What’s wrong with this picture?
Jonathan Chait on our Alice in Wonderland world in which Obama and the Dems bailed out Big Business interests that are now backing Republicans, while the income gap between the uber-rich and the rest grows. His aptly-titled post is “What does it profit a man.”
Let’s sum up the economic situation. Unemployment is high, and average Americans are in a desperate, fearful situation. Meanwhile, corporate profits are at record levels:
Profits have surged 62 percent from the start of 2009 to mid-2010, according to the Commerce Department. That is faster than any other year and a half in the Fabulous ’50s, the Go-Go ’60s or the booms under Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.
Meanwhile, the most popular analysis of our economic troubles — not just among furious, self-interested business tycoons but more moderate elements of the political elite as well — holds that the primary problem is that the Obama administration is too hostile to business. It’s quite remarkable.
Meanwhile, the Democrats have the worst of both worlds. A top-heavy economy is causing them massive grief among suffering voters, and the only people who are actually doing well are lambasting them as socialists.
http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/78767/what-does-it-profit-man
There’s nothing “quite remarkable” about it: as Chait himself observes in the opening graph, “unemployment is high, and Americans are in a fearful, desperate situation.” Fearful, desperate people usually don’t have either time or inclination for patient, lucid analysis of the economic and political landscape. They take what’s provided by the Beltway media, which is itself a part of the political apparatus. The role of the Beltway media is not to offer insight, but to ratify the consensus already reached by the business tycoons (whose ownership of the media set the parameters for “responsible” discussion) and their flunkies in Washington.
One of whom is named Barack Obama. It’s true that Obama has cut taxes for most Americans; it’s also true that he’s provided some other goodies (easier student loans, etc.) But he’s also rightly perceived as a friend of Wall Street — which, despite all the bleatings of liberals in this venue and others, he undeniably is. Obama isn’t peculiar in this regard — the Democratic Party has effectively abandoned the working class, the poor, and struggling elements of the middle class to go a-whoring after the professional/managerial elites and corporate tycoons. So when Republicans mobilize the disgruntled under the banner of “anti-elitism” — the rank hypocrisy and falsity of which most people have neither the time nor the inclination to analyze — the Democrats have no credible alternative rallying cry.
Of course Obama and the Democrats aren’t “socialists.” But since the corporate narrative has been the dominant mythology for the last forty years; since the lamestream media is too stupid, lazy, and complicit to question it; and since there is no really politically efficacious left in America at the present — well, you get the political vernacular we have.
Just a case in point, David — ABC News is going to have Andrew Breitbart providing election night analysis on Tuesday. Andrew Breitbart — confirmed serial slanderer, especially of Shirley Sherrod, who was, recall, thrown to the wolves by the gutless Obama Administration. (Oh, right, she received an apology from President YesWeCan himself. Thanks, Mr. Audacity.) When an odious and oft-exposed liar like Breitbart is put on prime time, why should anyone find it “quite remarkable” that many Americans think the Democrats are Bolsheviks?
Eugene –
Do you have to call the president a “flunkie”? It weakens your argument.
Ann — Yes, because he is a flunky. It only weakens my argument if you don’t agree that he is one.
Eugene –
I agree with a lot you say. But when you rely on pure rhetoric, you disincline me to listen to the rest. Who is your audience — people who already agree with you?
“Americans are in a fearful, desperate situation.”
I just don’t think this feeling is based on a single and statistic like unemployment. It is a sense of insecurity evolving into dread that has been growing for many years now, as Americans are aware that the American machine has not been running on all cylinders for a long time. Unemployment surely is part of it, as is the national debt, and the government debt, and slipping performance in education, and falling property values, and the rising number of nuclear powers, and the lack of success in the ‘war on terror’ etc. Many of these are things that no president and party can do something about in a single election cycle.
Maybe what the country really needs is an Administrator-of-Zoloft-in-chief to make us feel better about our situation.