Very frequently cited source by this blog, Bob Herbert, raises some eyebrows very high with his most recent op-ed for the NY Times today. Nothing earth-shattering, nor just in, nor NY Times exclusive, just a sobering reality check on just how far this mighty country hath fallen; only this time it’s on the domestic front… Mr. Herbert discusses how a little over fifty-nine years ago, President Harry S. Truman signed a little piece of legislation that would enact the Marshall Plan. While this act helped contribute to the rebuilding of post-World War II, Herbert quips in brutally honest fashion that the sitting President can’t even rebuild New Orleans!
Jules Renard once said: “Look for the ridiculous in everything and you will find it,” and never has this been the case more so than with this current administration. But then again, he’s French, so what does the heck does he know?!
One of the points he makes (Herbert, not Renard) is that America no longer has that can-do attitude, you know – the one that made us the pre-eminent, or at least one of two world superpowers.
Complacency doesn’t even begin to explain this lack of initiative; it seems the status quo might be better explained by the tenet generally held by a majority of Presidents since Roosevelt and Truman that less government means more for America.
Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis once said: “We can have a democratic society or we can have great concentrated wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both.”
To be sure, smaller government leads to less regulation and more privitization of industry, which invariably leads to more concentrated wealth (in the hands of a few) – sound at all familiar? I won’t enlighten you with the countless statistics demonstrating the vast financial divide in this country, its greatest since the roaring ‘20s, and we all remember what happened after…
Narrow-minded individuals will try and peg such talk as being pinko-communist or whatever, but there are without question elements of communism in democracy and vice versa. When the Soviet Union fell in 1989, it seemed to indicate that communism was a nice idea in theory, but human nature would inevitably lead to its downfall. Democracy, on the other hand, has proven itself to be an extremely viable and sustainable method of government. Bush has touted his little war as being (among many other things) a crusade to spread democracy in the middle east and beyond, yet he routinely speaks derridingly about his opposing party, calling it the ‘Democrat Party’, as if that’s supposed to be an insult. Subconsciously though, it is an insult, because democracy is just about the furthest thing from his mind, at least as far as practice is concerned.
This country absolutely must get away from its past experience of being arguably the greatest war profiteers in history. Just because we experienced a boom like no other before after the second WW, does not mean that profiting financially from international conflict is the only way to have a sustainable economy. We must begin to profit through helping other countries, not through bombing them back to the stoneage. Bust before all else, we must help ourselves and that begins and ends with infrastructure.
To bring it back to Bob Herbert, he speaks of Felix Rohatyn, investment banker who helped the NYC avoid bankruptcy in the ‘70s, and former Senator Warren Rudman (ironically, a centrist Republican from New Hampshire) strongly ‘criticizing the government’s unwillingness to invest adequately in public transportation systems, water projects, dams, schools, the electrical grid,’ etc.
http://select.nytimes.com/2007
Essentially, the point is that while America emerged as THE global superpower at the end of the twentieth century, this is now the twenty-first century and to dwell on the past will most certainly spell our demise. There is no question this country is capable, but leadership comes from the top-down, and this is just another painful example right now of who’s on first (if only he coulda just been commissioner of baseball! It’s so screwed up now he probably couldn’t have done much worse!). Play ball!
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment