Time To Care
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc./Getty Images
In 1987, while running for president, U.S. Senator Gary Hart was caught hanging out with a woman, not his wife. He was driven from the campaign and made a political punch line for decades, despite being one of the smartest, most talented senators in history. (I covered him as a young reporter and our discussion of the Kennedy assassination still keeps me awake)
Same year/same campaign - U.S. Senator Joe Biden (yes - same guy) is caught making speeches cribbed from another politician. Videos of the speeches are given on the sly to Maureen Dowd of the New York Times. Biden is out of the race in short order. His rival, then Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, fires his campaign manager for leaking said videos.
Back then, you had to keep your nose clean to run for office. The standard was fairly high. The dregs on the back benches of the House and Senate could get away with a lot - the lobbyist dinners, the boozing, the affairs etc. But when you ran for president, you submitted yourself to what Obama advisor David Axelrod termed “an MRI for the soul.’’
More than 30 years later, the president of the United States can say whatever he wants and generally get away with it. The porn star, the hoax claims, the self-dealing. None of it lays a glove on him. And 40 percent of the country doesn’t seem to care.
Why?
Would this teflon have applied to Jeb Bush or another Republican? Was it something about Trump himself that made him immune? Or has the system - our civic culture - become so toxified, so cynical and base, that nothing matters anymore.
We have some clues. I think the next Republican nominee for president could be Tucker Carlson of Fox News. And I once said that the Democratic nominee could be movie star Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock.
The presidential campaign has now seen $14 billion in spending. That’s with a B. That doesn’t include the millions spent on Senate and House campaigns. Don’t tell me this country can’t afford a better healthcare system or end poverty. Take that money, end the carried interest tax giveaways for hedge-fund managers and cut the Pentagon five percent and you could do Medicare for everyone or redo K-12 education.
The answer to why Hart and Biden and so many others went down for nothing crimes and Trump survived goes to the heart of what we are dealing with now and into the future - no matter what happens tonight and over the next month.
We have created the wealthiest society in the history of the planet by plundering that planet and ignoring the consequences. That system worked really well (for some) until about now. It made lots of people very rich and made the U.S. the headline power on Earth. And we turbo-charged the whole system with the Internet, connecting us all together in a more profitable world (Amazon) but vulnerable to the rot lurking beneath.
In our greed we forgot the basics. That wealth machine became so efficient at selling stuff to people that the existence of the machine itself became the goal. Keep that machine oiled and we will all be good. And it didn’t matter whether the stuff sold by the machine was good for society or not. Coke and Pepsi, Facebook, plastic packaging, guns, chemical laden laundry soap, huge mono-culture farms, mega-mansions, fracking. All of it boosted the GDP, but to what end?
Let’s frack that oil in Pennsylvania. Ignore the lead in the drinking water in Flint. Let’s drain the Colorado River over decades so we can irrigate California to send strawberries to grocery stores in New York in February. Miles per gallon? You care about that? That’s for the weak.
Facebook sells your personal information while fooling you into thinking you are hanging out with your friends. They allow hate speech and propaganda campaigns from foreign governments and hide behind the First Amendment. As Professor Scott Galloway of NYU says, Facebook is a public menace.
We forgot about education. Most of our kids go to school in 1940s era buildings with tile floors, asbestos ceilings and bad air.
We forgot about our health. We allow the rampant sale of poison to our citizens, leading to an obesity epidemic that is crashing the economy and wrecking lives.
We forgot about the public discourse. We allowed right-wing companies like Sinclair to buy up our TV stations. We allowed Facebook and Google to steal the advertising money from newspapers. So now no one is covering the school board or City Council in Red Bank, NJ. We allowed megalomaniacs like Rupert Murdoch to control our entertainment and news. A menace to a healthy society.
And now we wonder how we got here. We got here because we got greedy. We got here because of carried interest, 20 percent capital gains rates, low-paid teachers, defunding government research and ignoring the crisis of K-12 education.
We got here because we handed our government and the functioning of society over to a small cadre of oligarchs that we allowed to grow too big too fast. We turned the Justice Department into the president’s private law firm, instead of the trust-busting agency it needs to be.
We lowered our standards. We bought the line that government doesn’t work because we were fed the line for 40 years. And then when the bridge collapsed or the potholes didn’t get filled, we complained but didn’t make the connection with the de-funding of government.
We allowed the Democrats to abandon working people to raise money in Silicon Valley. We allowed the Republicans to sleep in the same bed with Murdoch and take us to war in Iraq on a lie.
We stopped caring. We cared more about our 401k than who we do about how we run things, whether it’s the city council, school board or the White House.
It’s time to start caring again. If Biden is the next president and the Senate goes Democratic, the job of giving a damn starts anew. Your 401k will be fine. Really rich people are gonna pay some more tax. They will be fine. We will engage the world on climate in order to save the world. We won’t change things overnight. But we will start.
That’s our job now - to save the world from the world we created - from ourselves.
