Why Are You Struggling?

Long ago, on a Roman galley, the captain tried an experiment. He let everyone on board -- oarsmen and aristocratic passengers -- vote on whether to change to a democratic system, where everyone would take turns, alternately rowing and lounging in the luxurious passenger quarters. Of course the aristocrats voted to retain the existing system. But then, to his surprise, so too did the galley oarsmen.

There is a simple explanation for why you are having a hard time financially, why you are in danger of losing your job or your health or your home, why you don’t have access to the luxuries that more privileged members of society are enjoying.
Why haven’t you realized the truth? In case you are too dumb to figure it out, here it is: It’s because you deserve what you are getting. And because deep down inside, you know this. That’s why you keep making choices that maintain the status quo, that keep you down and struggling.
You don’t believe it? Consider this:
Our legislators obviously believe what I’ve just said. They maintain a tax structure and an economic structure that does what it should do -- it rewards the deserving and punishes the undeserving. In other words, some people get rich, the rich keep getting richer, and the rest struggle to stay where they are, and sometimes, no matter how hard they struggle, they slip downward into poverty.
Look at the statistics -- they’re all around you. You’ve seen them. The top 2% make as much money as the bottom 50%. CEOs get paid on average 400 times as much as their lowest-paid employees. When failing businesses are sold out, the top managers (who ran their companies into the ground) walk away with “golden parachutes” worth millions of dollars.
And at the other end of the scale, 10% of our workforce is unemployed. This country has some 40 million uninsured people. The middle class is getting smaller. More people are in poverty than ever. Millions go to bed hungry every night. Hundreds of thousands of homes are being foreclosed, leaving ever more people homeless.
And how are our governments, local, state, and federal, coping with all this? They are reducing services to those most in need. Thousands of state employees are being laid off, hurting not just them but also all those that they were providing services for. Universities are cutting faculty and course offerings; students must pay higher tuition for fewer and more crowded classes. Public schools are laying off teachers and aides and increasing class sizes. Mental health programs, already appallingly inadequate, are being cut further, leaving the mentally ill in crisis and unable to receive treatment that might save their lives.
Clearly the decision-makers who have brought all this about are acting out of a morality that says that the deserving will be rewarded and the undeserving punished.
And who chose these decision-makers? You did. You have chosen to elect representatives who will carry out your moral values, who will punish you for all your flaws and shortcomings. And as long as you coninue to believe that you deserve the worst, you will keep on electing representatives who will make sure you get it.

Has Obama Failed?

The hue and cry of the Republicans -- and some Democrats -- has recently been to the effect that the Obama presidency has failed. Key evidence: the continuing high unemployment rate.
Is our economic situation as we want it to be? Admittedly no. Ten percent unemployment is clearly unacceptable. So does this mean that Obama has failed? I would suggest that the implied comparison (where we are vs. where we’d like to be) is erroneous.
The proper comparison has to be between where we are, under Obama, and where we would be if his administration had not done what it has, or -- to put it very bluntly and starkly -- where we would be if McCain had been elected.
Of course, we do not know for sure what McCain and Palin would have done, but we have a pretty good idea, both from those candidates’ statements during the 2008 campaign and from the statements and positions of Republican leaders since. I think it is clear that under McCain/Palin we would be feeling the effects of more tax-breaks for the wealthy, more cuts in government programs for the poor and middle classes,and less effort at economic stimulus.
And what would those effects be? The CBO -- Congressional Budget Office -- recently released some projections that without the Obama stimulus programs, unemployment now might be 13% or 14%. And we can figure that there would be more people losing their homes, more people exhausting their unemployment benefits -- in short, we would be in a major depression, not just a painful recession.
So has Obama failed? Hardly. He has achieved a lot, compared to where the country was when he started and where it might have gotten to with different policies and programs.

And we need to recognize too that what the Obama administration as accomplished has been tempered -- and severely limited and distorted -- by the obstinacy and determination of Republicans to do everything possible to cause Obama to fail, regardless of what might be best for the country.