Let’s face it - January was an
unimaginably rough start to the New Year for progressives. First, the
painful and surprising loss of Ted Kennedy’s seat to a crass, pickup truck driving
teabagger, who tried to sell his daughters
on national TV, and who promised the country to derail health insurance reform.
Then, the announcement of the big, unfathomably huge, gargantuan Wall Street
bonuses totaling almost the exact amount that taxpayers had forked over in the
bailout, ultimately culminating in a 100 million dollar payday
for Goldman Sachs CEO, Lloyd Blankenfein, and the need for anti-nausea drugs
for the rest of the country. With the administration’s most important
social policy change unlikely to result in anything meaningful, and the
financial crisis turning into a coup for banks, burning rage for the people,
and a public relations nightmare for the beleaguered administration the week
before the State of the Union speech, things didn’t seem like they could get
any worse. And then - whammo – seemingly out of nowhere, the Supreme
Court rules that corporations can make
unlimited campaign contributions, expediting the retreat of
democracy to an insidious and uniquely American form of corporate fascism.
On the year anniversary of the election of the first black president, and just
after our national reflection on the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., there’s
every reason for progressives to ask, “why, oh why?”
Some answer that it was a failure of
the democrats to support Martha Coakley that led to the humiliating loss of the
key seat. Others blame her for an untimely holiday vacation. Others
say she was simply a bad candidate, and mean that she didn’t come across well
enough on television. Some argue that we should have let the banks fail.
Others that they had a gun to their head and a bomb strapped to their back, and
we had no choice but to hand over the dough. Still others feel that
allowing corporations carte blanche contributions won’t change much at all –
either the people will still prevail, or it’s merely the breakdown of an
illusion anyway.
But while all of these points speak at some level to the issues at hand, they also all fail to address the big picture: the progressive narrative of interdependence, a “level playing field” and social welfare is failing to strike a chord, while the conservative narrative of freedom, individuality and the invisible hand sounds in tune with what many in the country believe on a gut level. I would argue that the impact of changing media technology on these classic American narratives is the strongest and most difficult force to reckon, blowing back very rational progressive solutions to problems that will determine the future success of this country.
Continue reading "Progressives Need a Narrative that Resonates" »
Who Broke America’s Jobs Machine?
via www.washingtonmonthly.com
In this cogently written article, Barry C. Lynn and Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation raise the issue of why the "elephant in the room" of corporate consolidation is not being debated within public discourse. Although it's not obvious when you're shopping at Bloomingdale's that you're actually shopping at Macy's, which now owns Bloomingale's, or that when choosing between milk brands you're actually only choosing between labels, I don't think this is a sufficient explanation for why consolidation has not been more discussed in the news or why the issue of corporate consolidation is not top of mind for the American public. I think the next step for collective inquiry is to ask why we have come to adopt an ideology that does not perceive this obvious undermining of the free market as problematic.
The article points out that in the past new technology has increased jobs, and uses this point to refute the relevance of technology to job loss. While I'm not sure if it's accurate to say that new technology has historically increased jobs, setting this point aside, I do feel that the article narrowly perceives technology only as a sort of tool that impacts efficiency. Whereas technology can also be perceived as having a programmatic effect on human consciousness. For example, the ability to read silently rose with the technology of the printing press, and industrialization changed our perception of time. Once we perceive technology as potentially having a programmatic quality, we can pose the question of how new technology may be at the root of ideological change toward a social Darwinist belief that the "elephant in the room" deserves its social position of invisible domination.
Who Broke America’s Jobs Machine? - Barry C. Lynn and Phillip Longman
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