Who Let the Dogs In? (2 page)
Read Who Let the Dogs In? Online
Authors: Molly Ivins
I respect those who oppose abortion, but I do not think they have a right to use the law as an instrument of coercion against people who do not believe (and it is a matter of faith) as they do. They have no right to make this decision for someone else, nor does the government. Some women do not have the physical, psychological, or economic resources to bear a child. There were an estimated one million abortions a year in this country before
Roe.
Abortion can be safe and legal, or dirty and illegal. It cannot be stopped.
The anti-choice crowd have every right to make their arguments, but I think they are being used. Ditto the people who think gays are an abomination. I do not think the Christian right is driving what is happening in this country politically, nor is it even an equal partner with economic fundamentalism. There’s a large extent to which the Christian right is being played for a bunch of suckers by country club conservatives who are interested in nothing more than their own pocketbooks.
Everybody knows God is nonpartisan, but I swear Jesus was a liberal—the best, the biggest, the original bleeding heart—the one who embraced the outcasts, the model for us all. Just read the stuff in the New Testament written in red. Don’t ever try to convince me that Christianity is right-wing. As for the economic conservatives, who are driving this entire insane detour away from liberty and justice for all, well, as Wright Patman once observed, “The rich and powerful in our country are very greedy. This has many times been demonstrated. It is natural that they should seek ever more power and wealth, but where there is greed there is no vision. And as the Good Book says, where there is no vision, the people perish.”
We are witnessing such an astonishing demonstration of greed, such a ridiculous maldistribution of wealth. The average CEO makes three hundred times as much as the average worker. (In 1982, it was just forty-two times.) The richest 1 percent of Americans have 33.4 percent of the total wealth of the country, while the bottom 80 percent have 15.6 percent. According to government data, in 2000, the richest 1 percent had more money to spend after taxes than the bottom 40 percent. Between 1990 and 2003, CEO pay rose 313 percent. The S&P 500 rose 242 percent. Corporate profits rose 128 percent. Average worker pay rose 49 percent. Inflation rose 41 percent. This is not capitalism, this is some sick, extreme deformation of a system that always needs regulation.
How many ways can you measure what’s wrong? According to the Census Bureau, poverty is getting worse and household income is falling: The poverty rate is 12.1 percent, or about 35 million people, including 12 million children. Median household income dropped 3.3 percent between 2001 and 2003. Between 2002 and 2004, the richest 1 percent of Americans got $197 billion in tax cuts under the Bush plan.
The Wall Street Journal
’s editorial page, a fountain of misinformation, moans about liberals who want “class warfare” and “income redistribution.” Since 1962, there has been a 17 percent decline in federal revenue from progressive taxes and a 135 percent increase in the share of revenue from regressive taxes. There has been a 67 percent drop in the share contributed by corporations and a 17 percent increase in individuals’ share. The disparities are becoming worse, not as a consequence of some inexorable economic law, but as a direct result of unfair taxation and unfair legislation.
So, what? We’re supposed to think a mere vote outweighs a $2,000 campaign contribution? Not to mention the $2,000 from everyone on the entire corporate masthead—a little campaign-money trick called “bundling.” Beloved fellow citizens, it stinks, it rots, it is disgusting and full of worms—it is not just not working for us—this system is screwing us. Oldest saying in politics: “You got to dance with them what brung you.” Not that hard to figure out how to fix it. Public campaign financing—kick in a couple of tax dollars to pay for campaigns, so when pols get elected, they got nobody to dance with but us, the people.
Public schools and health care are falling apart while the right sits around griping about high taxes. What is this, France under Louis XIV, with aristos and peasants? Working-class people are getting screwed, and Lord knows it’s not because they’re not working hard. We finally get a so-called recovery, and none of the profits go to the workers.
Come on, Americans: This sucks. Democracy and capitalism are separate systems: one political, one economic. Capitalism is the best system yet invented for the creation of wealth, but it does dog on its own for social justice; it must be mitigated; it needs to be refereed by government intervention (and the refs damn well better not be on the take). Otherwise, we’re going to end up like the banana republics in Latin America—rich people shut up behind high walls and the rest of us in slums. This is not rocket science. We’ve had decades and even centuries of experience with capitalism: We know how to harness it so it works for most of the people most of the time.
As I look at the “career,” it’s hard for me to remember what it was like to be naïve, but I have never been able to move beyond the experience of being shocked by people who think it’s OK to lie, cheat, and steal in politics. My old friend Linda Lewis and I once came to agreement on what we consider the irreducible minimum of decency in politics, based on our experience with a sorry class of pseudoliberals called “poverty pimps”: Don’t Steal the People’s Money.
