Good In My View today in the Bulletin: Perceived tea party threat false; Obama’s the real menace By Jack Niewold Published in the Bend Bulletin: November 06. 2013 4:00AM PST My Terrebonne neighbor, Billy Hardin, recently wrote an In My View column in which he warned us that America is in peril. We’re “in the throes of a revolution, he writes. “The oligarchy is at our gates. A “duped public is allowing the tea party to dominate politics through its alliance with the “corporate power of the Koch brothers, Exxon Mobil, AT&T, and with the American Legislative Exchange Council. The only thing missing was mention of George W. Bush and Halliburton. It is necessary, though not sufficient, to parse Hardin’s argument at the level of detail. The tea party is anything but an “oligarchy. Oligarchies are cabals of the wealthy and influential operating out of public sight. The tea party is a large, spontaneous movement with no discernible center. Rather than carrying the kind of sweeping powers Hardin ascribes to it, the tea party is a loose affiliation of citizens, usually entrepreneurial and somewhat better informed than the population as a whole. It has no official mouthpiece, no Washington address, no board of directors. It has been illegally targeted by the IRS’s Lois Lerner. With all this going for it, the tea party is currently out of favor with just about everybody. On the same page as Hardin’s opinion was an editorial berating the recent tactics of the tea party — by George Will. Some oligarchy, right? Hardin adduces a familiar cast of nefarious, right-wing suspects — start ing with ALEC, which is a policy think tank that, among much else, suggests drafts of legislation. In reality, ALEC is no different than many other think tanks. The centrists have the Progressive Policy Institute, the left wing the Center For American Progress and conservatives have ALEC (in spite of Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin’s recent attempts to intimidate it). Organizations like ALEC are common. They channel the ideas of their constituents, much like AARP or People for the American Way. Hardin’s fear of a right-wing corporate assault on our democracy is equally misplaced. Big business is generally unfriendly to the tea party. The notion that Wal-Mart, Microsoft or big pharma toe the conservative line, to say nothing of the tea party line, is delusional. The Koch brothers? A cliché of every left-wing hack for years and easily rebutted. The real root of Hardin’s ideas lay elsewhere than in these tiresome tropes. Here’s the story: Rather than some imagined, imminent dystopia run by the tea party and Sen. Ted Cruz, Americans inhabit an actual world, a world fashioned in large part by Barack Obama and his acolytes. This is a world in which our sovereign debt will have doubled by the end of the president’s second term. Phrased differently, Obama will have borrowed more money during his two terms than all previous presidents combined. We have scarcely begun to calculate what this means for our children and grandchildren. For the present, however, we live in an world of real unemployment and underemployment in the 15-20 percent range, where multitudes of twenty-somethings cannot find jobs — to say nothing of careers. Fifteen percent of children are not in school. Poverty rates are at historic highs in 49 states. Disability benefits have become a default for millions whose unemployment insurance is exhausted. Food stamp usage is through the roof and rising. Various government subsidies have become a way of life for younger cohorts who in earlier decades would by now have launched meaningful family and working lives. For those of us with 50-year memories, America is poorer, more depressed, more morally confused, and more socially primitive than we have ever seen. America is also becoming historically and literarily ignorant, as every metric shows. Finally, we are more divided than at any time since the Civil War, even with the Great Reconciler in the White House. Five years of Obama shows how a real oligarchy operates. — Jack Niewold lives in Terrebonne.
Posted on: Wed, 06 Nov 2013 22:05:12 +0000
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