D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
January 2010
Another Fine Mess
Is America headed the way of California — becoming ungovernable?
New Year's messages — particularly those at the start of a new decade — are supposed to be filled with hope for the future and brave talk about how we'll face tomorrow's challenges together, holding hands and singing "Kumbaya." As a difficult, divisive year passes into the history books and an even more strife-filled year of midterm elections begins, however, the proper rah-rah spirit proves elusive. Even last January, in the depths of the worst economic downturn since 1929, optimism seemed easier to grasp: We had an energetic new president who embodied turning the page on the past and talked boldly of bridging the nation's partisan divide. It was, indeed, the dawning of a brave new world.
If nothing else, 2009 serves as a bitter reminder of the irony inherent in that quote from Shakespeare's The Tempest:
"O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!"
You could apply many adjectives to the protesters who rallied last fall outside the US Capitol waving signs that depicted piles of bodies at Dachau, captioned "National Socialist Healthcare," but "beauteous" would not be among them.
While America has always had a lunatic fringe, what's alarming about the political scene as 2010 begins is that it's no longer confined to the fringe. As Paul Krugman noted in The New York Times, that rally with its Hitler references was sponsored by the House Republican leadership, with senior lawmakers in attendance. Did these leaders disavow the extremism on display? "Not very helpful" was the strongest condemnation Rep. Eric Cantor, the second-ranking House Republican, could muster.
This is not to pick on the Republicans — Democrats had their own loony paranoiacs when they were the party out of power. The problem, as Krugman put it, is that "the GOP has been taken over by the people it used to exploit." Since 1968, Republicans have achieved electoral success in part by playing on paranoia and — to be brutally honest — racism (as any objective appraisal of Nixon's "Southern strategy" would have to conclude). But once in power, they've catered more to Wall Street than to the element that historian Richard Hofstadter presciently described in a 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," who believe that: "America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion."
Until 2008, the GOP could count on the votes of this angry element without actually having to deliver more than symbolism. But a sort of "perfect storm" of political and social changes has altered that equation: the brutal recession, the election of the first African-American president, a power vacuum in the GOP leadership that's been filled by talk radio and Fox News, the failure of American institutions as epitomized by the Iraq war and the deficit, the realization by white America that its majority days are numbered.
So now, instead of a "loyal opposition," we have Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. "Because these people aren't interested in actually governing," Krugman pointed out, "they feed the base's frenzy instead of trying to curb or channel it." Republicans define themselves only as in opposition to President Obama's policies, without offering genuine alternatives or solutions.
While that approach has succeeded in eroding Obama's popularity and dragging down the Democrats — who scored only a 39% approval rating in a new CNBC poll — it's been even harder on the Republicans themselves: That same poll gave the GOP only a 26% approval rating.
But the state of the GOP is only a symptom of what's ailing America. That same CNBC poll found that only 39% of Americans have confidence in the Supreme Court, 24% in the Federal Reserve, 19% in the US Treasury, 18% in FEMA and 15% in Congress. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that 65% of respondents trust the government in Washington to do the right thing "only some of the time," while an alarming 11% said "never."
It's not just government we don't trust: Only 17% have confidence in health-insurance companies, according to the CNBC poll, 10% in the financial industry.
In another recent New York Times column, Thomas L. Friedman suggests a half-dozen reasons for the fracturing of "our public space" and paralyzing of "our ability to forge optimal solutions" to the nation's challenges:
- The pervasive influence of money in politics, putting politicians in the pockets of special interests.
- The gerrymandering of political districts "means politicians of each party can now choose their own voters and never have to appeal to the center."
- The "cable TV culture" that "encourages shouting and segregates people into their own political echo chambers."
- A permanent presidential campaign that "leaves little time for governing."
- The Internet, which "at its worst provides a home for every extreme view and spawns digital lynch mobs."
- A US business community so globalized that it no longer speaks in the national interest.
Both Krugman and Friedman warn that these trends threaten the "Californiafication" of the whole country, making the US as ungovernable as that state has become. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proven incapable of "terminating" California's dysfunction, Friedman notes, adding, "A lot of the disappointment settling in among Obama voters today is prompted by the dawning realization that maybe, like Arnold, he can't" fix what seems broken in our body politic.
But does the fault really lie with our elected leaders? It's true, to give the Democrats' failings equal time here, that Reid, Pelosi et al have proven startlingly inept at holding the reins of power handed them in the 2008 elections. Health-care reform, in particular, has unfolded in a Frankenstein's monster-like shambling of fits and starts. People elected as Democrats — such as our own Rep. Harry Teague, about whom more in the next item — have reneged on their campaign pledges and joined what Jonathan Chait of The New Republic calls "Republican nihilists."
Right here in New Mexico, as we observed in this space last issue, Gov. Bill Richardson has presided over a spending spree that would make drunken sailors blush — and now we're all having to pay the piper.
