Re: The Corpo-Obama-Geithner-Petraeus State

On Sat, 14 Aug 2010 09:34:27 -0700 (PDT), "Sir Arthur C.B.E.
Wholeflaffers A.S.A." <science@zzz.com> wrote:

On Aug 14, 9:33�am, Dave Anderson <danderson...@gmail.com> wrote:

http://www.thenation.com/article/154017/corpo-obama-geithner-petraeus...

The Corpo-Obama-Geithner-Petraeus State
Barbara Ehrenreich
August 12, 2010 � | � �This article appeared in the August
30/September 6, 2010 edition of The Nation.

So a black man finally wins the presidency, only to discover that it's
about as useful as a 32 cent stamp. According to Eric Alterman, the
federal government, avatar of liberal hope for at least a century, has
become hopelessly undemocratic, poisoned by corruption and
structurally snarled by partisan divisions. Poor Barack Obama, who
steps up to the plate and gets handed a foam bat!

The government, as Alterman convincingly describes it, is not only
expensive, "bloated" and all the rest. It has become a handmaid to
corporate powera hiring hall from which compliant officials are
selected for vastly more lucrative private-sector jobs, as well as an
emergency cash reserve for companies that fall on hard times. No
wonder so many Americans unthinkingly conflate "big government" and
"big corporations." This is not the kind of government that hires
unemployed people to paint murals on post office walls. And, as
everyone knows, when the bank decides to repossess your home, it's a
public employee who will kick in the door.

All that should be enough to sour liberals' trust in government as a
tool for progressive social change. But the situation is much worse
than Alterman acknowledges. In the years since governmentstate and
local as well as federalhas shed its role as a kindly change agent,
it has assumed a new one as |ber-cop: building more penitentiaries,
snapping up stoners, harassing blacks and Latino-looking people on the
streets. Nonviolent protests have dwindled, not only because of
activists' lingering deference toward Obama but because the police
response to any outdoor gathering so resembles the assault on Falluja.

Even the more helpful government programs have become agents of an
increasingly repressive state. Food stamp offices, public housing
complexes and homeless shelters are the sites of "warrant searches"
used to gather up people who might have missed a court date concerning
an unpaid debt. Public housing residents are subjected to drug tests;
in many states, the process of applying for what remains of welfare
(Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) parallels that of being
booked by the police, complete with mug shots and fingerprints.
Although you won't find them out campaigning against ICE raids and
urban stop-and-frisk programs, some of the Tea Partyers seem to dimly
understand this, with one handmade poster at last year's 9/12
demonstration in Washington saying, for example, GOVERNMENT HEALTH
CARE = PEE IN A CUP.

And what is a liberal to make of the city of Maywood, California,
which more or less disbanded itself in June, outsourcing all municipal
functionssounds like a liberal nightmare, right? Until you read that
the now-defunct police department was found by the state in 2009 to be
"permeated with sexual innuendo, harassment, vulgarity...and a lack of
cultural, racial and ethnic sensitivity and respect.''

Alterman acknowledges the problem only tentatively, observing that
"one might argue that this [Democratic] faith in government's ability
to improve people's lives is misplaced." You betcha. The role of the
left should not be to uphold or defend the government, meaning, for
now, the corpo-Obama-Geithner-Petraeus state, but to change it,
drastically and from the ground up. That may sound overly radical to
Alterman, who seems to want "progressives who think of themselves as
left of liberal" to abandon even that tiny distinction. But as the Tea
Partyers keep reminding us in their nasty and demented ways, these are
revolutionary times.

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author, most recently, of Bright-sided: How
the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.

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