are, unfortunately, an unfocused lot, ripe for manipulation by the unscrupulous legions that populate our politics and march across our TV screens. We seem not to have learned how to entertain a healthy level of skepticism. As Frank Rich wrote, NY Times, 10/25/09, about the “balloon boy” media blitz, “…even slightly jaundiced onlookers might have questioned how a balloon could waft …through the skies for hours with a 6-year-old boy hidden within its contours. That so few did is an indication of how practiced we are at suspending disbelief when watching anything labeled news whether the subject is W.M.D.s in Iraq or celebrity gossip in Hollywood.”

Maybe if we try really hard we can conquer the twin demons of ignorance and greed and begin to speak truth to power.