The Sky is Falling!

As the nation sits transfixed by the disasterporn coming out of Haiti, the facts on the ground here in the good old USA aren't too good either. Still, one can always say that Americans are so much better off than, say, Haitians. No argument there. But we aren't a third world country, with some exceptions. The New Orleans fiasco was a major embarrassment and still goes on....but it's not Haiti. Bob Herbert in the N Y Times, January 22, 2010 quoted a Brookings Institution study that points out that 30% of the population of this blessed nation lives at less than twice the poverty level for a family of four...$21,834. The fastest growth area for poverty is in the suburbs. What about Ozzie, Harriet, Rick and Dave? Forty thousand lives are lost each year due to lack of health insurance, and our infant mortality rate is that of Albania's. Still, we are not Haiti!


The recent decision by the Supreme Court to allow the outright buying of candidates by coroprate America will further reduce the risk of popular government's becoming a reality anytime soon. The marvelous legal fiction of the corporate person's free speech rights will most likely kill any attempts to stay the buying of the political system. Not since the Gilded Age has the prospect of wholesale political corruption been more likely. Where is Upton Sinclair now that we need him?


Poor O-man, he tries to save the elites from themselves and they don't get it. The last shreds of legitimacy of the political system have been buried by the supreme irony of the Supreme Court's enabling the corporate elites to bury the notion of a level playing field in terms of political contributions. This may have the beneficial effect of allowing the peasantry to suspect both major parties of being the same...bought. It now becomes a question of how to maintain the fiction of voter and citizen input into the process. O-man seems to perceive the threat of mass disaffection on the part of the voters, and he is rapidly mobilizing the circus team that got him elected in an effort to make it appear that he is ready to stand up to the malefactors of wealth...like the guys in his cabinet and at the Treasury Department.


The problem that O'man has is reality: the unemployed and the mortgage foreclosures and the lack of job creation and the wars and the corporate bonus pools announced by his friends on Wall Street and in hedge fund land. Still, it isn't Haiti. I feel so blessed that I am not in....


I am gratetful to the Urban Dictionary for the term Disaster Porn.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/23/opinion