I got email today from MoveOn.org. They asked "I'd love to hear what you're thinking right now. What do you take away from the news recently? What are you excited about? What do you want from MoveOn?" This is what I wrote:
There are three things that really bother me with today's politics.
1. That Republicans state falsehoods constantly and are not called on it. This isn't just a few people, it becomes their platform. By this I mean things like climate change isn't happening, that the rise in gas prices is deliberate by the administration (Hailey Barber this weekend), that the debt caused the financial crises, that high regulation is preventing the recovery, that corporate taxes are too high, that Democrats cut medicare, that Paul Ryans plan isn't vouchers, death panels, that unions caused the financial crisis, birthers, etc. etc.
It bothers me that they say this and more so that they get away with it. They say it on news programs and the so called journalists never point out the falsehoods. If it's a one-on-one interview maybe there's one followup question and then they move on. Or it's a situation where there's one Republican and one Democrat and the Democrat just never says the Republican is wrong or lying. The politicians come into these interviews with their own facts memorized and not enough knowledge of the issues to correct the other's misstatements. That used to be the job of journalists, but they've stopped doing it. They've even stopped pointing out politicians own inconsistencies and hypocrisies, only John Stewart is doing that now.
We can't have a real debate or rationally govern if one side is lying (or at best wrong) all the time.
2. That Democrats are just treading water and not espousing a progressive alternative to the Republican fictions. We should not be talking about how many trillions to cut from the deficit in order to raise the debt limit, we should be presenting a view saying we need more stimulus spending to grow the economy to not repeat the mistakes of 1937. We should be talking about a public option or expanding medicare to lower the cost of health care and not just what the federal government spends on it. We should be closing Guantanamo and trying prisoners in US courts because we can handle it. We should be appointing people like Peter Diamond, Goodwin Liu, and Elizabeth Warren because they're qualified and elections have consequences. We should be preventing climate change because it's real and we want to protect the planet.
They might be trying to work these things behind the scenes, but the Republicans are winning in the court of ideas. The Democrats have given up on using public opinion to push politicians in Washington to do the right thing. The facts have a liberal bias, use them to help you win!
3. And of course the real issue is that we are not addressing the issues. The media and Washington obsess on various scandals and circuses (Arnold, Weiner, Trump, Palin, etc.) and doesn't spend any time on the real things that matter. It's the economy stupid. Jobs. We need to get jobs going and we need stimulus to do it. Keynes was right, all the data in the last 3 years has said so, we need stimulus not austerity (which is not working in Europe). But now its just conventional wisdom that it's not going to happen. So what are we supposed to do?
We need real financial reform and regulation of derivatives or we're likely to have another financial crisis that is worse because the banks now are even bigger. They still have all these toxic assets on their books and are zombies, even as they rake in record profits. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is fine (but it does need a head) but we really need derivative regulation because that's what caused the crisis. And we need sensible regulation of the power industries to prevent oil spills, coal mine and nuclear disasters and to figure out safe distances between industrial wind farms and fraking sites and residential neighborhoods. We need to rebuild our infrastructure because it's falling apart and it will provide jobs.
We need to get out of Afghanistan and close Guantanmo and stop giving up our privacy and civil rights. The fourth amendment applies to our electronic conversations too and we shouldn't be renewing the Patriot Act in the dark of night. We need to be paying our teachers more and educating our children; if only so they know enough math so that they know when politicians are lying to them about the economy.
And we need to get money out of politics or none of this will happen.
No comments:
Post a Comment