No wonder 13% of those in the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll said they have a negative view of both parties.
But what, we wonder, would really happen if a politician — from either party — found the courage to propose tough yet necessary solutions to what ails America? Dramatic and difficult changes in Social Security to insure its long-term viability. A big hike in the federal gas tax to help break our addiction to foreign oil. Deep cuts in your favorite government giveaway or entitlement program to address the deficit.
Could such a truly straight-talking politician get elected? Not a chance.
The awful truth is that, whether it's Harry Reid or Mitch McConnell, we mostly get the leaders we deserve. People propose term limits as one way to throw the rascals out, but that's just a gimmick to substitute for electoral willpower. You want to throw the rascals out? Vote for somebody else — maybe even somebody with the courage to tell you what you don't want to hear.
"The standard answer is that we need better leaders," Friedman writes. "The real answer is that we need better citizens. We need citizens who will convey to their leaders that they are ready to sacrifice, even pay, yes, higher taxes, and will not punish politicians who ask them to do the hard things."
As the storm clouds gather here at the first light of 2010, perhaps another Shakespeare quote says it best about the "brave new world" we face:
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves."
Second District or Financial District?
Harry Teague sides with Wall Street over Main Street
on financial reform.
If this keeps up, we may have to give Rep. Harry Teague his own column. Perhaps we could call it, "So You Think You Elected a Democrat." Last month we berated Teague for breaking his own campaign promise and voting against health-care reform. While we ordinarily prefer to spread our editorializing around, Teague's latest vote on a major issue — against the financial-regulation bill designed to prevent the excesses that helped lead to the Wall Street collapse — was so egregiously wrong-headed that we must repeat.
Once again departing from the other two New Mexico Democrats in the House, Teague voted to strip the bill of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency that would serve as a watchdog on Wall Street abuses. After that attempt failed, Teague was one of only 22 Democrats to join all the House Republicans in voting against the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009, which would also:
- Give shareholders an advisory vote on executive pay.
- Use $3 billion of TARP funds to reduce the risk of foreclosure among the
unemployed.
- Create a whistleblower bounty program for those who uncover securities fraud.
(That summary of the legislation, by the way, comes from the Wall Street Journal, not exactly an anti-business mouthpiece.)
Apparently, Harry Teague was too busy buying his Congressional seat last fall to pay attention as the US financial system nearly propelled itself into a black hole. Liberated by an orgy of deregulation and happily forgetting the lessons of the last great economic collapse, speculative investment firms and lenders went on a binge from which we're now all suffering the hangover.
But Teague doesn't see that as a problem in need of fixing, we guess. Hey, after all, he's not unemployed.
One wonders exactly whom Teague thinks he's representing. Just three days before the House vote on financial reform, Republican leaders met with more than 100 financial-industry lobbyists to coordinate strategy. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, members of the House who voted against the measure raised 50% to 70% more from commercial banks, credit and finance companies, on average, than those who supported it. Teague collected a total of $226,809 from the financial sector, significantly more than Rep. Martin Heinrich ($176,019) or Rep. Ben Lujan ($170,883), the New Mexico congressmen who voted for the bill.
Much as he did on the health-care bill, Teague blamed his "nay" vote on perceived imperfections in the measure: "As written, the bill created a new government agency run by one administrator that will have the power to regulate trillions of dollars of financial products and transactions. I think it makes more sense to create a powerful council of regulators called the Consumer Financial Protection Council to promote consumer protection for customers of financial institutions."
That "council of regulators" was proposed by Republicans and opposed by all but 33 Democrats. According to the White House occupied by a president of Teague's own party, the watered-down watchdog would allow "big banks, mortgage companies and credit card companies to continue to get away with the practices that helped cause the financial crisis."
Evidently that's OK with Harry Teague. It may not be OK with New Mexico voters in the Second District who thought they were making a change from Rep. Steve Pearce.
Photographing Palomas
A new series pictures the border town as it was.
For Desert Exposure readers, the new year brings a new series of articles, "Going to Palomas," which in this issue. Author and photographer Victoria Tester will be familiar to readers from her previous "Voice of a Ranchwoman" series (which is still collected on our Web site at www.desertexposure.com/ranchwoman). In this new, heavily pictorial series, she presents a personal view of Palomas, the Mexican border town that’s been so sadly in the news for drug-related violence. The violence, however, is not Tester’s subject here: An award-winning poet and playwright, the author of Miracles of Sainted Earth (University of New Mexico Press), Tester shares her memories and photos from regular visits to Palomas that began more than a decade ago. You might think of it as a vision of the Palomas that was--and that, optimistically, might be once again someday.
In the meantime, another regular contributor, Marjorie Lilly, continues to chronicle the current state of affairs in Palomas and other border towns in her Borderlines column. Like Tester’s new series, it’s must-reading.
David A. Fryxell is editor of Desert Exposure.