President Eisenhower tried to warn us; Frank Rich tries to remind us.
This blog often cites Frank Rich as one of the most astute thinkers and critics of American society and politics. His New York Times column is required reading for anyone who wants to know what is going on in the United States today. He is, simply, the best.
Yesterday’s column is worth recapping, because Rich explores the sense that Americans are starting to wake up to the feeling that they have been “punked”, or taken for what they are worth. He looks at Obama’s promises, and the reality of his administration thus far. He also looks at the Original Punkers, the Republicans, who have made a habit of flat-out lying to their constituents during the current healthcare debate. From Steven Pearlstein in the Washington Post:
The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they’ve given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They’ve become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.
Back to Frank Rich, who watched this and other long-term developments in our political dialogue to write this column. Below are some excerpts, with their original links:
What the Great Recession has crystallized is a larger syndrome that Obama tapped into during the campaign. It’s the sinking sensation that the American game is rigged — that, as the president typically put it a month after his inauguration, the system is in hock to “the interests of powerful lobbyists or the wealthiest few” who have “run Washington far too long.” He promised to smite them.
[....]
What disturbs Americans of all ideological persuasions is the fear that almost everything, not just government, is fixed or manipulated by some powerful hidden hand, from commercial transactions as trivial as the sales of prime concert tickets to cultural forces as pervasive as the news media.
That the system is “fixed” is no longer just the concern of conspiracy theorists. American General and President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned the American public about a growing military-industrial complex in his farewell address:
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
The influence of corporations and the groups that profit from war, defense and the banking system can be seen daily on our cable news programs, which Frank Rich also explores as a cause for the cynicism that the electorate can’t seem to change the system:
It’s a cynicism confirmed almost daily by events. Last week Brian Stelter of The Times reported that the corporate bosses of MSNBC and Fox News, Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric and Rupert Murdoch of News Corporation, had sanctioned their lieutenants to broker what a G.E. spokesman called a new “level of civility” between their brawling cable stars, Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly. A Fox spokesman later confirmed to Howard Kurtz of The Post that “there was an agreement” at least at the corporate level. Olbermann said he was a “party to no deal,” and in any event what looked like a temporary truce ended after The Times article was published. But the whole scrape only fed legitimate suspicions on the right and left alike that even their loudest public voices can be silenced if the business interests of the real American elite decree it.
The tone of Rich’s column hearkens back to Eisenhower; Rich shows that the news you watch is only the news the power structure deems fit to be packaged and consumed:
The revelation of that scandal did not end the practice. Last week MSNBC had to apologize for deploying the former Newsweek writer Richard Wolffe as a substitute host for Olbermann without mentioning his new career as a corporate flack. Wolffe might still be anchoring on MSNBC if the blogger Glenn Greenwald hadn’t called attention to his day job. MSNBC assured its viewers that there were no conflicts of interest, but we must take that on faith, since we still don’t know which clients Wolffe represents as a senior strategist for his firm, Public Strategies, whose chief executive is the former Bush White House spin artist, Dan Bartlett.
Looking to the Democrats to help staunch this hemorrhage of influence in American corridors of power? Don’t. The screaming matches at town-hall meetings, while as astro-turf as tea-bagging, are only aimed at the ‘least worst’ of the pigs at the trough:
As Democrats have pointed out, the angry hecklers disrupting town-hall meetings convened by members of Congress are not always ordinary citizens engaging in spontaneous grass-roots protests or even G.O.P. operatives, but proxies for corporate lobbyists. One group facilitating the screamers is FreedomWorks, which is run by the former Congressman Dick Armey, now a lobbyist at the DLA Piper law firm. Medicines Company, a global pharmaceutical business, has paid DLA Piper more than $6 million in lobbying fees in the five years Armey has worked there.
But the Democratic members of Congress those hecklers assailed can hardly claim the moral high ground. Their ties to health care interests are merely more discreet and insidious. As Congressional Quarterly reported last week, industry groups contributed almost $1.8 million in the first six months of 2009 alone to the 18 House members of both parties supervising health care reform, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer among them.
Welcome, America, to your system of governance and information.
The news organizations are failing to inform
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Joan Rivers – a Musto-inspired photographic essay
I’m living with a ghost in New Jersey
A man has lived in a van outside my home for 8 years
Making out in public – good or bad?
Obama Condoms in Union Square
New York City water shots
It’s too bad Barack Obama has to compete with an existing system.
Twitter: davidshankbone
says:
True, but we (the voters) allowed it to get this way.
Twitter: peteforsyth
says:
This column and blog post are a pretty succinct statement of why I find it important to edit Wikipedia. For all its shortcomings, I believe its structure is about the least likely to be systematically subverted to serve any particular agenda. Not that it’s perfect, but it’s a good model.