The Sequester Blues

As the miniscule flow of cuts required by the sequester of spending starts to take hold across the country, I was struck by the thought that ultimately Americans elected this government. With all the money, and all the cable TV hoo-hah, the political climate we are now enduring is the direct result of our democratic process, the process we selected and the ones we perpetuate with our votes. Even the cascading Big Muddy of unregulated cash brought about by the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision, is really how government works in America today. There are Constitutional methods to overturn Citizen’s United, but the political will even for majorities in the House and the Senate do not exist to bring them forward for consideration, much less approval.

Those actively engaged on both left and right will say “This is not the government I wanted”, and there is of course truth to that, but we should not fool ourselves into thinking that does not mean it is not the government we voted for. For those angry that our leaders no longer lead, and I am one of them, we would do well to remember the random, consequential, and actually pretty limited times that they actually did. Over our entire history for every profound historical event like the Voting Rights acts, which required courage, governance, and superb strategic thinking there is a jarring counterpoint of political faint-heartedness. Roosevelt engaged an isolationist America in a land war in Europe and the World only after a prolonged period of caution. Concerned over public opinion, Roosevelt never addressed America’s involvement in the War from the moral high ground of preventing the impending Holocaust of Jews. Ultimately, United States involvement was precipitated by the attack at Pearl Harbor which led most Americans to feel that without action their very lives were in danger. Narrow self-interest trumps moral high ground nearly every time.

More recently America was provoked into a needless war in Iraq again primarily motivated and perhaps manipulated by concerns about our own security. I watched Maddow’s documentary on the run-up to the Iraq war a few weeks ago. There is little doubt that public opinion was manipulated, and that wild promises were made about the costs and ease of both entry and exit, but anyone paying attention might should have known that. But we would do well to recall that the Iraq War resolutions were supported by 126 Democrats in the House, and 29 in the Senate and so passed by overwhelming votes. Both current Secretary of State Kerry and former Secretary of State Clinton voted to give Bush Authorization to enter the war, the resolution citing the "threat to the national security of the United States and international peace and security in the Persian Gulf region” that Iraq’s weapons of Mass destruction posed. Who wants to be on the underside of the much discussed mushroom cloud? Considering these votes, despite the revisionist anti-war fervency of later years, there clearly was political will amongst our leaders and the electorate in general to attack Iraq. What germinated from that consensus was a war of choice, against an enemy who it would turn out posed no threat to America, or even our allies.

The Iraq war will cost America something north of a trillion dollars and is already well past $700 billion. Think about that when you hear another Congressman talk about the immorality of the deficits we pass onto our children and grandchildren. What after all is more immoral than a war of choice, fought under false pretense, with the added component of being paid for through deficits financed by the Chinese? Listen as our leaders talk about the “stupidity” of the blunt instrument of sequestration, but remember that whoever proposed it, sequestration was legislation, passed by both Houses of Congress as Part of the Budget Control Act of 2011. Voters, angry with their political leadership, are not lacking in responsibility for these decisions.

The irony of the current moment is both illuminating and infuriating. Despite the attacks we now see in the Supreme Court, most Americans retain great pride in the progress which the country has made in securing racial equality. But I wonder as did Maddow on Jon Stewart’s show this week, how no one’s head explodes when considering the juxtaposition of official Washington erecting a statue in honor of Rosa Parks on the same day the Voting Rights Act comes under sustained attack in the Supreme Court. Scalia’s comments whatever their motivation spoke for the bitter white minority who are just so fed up with the sense of “entitlement” perpetuated by what they perceive to be uppity blacks. Justice Scalia’s resentment speaks for millions of whites angry that the country is no longer theirs, and who see their majority political status slipping away.

For all the talk about huge philosophical differences between the parties, is there any difference more profound than the racial and socio-economic divide? This is precisely who we are.

We can blame our politicians all we want,  but this Government, though greatly gerrymandered through the influence of private interests, and divided along every point of demarcation between one segment of the population and another, that too is who we are. Once a coalition of Americans sought to secure racial equality, ease the suffering of the poor, and build a broadly egalitarian society. Today in America there is no politically determinative consensus to do almost anything. A lot of us have just given up. A heartless selfishness always the province of the privileged now infects voters of all economic backgrounds. We no longer believe we can alleviate the suffering and desperation of poverty, so millions of Americans vote the “Why Bother” ticket and don’t even show up at the polls.  Chronic joblessness brought about by globalization, and an educational system not up to the task of responding to the crisis, does not raise calls for reform that have a chance of effectuating legislation. To the extent that there is fervor often it seems that it is raised to block movement. Americans are far more likely to be against something, than for anything.

