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Full Version: Why Don't Americans Care?
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| Why Don't Americans Care? Do you know who Halliburton is? Dick Cheney? How about Karl Rove? Alas, most Americans don't By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist Wednesday, October 6, 2004 Let's be honest. Percentage-wise, few people in America really give much of a crap about what's going on in the hallowed halls of politics and power. This is what we in the media and maybe you in the media-consuming audience tend to forget far too easily: This country is simply jam-packed with millions of people who have no time for, or interest in, politics, or media, or environmental policy, or education, or global issues, or which presidential candidate lied his ass off about which aspect of his military career and which Orange Alert is totally bogus and how many soldiers are dying for what imbecilic war. It seems hard to believe. But the general rule of thumb is that major cities are slightly more attuned due to aggressive media saturation and how issues tend to make themselves known more urgently, more immediately, whereas Middle America is a scattershot conglomeration of the politically apathetic and the actively disenfranchised, full of people far too busy with their lives and kids and jobs and zoning out on "Fear Factor" and "Monday Night Football" to care about following the elitist, ever dire dramas playing out on the nation's gilded stages. Most Americans, in other words, have no idea what the hell a Halliburton is. Or a Karl Rove. Or a Donny "Shriveled Soul" Rumsfeld. Or a Lockheed Martin. Or a Carlysle Group. Or have any idea that Saddam had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11. Or that WMDs were never found. Or that President Bush has taken more vacation time than any president in U.S. history. Or that Jesus thinks Dubya is "sort of a dink." Or where Iraq is on a map. Fact is, in the past decade, TV-news ratings -- cable and network, combined -- has shrunk to a fraction of its former numbers. Newspaper subscriptions have been either flat or dropping for just about as long. Newsmagazines, radio, historical nonfiction: flat or dropping fast. Even the Internet, that vast teeming customizable firestorm of news and info streaming in from all over the planet, even the awesome Net draws far more people to its porn and gossip and shopping departments than any e-news joint could ever wet dream. Is this unfair? Does it sound elitist and biased? It's not. There have been studies. And reports. And alarming indicators of all kinds telling us time and again that, for example, fully 50 percent of eligible Americans don't even bother to vote (a 15 percent drop since 1964), and many have no idea who's on the Supreme Court or what Congress does, and many can't even point to France on a globe. Voter turnout, comparatively, in Italy, Spain, the U.K., or Germany? Anywhere from 75 to 92 percent, every time. The sad fact is, the United States ranks 139th out of 172 countries in voter turnout. Wave that flag proudly, baby. You've seen the headlines. Alarming numbers of American high school students can't even identify the current vice president, much less name a half dozen presidents from history. Far too many citizens can't name the capital of their own home state or recognize their own senators, much less discern how Bush's environmental policy is poisoning their water or how Ashcroft wants to scan their email and tap their phones and suck the pith from their souls. A whopping 49 percent of Americans aged 18-25 can't find New York on a map, and 11 percent can't even locate the United States. Now that's patriotism. A recent report by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development states that upward of 60 percent of Americans ages 16-25 are 'functionally illiterate', meaning they can't, for example, fill out a detailed form or read a numerical table (like a time schedule). A recent Florida study shows at least 70 percent of recent high school graduates need remedial courses -- that is, basic reading and math -- when they enter community college. These are kids who, you can be assured, think Colin Powell is that nasty British dude on "American Idol." And everyone you know seems to have a parent or a sister-in-law living somewhere conservative and podunk for whom politics and news media is like some sort of impossibly dense morass, alien and strange and vaguely threatening, like a nasty, painful growth on their big toe, best ignored in hopes that it will just dry up and go away. Maybe this, then, is the most pressing question of our time: How to get the vast majority of Americans to care? To pay attention? To read? To effect change and demand accountability from bumbling spoon-fed leaders who count on voter apathy and force-fed ignorance to cram through their environmental rollbacks and homophobic laws and draconian Patriot Acts? Is it even possible? Are we too far gone? How to make America more like, say, Europe, where knowledge of current events and political intrigue is not only hugely important to the vast majority of citizens but is also deeply woven into the very fabric of daily life, an integral part of the educational system and the café conversation and the workplace water-cooler chats, and to ignore it is considered, well, irresponsible and even a mite traitorous? True, part of why they care so much is because America is the foremost bully on the block and it pays to know what makes the bully tick. And whine. And kill. In short, as the theory goes, most Americans don't give a damn because we're on top and we own everything and have more nukes than anyone and we're never the ones getting invaded. It's our unofficial motto -- America: We Don't Have to Care. And this very column is frequently slapped with the accusation that it merely "preaches to the choir," and if I really want to affect minds I should consider tempering or sanitizing my opinions for a more "moderate" mainstream readership, as if the nation was chock-full of opinionated, well-read, temperate thinkers ready to be gently informed of new ideas, when in fact this group is but a fraction, a sliver, far overshadowed and overpowered by the real majority in America: The detached. The disinterested. The intellectually lazy. So, what's the solution? It is as simple as dramatically changing the way we educate our children, our population? Is it desanitizing our vacuous history textbooks and making media studies and political science and current events as mandatory to the educational diet as macho sports and bad lunches and playground kickball? Or maybe it's a new national draft? Will that galvanize the rest of the populace sufficiently? How about Iraq devolving even faster into Vietnam 2.0? Is it 10,000 dead U.S. soldiers and nary an imprisoned terrorist or fresh barrel of oil to show for it? How about five bucks a gallon? Ten? Is it legalizing pot and banning guns? What will it take? Maybe another massive national catastrophe? Maybe a 9/11 cubed, and cubed again, something unthinkably horrific and unleashed upon the innocents and the children and the puppies, something that so jars and infuriates and undermines our desperate empire that even the cold-blooded neoconservative Right can't possibly leverage our sorrow and pain for its own political gain? Very possible. After all, nothing like a little hard-earned apocalypse to make you consider voting independent. Or maybe it's something entirely different, maybe some sort of potent, unimaginable spiritual enlightenment that looks like revelation and smells like Vishnu and sounds like harmonic convergence and tastes like Buddha and has nothing whatsoever to do with fundamentalism or Christianity or Bush's angry homophobic flag-wavin' God. The mystics say we're very close. They claim the next decade will offer, to those who care to participate, one helluva transformational vibrational wallop. Possible? Whatever it looks like, we can rest assured we're still not out of the dark, dank woods just yet. Our national apathy is well protected, our intellectual ignorance secure and our fears well fed and carefully, perpetually reinforced by the Powers That Be and the fact that the overall 50 percent voter turnout never moves by more than a point or two, usually downward. And the Establishment, it only smiles knowingly, and nods, and says there there now. It'll be all right. Just go back to sleep. |
| QUOTE (nvxplorer @ Friday, 17 December 2004, 11:20 am) | ||
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...notes100604.DTL
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The next tier is about to be hit.
January will see a lot more poverty for a lot more people.
We are in for a shitty decline in standard of living for most Merkins.
Yesterday was all about tough budget choices.
"We're going to submit a tough budget" Chimpy
President Bush (news - web sites) speaks at the White House Conference on the Economy at the Ronald Reagan (news - web sites) Center, Thursday, Dec. 16, in Washington. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds)
President Bush (news - web sites) makes closing remarks at the White House Conference on the Economy: Financial Challenges for Today and Tomorrow, Thursday, Dec. 16, 2004, at the Ronald Reagan (news - web sites) Building in Washington. President Bush wraps up a two-day economic conference with sessions on jobs and Social Security (news - web sites) reform. (AP Photo/Lawrence Jackson)
Yesterday
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| White House - AP By LEIGH STROPE, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON - President Bush (news - web sites) said Thursday the Social Security (news - web sites) investment accounts he is proposing would have rules to prevent workers from gambling away their retirement money. He appealed for congressional action to shore up the system and said lawmakers supporting him wouldn't be risking their seats. "This is an issue on which I campaigned and I'm still standing," Bush said at an economic conference promoting his domestic proposals, including Social Security, his leading legislative issue for next year. "The crisis is now," he said, pressing for an overhaul of the system, which will be under increasing financial pressure as the baby boom generation retires and claims benefits. He is proposing that workers be allowed to take part of the Social Security taxes they now pay into the system and instead invest in private accounts. But he said there would be restrictions on the money. "You can't take it to the race track and hope to really increase the returns. It's not there for the lottery," Bush said. He compared the structure of the accounts to the investment plan available to federal workers — the Thrift Savings Plan, a tax-deferred retirement investment plan similar to a 401(k). "There will be reasonable guidelines that already exist in other thrift programs that will enable people to have choice about where they invest their own money, but they're not going to be able to do it in a frivolous fashion," Bush said. He spoke to a Social Security panel, which included officials from financial service companies and others supporting his overhaul for the program. Investments are not without risk, as seen by the Thrift Savings Plan's annual returns. Federal workers have five investment options, including government and corporate bond funds, a stock fund that tracks the S&P 500, an international fund and other stock funds. The stock funds performed well in the 1990s, with the largest annual returns ranging from 20 percent to 43 percent. But in the 2001 recession and later, they have posted annual losses as high as 22 percent. Over 10 years, all the funds were profitable, the plan's Web site said. One of Bush's panelists talked about the resiliency of the U.S. economy, calling attention to the unreliability of the financial markets. "Everybody knows we faced an incredible number of shocks in the last several years. These shocks, which, by the way, destroyed almost half of the stock's market value in a short period of time," said James Glassman, senior economist with JP Morgan Chase. The shocks, including the 2001 terrorist attacks and the corporate accounting scandals, "were potentially as devastating as the shocks that triggered the Great Depression," he said. "And yet, the experts tell us the recession we just suffered in the last several years was the mildest recession in modern times." Away from the conference, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said Bush's planned overhaul was "a risky scheme for America, but a sure bet for the financial services industry." Sweeney urged the Securities Industry Association to disavow Bush's approach. "Will the financial services industry behave as professionals with a duty to speak candidly to the investing public or will elements of the industry once again seek to make money at the expense of their customers, only this time on a much grander scale?" Sweeney said in a letter. Financial services companies strongly disagree. "The fees are structured to be so minimal that in fact, even the studies have show that under any set of proposals Wall Street doesn't make any money on this for another seven or eight years," said Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist for Charles Schwab and Co. and a member of the economic panel Thursday. Supporters of personal accounts argue that if the system is not changed, future retirees will not get the benefits being promised today. Though going to a system of investment accounts means the government would cut promised benefits, participants could make up the difference through their investments. "This result is superior, particularly compared to the returns you would get leaving that money with the government," said Richard Parsons, chairman and chief executive of Time Warner Inc. and a chairman of Bush's 2001 commission on partial privatization. "People ought to be able to start to save on their own behalf to create wealth for themselves so that they have that wealth to look to in their later years, as opposed to a government promise only, which at some point in time is going to have to come up empty," he said. But five years after Bush first campaigned on a Social Security overhaul, he has yet to provide details of a plan despite three recommendations from his commission, none of which he endorsed. He also recognizes the political difficulty of taking on a program important to a large voting bloc that is called the untouchable third rail of politics. Republican leaders have been pressing the White House to offer more than a broad outline of changes. "The great desire for people in Congress is for me to negotiate with myself," Bush said Wednesday about presenting plan details. Addressing concerns about the record budget deficit, Bush also promised to send Congress "a tough budget" early next year to hold the line on spending. "You will see fiscal discipline exercised inside the Oval Office this coming budget cycle," the president told the economic conference. |
Also yesterday...
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| By ALAN FRAM, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON - The White House is telling federal agencies to expect lean budgets next year, with congressional aides and lobbyists saying President Bush (news - web sites) appears ready to propose freezing or even slightly cutting overall domestic spending. Targeted would be all annually approved programs except for defense and domestic security. Excluding those two would leave a part of the budget the administration estimates will total $388 billion for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. Also excluded are automatically made payments like Social Security (news - web sites) and interest on the federal debt. Bush's stringent approach comes as record federal deficits that hit $413 billion last year hinder his ability to pay for overhauling Social Security and extending his tax cuts. He also has tied the budget shortfalls to the weakening dollar, and pledged to reduce red ink to help prop up the currency. At his White House economic conference on Thursday, Bush said he made "good progress" in holding the growth of non-defense, non-homeland-security programs this year to about 1 percent. "What I'm saying is we're going to submit a tough budget," he said. "And I look forward to working with Congress on the tough budget." The president is still making final decisions about the $2.5 trillion budget for 2006 he will propose in February. But House and Senate aides, speaking on condition of anonymity, said cuts appeared destined for such programs as housing, grants for community development, purchases of new equipment for the Federal Aviation Administration (news - web sites), and Army Corps of Engineers water projects. Even the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, an administration favorite, was facing an increase of just 1 percent, pending appeals to the White House by outgoing NASA (news - web sites) Administrator Sean O'Keefe, a lobbyist said. The zero-sum game that is federal budgeting means that if spending for next year is held flat, for every dollar increase that administration favorites like education or veterans receive, another dollar must be cut elsewhere. Even a program receiving the same as this year would lose purchasing power due to inflation, now running about 3 percent annually. Bush's spending blueprint would be among the toughest for domestic programs since President Reagan's budgets of the 1980s. Overall domestic spending has grown every year but three since 1987 — in 1995 and 1996, when Republicans first recaptured Congress, and in 2000, immediately after a one-time influx of U.S. aid to help poor and debtor countries. Even as domestic spending growth has slowed, overall expenditures including defense and domestic security continue to climb, largely due to the costs of wars in Iraq (news - web sites) and Afghanistan (news - web sites). Congress approved $87.5 billion for those wars in fall 2003 and $25 billion more last spring, and Bush is expected to request another $75 billion to $100 billion early in 2005. |
Today:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...useconomygrowth
US economy to grow by 3.5 percent in 2005: White House
1 hour, 59 minutes ago Politics - AFP
WASHINGTON (AFP) - The US economy is expected to slow to a still-solid 3.5 percent growth pace in 2005, allowing it to trim a record budget shortfall, the White House said.
....
SHORTFALL? People are about to care.
Gee. Dubya's lifting the debt ceiling to--HOW many trillion, again--so soon after the election, must really have paid off! 
'Bina.
'Bina.
| QUOTE (BinaBecker @ Friday, 17 December 2004, 2:49 pm) |
| Gee. Dubya's lifting the debt ceiling to--HOW many trillion, again--so soon after the election, must really have paid off! 'Bina. |
He's stripping this country soon there will be nothing but bone....
Doc
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