Bob Herbert: "All we are good at is bulldozing money to the very wealthy."

[Better Believe It]

Hiding From Reality
By BOB HERBERT
November 19, 2010

Wherever you choose to look — at the economy and jobs, the public schools, the budget deficits, the nonstop warfare overseas — you’ll see a country in sad shape. Standards of living are declining, and American parents increasingly believe that their children will inherit a very bad deal.

We’re in denial about the extent of the rot in the system, and the effort that would be required to turn things around. It will likely take many years, perhaps a decade or more, to get employment back to a level at which one could fairly say the economy is thriving.

.... the U.S. needs to develop a full-employment economy that provides jobs for all who want to work at pay that enables the workers and their families to enjoy a decent standard of living. In other words, a resurrection of the American dream.

Right now, nothing close to that is happening.

The human suffering in the years required to recover from the recession will continue to be immense. And that suffering will only be made worse if the nation embarks on a misguided crash program of deficit reduction that in the short term will undermine any recovery, and in the long term will make true deficit reduction that much harder to achieve.

We’ve become a hapless, can’t-do society, and it’s, frankly, embarrassing. Public figures talk endlessly about “transformative changes” in public education, but the years go by and we see no such thing. Politicians across the spectrum insist that they are all about job creation while the employment situation in the real world remains beyond pathetic.

All we are good at is bulldozing money to the very wealthy. No wonder the country is in such a deep slide.

Please read the full article at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/20/opinion/20herbert.html?_r=1&ref=bobherbert

[geckosfeet]

1. Nice write up. 'Hiding From Reality' - a bit more...

Read more: Hiding From Reality

We're in denial about the extent of the rot in the system, and the effort that would be required to turn things around. It will likely take many years, perhaps a decade or more, to get employment back to a level at which one could fairly say the economy is thriving.

Consider this startling information from the Pew Hispanic Center: in the year following the official end of the Great Recession in June 2009, foreign-born workers in the U.S. gained 656,000 jobs while native-born workers lost 1.2 million. But even as the hiring of immigrants picked up during that period, those same workers "experienced a sharp decline in earnings."

What this shows is not that we should discriminate against foreign-born workers, but that the U.S. needs to develop a full-employment economy that provides jobs for all who want to work at pay that enables the workers and their families to enjoy a decent standard of living. In other words, a resurrection of the American dream.

Right now, nothing close to that is happening.

Read more: Hiding From Reality

[creon]

2. True

Herbert is right. And, it has been building for many years.

The 'man in the street' does not really know what to do about; and, the ones who do have ideas about it do not agree with anyone else. We have become atomized.

The political class appears to be bitterly divided against itself and completely unable to govern; the leaders cannot, or will not, lead.

A sad situation.

[Hydra]

8. Oh no

Quite the opposite is happening. Plenty of people know exactly what needs to happen, but they don't have any power to do it within this system. They refuse to even talk about a new system.

The ones with the power are rolling in it and consolidating, just like in the Great Depression. They crash the system and buy it up, and lots of people die.

It's an interesting train wreck. The people in power are conning people into ignoring what they know to be true in favor of the national myth. Social Security has to be gutted, but ending unnecessary wars and taxing the rich are verboten.

[creon]

9. maybe

I think that some people are too comfortable and too insulated to care. Others are too worried about their own economic problems < and rightly so>.

The political class is, basically, a blind kitten. As a group, they are just standing and watching the country languish.

[Hydra]

10. I disagree about the political class

They know what they are doing- it's their job to sell us things we don't want that come down from the 1%ers.

The question now is, how many of us are they planning to starve out?

[creon]

13. too much credit

I think that you are giving those people too much credit. They are seriously lacking in wit and wisdom. Which makes them more dangerous.

[Fumesucker]

3. True.. But we are world class at it, #1 in fact.. n/t

[KT2000]

4. Embarrassing indeed

the rest of the world knows what is happening here. The only ones who don't are the Repugs.

Thank goodness for Herbert.

[nashville_brook]

5. i wish i could rec this a hundred times -- "smaller government" is just code for bulldozing cash to

good old boys. nothing could be more demoralizing.

[Better Believe It]

6. For Sunday DU'ers

[Flubadubya]

7. Some of the comments are just excellent. Here's a choice excerpt...

"We are facing a real social disaster, and a dramatic fraying of our concept of common citizenship. It's worth noting it didn't have to happen. The Bush tax cuts for the exotically rich were one of the harbingers of worse things to come. Many serious, open eyed commentators said so at the time.

We have an extreme right wing owned and operated media empire, Fox, that wants to make this social disaster a permanent part of our future. They don't target, or need to target, the super rich, instead they target the less politically savvy, less politically informed lower middle classes, designing their attacks on equal sacrifice as "socialism". Virtually every person who goes to the polls in support of this right wing agenda would benefit exceedingly well from anything remotely like the social democracy of a Sweden, France or Germany.

It is all propaganda, a "truth free zone" and the rest of us are its victims, staring like deer in the headlights at a force seemingly beyond our control.

The right wing is a far greater threat to our society than the best organized Islamic terrorists. Only if we wake up and see this will our society be saved. My verdict: highly unlikely. Get out of here while you still can."


-- I just love the term... "exotically rich". It so punctuates the fact of the matter!

[OlympicBrian]

11. Nice piece nt

[DeSwiss]

12. Now here's a telling passage.....

The wreckage from the recession and the nation’s mindlessly destructive policies in the years leading up to the recession is all around us. We still don’t have the money to pay for the wars that we insist on fighting year after year. We have neither the will nor the common sense to either raise taxes to pay for the wars, or stop fighting them.

Bob Herbert raises salient points and yet doesn't go far enough. He doesn't (nor do any of the others I might add) ask why it is that if we don't have the money, that we keep on fighting these Corporate Wars and making the exotic electronic weapons to fight them with, anyhow?

And if it's China who is enabling us to continue to fight these Corporate Wars through the buying of our worthless Treasury paper, then why are they doing it if they run the risk of not being paid back? What's in it for them to continue to give money to Corporate War junkies?

And let's not forget to mention that it is China who sells us (as well as controls the world's supply) of rare earth minerals which are required to enable our electronic Corporate Warfare superiority over everyone else in the first place. So it would be relatively easy to bring things to a halt pretty quickly. If they wanted to. And yet the only thing they seem to do is to complain about us incessantly and occasionally embarrassing us before the world whenever they get the chance. But they keep playing ball. Why?

Another great truth that goes unsaid is that all those dollars printed for the billionaires, the corporate and investment bank bailouts, the economic stimuluses, the saving of antiquated auto companies, and even the belated and anemic investment in green tech is all being paid for with invisible resources. More economic band-aids bought with credit cards from China and others, only with a higher credit limit. And where the dollar's value is what we say it is. And where no one is prepared to argue with us about it. Again, why?

I think we all know the answer:



- Fear.

on edit: spelling

[Better Believe It]

14. What is "the political class"?