America no longer dreams of big things, such that a collation of convenience barely exists to do small things. I read somewhere that in the last term of Congress measures were passed to rename over 100 post offices, which must seem bitterly ironic to a postal worker fighting to survive the financial state of the USPS. Meanwhile the Chinese are graduating more engineers than America, even as they invest nearly a trillion in green energy and another trillion in high speed rail.

Polls indicate broad support for stricter gun safety regulations, measures to arrest the dangers of climate change, immigration reform, AND sane budget solutions, but at least right now, all of these measures are in doubt.  It is easy to place the blame for that at the feet of a Republican minority in the House determined to undermine any efforts at governance, but that somehow seems too easy to me. Most who reject the blaming the House Republicans then make the leap to blaming lack of leadership from the President. The two parties pass the provenance of the sequester around in such a way that one might be start to believe that if the party that suggested it first was finally determined then the way out might also be assured. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Every battle now seems to lead to inconclusive, unsatisfying, results. Barely four months after a 5-million vote victory and the soaring rhetoric of the inauguration press reports increasingly point to Obama’s 2014 congressional strategy to dislodge Republicans in the House.  Why worry about governing, let’s just get on to the next election? I wonder who really cares if Hillary or Biden engage for the Democratic nomination if the result is four more years of this dreck. The media, obsessed with the horserace, winners and losers and so forth, leaves scant time to address the issues for which all of this is so critically important.

No policy disaster ever leads to soul searching or admission of blame. Johnson and Westmoreland, their faults notwithstanding, at least had the humanity to be tortured by their Vietnam era decisions.  Now that 60,000 are dead in Syria can we dispense with the idea that Iraq was fought for some reason other than to prtect our own economic interests? Bush’s bathroom paintings suggests some degree of introspection, but in recent comments neither he nor Cheney see any need to revisit their decision to take the country to War in Iraq. Cheney’s language is more politically inflammatory, but is there really any difference when one considers the results of their folly, not only economic but more importantly human: almost 4,500 dead Americans; over 100,000 Iraqis killed; tens of thousands wounded Americans. Moreover, the country is now so broke and so stingy that veteran of both the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars wait for months to have their VA claims adjudicated and resolved. Each day about 20 veterans commit suicide. Then there is the $700 billion and counting debt.  VA claims will go on for decades at the cost of billion a year. $85 billion in sequester cuts applied with a dull ax rather than a well-defined scalpel are an insult in the face of such war-time, militarist, folly.

Meanwhile voters, like politicians, see only the fault in the other. We too easily forget that broad determinative political consensus that led—not only to colossal error—but to so much progress over the course of American history. While there is and always has been opposition to almost anything important and enduring America has set out to do, our democracy required that it be overcome and it was. Even the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, which led to the Interstate Highway System had opponents in Congress. Both the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed with overwhelming support despite heated, often violently expressed, opposition. Johnson saw overwhelming votes as a requirement to legitimize the legislation in the eyes of the country and the Senate master worked the Chamber like no President since Lincoln. In the streets Dr. King, John Lewis and others subjected themselves to firehouses and attack dogs in Birmingham and later took a horrific beating at the hands of Sheriff Clark and his vigilante posse on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in order to create a climate for passage. Politicians passed the laws its true, but legislation was enacted because a national consensus was in place. Voters that want change, tend to get it. Today division at every level prevents even a consensus for what is needed.

Ignorance is part of the problem. Ignorance is not just limited to the stunning proportion of Republicans, as high as 50% among Mississippi Republicans for example, still questioning the provenance and the religious background of the President. Americans are less knowledgeable about our history than any time in the last hundred years. Forget lagging science scores, studies have shown that American High School seniors are nearly illiterate when it comes to basic knowledge of American History. Despite three 24-7 cable news networks, most Americans don’t know very much about the budget issues being debated. A poll this week showed that only about one in four were even following the sequester drama as it played out. This does not prohibit many from extreme emotional commitments to one side or the other, but extremism is no guarantee of either knowledge or wisdom.

