Americans are hurting. Well… not all of us. Some of us – those who can claim the mantle of corporate “personhood” by virtue of a bizarrely generous judicial interpretation of the 14th Amendment –  are doing quite well, thank you very much. Profits are up, executive pay is up, personal wealth among the top 1% is up – in fact, virtually all of the gains realized through economic growth over the past ten years have been enjoyed by the very wealthy. This while the economic position of people in the lower strata of society – particularly communities of color – have seen what wealth they may have held (principally in their homes) wiped out. Blacks and Latinos have seen the gains of the past 30 years wiped away in less than 3.

With millions of people out of work, you would think Congress’s top priority would be job creation. That was what they ran on in 2010, not so much on debt reduction. The best the G.O.P. can manage is to twist the issue around to becoming a tortured argument for doing what the party always does – cut taxes on rich people. They want to allow rich folk to keep more of their money so that they will, in turn, hire some of the legions of unemployed. They cling to this belief, rhetorically at least, even when it’s clear that a) businesses already have multiple trillions in savings they are sitting on right now, and b) they have no intention of spending any of it on new hires so long as they can press their current employees to do the work of three, four, perhaps more. Ask anybody who’s got a job, and they’ll tell you – increased productivity is just the modern term of art for speeding up the assembly line.

Meanwhile, our national infrastructure is falling apart. Bridges in my upstate community are aged and crumbling, the water system is falling apart, roads are pitted and broken. With all this, the word that we get from Albany and Washington is austerity. It’s as if we have as a society decided that roads and bridges no longer need maintenance and repair, and that our highest calling is to keep taxes on companies and well-off people at historic lows. The vaunted debt ceiling compromise takes this tack – we don’t need to invest in ourselves, we’re told; we need to divest ourselves of all the trappings of modern society, from freedom of choice and to the freedom of driving downtown without having the highway crumble beneath you. That’s the essential philosophy of the tea party loomers in Congress.

This is what happens when 16% of American voters bother to go to the polls, as happened last Fall. Next time, folks, don’t sit on your hands.

luv u,

jp