Steven Brill’s brilliant and important article in Time on health care costs garners a fraction of the attention as that generated by the celebrity flavor of the week. An ill-informed electorate is easily fooled or distracted, and then becomes fertile ground for solutions that even when one layer is peeled away are clearly indicated as no solution at all. Healthcare costs are crippling America and will continue to do so whether born by business interests and private individuals (the Republican plan) or whether they are funded in public-private schemes (the Democratic Plan). Yet all or most of the cuts will not touch healthcare and entitlements.

Instead as always the poor, especially women and children, and the working class will bear the brunt of the cuts. I don’t know the accuracy of the CBO claim of job losses totaling 700,000 or so, but if correct that will require six months of recovery in today’s current climate. This is met with nothing but a shrug. Those are not bankers or regional sales managers that are going to be hurt, they are teachers, policemen, fire fighters, park service rangers, home care workers and working parents who will not be able to work for lack of daycare. Since this is the pain we are inflicting, it seems to me that that is where the broad political consensus is. This is the pain we are willing to accept.

Too Big to Fail has metastasized into Too Big to Prosecute or Regulate. Despite bitter anger on both the far left and the far right about that, Too Big to Whatever is where the operational consensus lies now, what both sides, and the deeply invested and entrenched business interests, are willing to accept. America wants both low taxes and expensive, largely unregulated, health care markets, so we’re locked into the inefficient and costly crisis-to-crisis budget management in Washington for the foreseeable future.  Washington could trim almost everything, turning the nation in one massive Pottersville, the fictional home of sleaze and decay at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life, but if Healthcare costs and defense are not brought under control, the deficits will continue to soar. Neither Party has honestly spoken to the American people about that.

To be sure deep pocketed financial interests have corrupted dialogue on almost every subject. When was it not so? Slavery and its offspring Jim Crow were, after all, economic models designed to ensure inexpensive labor.  Subjugated African Americans were not only low-cost, their presence provided downward pressure on the wages of whites. It is no accident that the slave states of the Deep South still lead the nation in Poverty and almost every other Standard of Living measure. Poor Southern whites who helped perpetuate the racially segregated status quo in the final analysis also turn out to be among its longest lasting victims.

So I got to wondering yesterday: Where in the shadow of this really stupid, really silly, sequester is the consensus for governance? How might Americans break from the habit of peeking in on the chaos in the Capital, decrying both sides with scorn? How might Americans come to see the actionable role we can and must play in effecting change? How might the vast middle be moved to understanding once again that their own future is inextricably bound to that of the poorest and most needy among us, that this is not only a moral requirement but a practical governing one? These are cynical times indeed, shamefully so, but how might each of us consider our role in creating a more informed debate?

Last week over several plane rides, I read through a pile of articles I had been accumulating on subjects ranging from Wall Street reform to fracking. My wife, laughed at me because the pile had been there so long it was getting close to two inches thick. Included was a series I pulled down from the Sam Harris Blog on guns and violence (http://www.samharris.org/) that really challenged me to reconsider my own point of view. Harris has a complex view of the gun argument. He supports almost all of the reforms out there—background checks, limitations on assault weapons and magazines, and a much higher standard for registration. Despite all this he is highly critical of the misinformed views, statements, and positions of the many gun control advocates, going so far as to point what he perceives to be the essential truth of what many of us believe to be the outlandish statements made by the NRA these last few weeks. All told I read three lengthy essays, about 30 pages in total. The essays were at points infuriating, but they were not dogmatic and his theoretical thread was never less than thought provoking.

Even though Mr. Harris is on that road, more than anything he made me consider turning off the information superhighway, at least onto a somewhat less travelled bi-way, more contemplative and less reactionary. We spent so much time being offended these days it seems we barely pause to decipher what is truly offensive—the hunger of a child or the ignorance of an illiterate boy or girl in his or her junior year of high school- as opposed to what offends our sensibility or political belief system which is in the end, well, just foolish. Bob Woodward’s hoary grandstanding this past week is but one example.

Maybe for me at least, it’s just time to think. Someone else can figure out the sequester.