Here are a few other things I have learned or come across that might be useful to you as citizens.
• “When Dr. Johnson declared patriotism to be the last refuge of a scoundrel, he underestimated the potential of reform.” —Roscoe Conklin, U.S. Senator from New York, 1890 (I used to think “reformer” was a noble word, until I met the Medicare Prescription Reform Bill, otherwise known as “How to Brown-nose Big Pharmaceutical Campaign Contributors While Literally Screwing the Life Out of Old Folks.”)
• “Being a man is not letting anybody be humiliated, not letting the people around you feel degraded.” —from
Kiss of the Spider Woman
• One of the wisest editors I ever had was Dick Cunningham, who observed, “American journalists inherit the freest press in the world, but they enslave themselves to two masters: the conventions of their craft and the limits their society puts on what is acceptable thought.” How many times have I been clocked by various kinds of thought police? One of my faves is the condescending “You do realize, Miss Ivins, that the polls show the great majority of Americans do not agree with you.” No shit? The struggle to escape conventional wisdom is, in my opinion, made much easier by avoiding Washington, D.C. I like to pretend it’s easy for me to say, “Aw, kiss my ass.” What is in fact terrifying to me is how often I accept “what everybody else says.”
• Huey Long observed: “If totalitarianism comes to this country, it will surely do so in the guise of 100 percent Americanism.”
• I’ve had encounters with sexism that range from infuriating to depressing to hilarious, but my favorite is still the Texas lawmaker who said in all sincere admiration, “Young lady, you got huevos.”
• There are 148,000 people in prison in Texas; 72,000 of them are there for nonviolent crimes.
• “News is something someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising.” —Lord Northcote
• “The character issue is driving all the characters out of politics.” —Jan Reid
• “Racism is not the KKK; it’s when there’s serious inequity and not a passion to do something about it.” —Pat Hayes, president, St. Edward’s University
• “Many conservatives despise government and perhaps for that reason disregard civilities suited to its functioning. People who despise government should not be entrusted with it. Important kinds of public spiritedness are foreign to them.” —George Will
• “I wouldn’t ask a plumber how he treated his wife and children before letting him loose on the leaking toilet.” —P. D. James
So here we are in the glorious election year of 2004, with a boring stiff in one corner and stupefying incompetence in the other.
Now
they all ask: “Who knew Dubya Bush would be this bad? I realize there is nothing more annoying than someone who says, “I told you so.” But dammit, the next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be in the White House, would you
please
pay attention? I knew him, but even I hadn’t counted on what fear would do to him. Fear makes people do terrible things. I also think Bush is badly advised, chiefly by Dick Cheney and also by that whole nest of neo-cons in the Defense Department. One of the most elementary mistakes you can make in politics is to listen only to people who agree with you. How could they be so stupid? Karl?
Reading Douglas Brinkley’s book
Tour of Duty
is enough to give one hope for John Kerry, but it also leaves one wondering, “So what the hell happened to the guy?” His career since then is not a profile in courage. The record isn’t bad, but he seems to suffer from extreme political caution. Of course, every criticism of Kerry can be countered with the unanswerable argument “Compared to Bush?”
Not an inspiring speaker? Compared to Bush? (My favorite is still the time the president informed us we had enjoyed an enduring 150-year alliance with Japan.)
Flip-flops? Compared to the man who opposed the 9/11 Commission, the Intelligence Review Board, the Department of Homeland Security, nation-building, McCain-Feingold, the Middle East peace process, summits, free trade, the corporate reform law, consulting the UN about Iraq, consulting Congress about Iraq, letting Condi Rice testify, etc.? Hell-o-o?
What more can be said about the mess in Iraq? The consequences of ignorance in power are disastrous. We knew Bush didn’t know anything about foreign affairs, and the great tragedy of his presidency is that the mother of all foreign policy crises occurred on his watch. But he was supposed to be surrounded by people who knew more. Paul Wolfowitz, architect of the Iraq invasion, assured Congress before the war, “There is no history of ethnic strife in Iraq.”
While Iraq is clearly hubris carried to the point of insanity—it’s damn hard to convince people you’re killing them for their own good—there is a quieter and creepier agenda as well: the steady erosion of freedom, the contempt for legal process, the secrecy, and the unleashing of corporate greed on the environment. Through good times and bad, through terror attacks and wars, Bush has remained consistent about one thing: cutting taxes for the rich. They said it would be “the CEO administration,” and so it is. What is astonishing to me is the irresponsibility.
Fiscal irresponsibility, leaving staggering debts to be paid for by future generations. Economic irresponsibility: As Paul Krugman observed, if you eat ten chocolate bars in a row, you will get a burst of energy, but it’s not good for your health in the long run. Environmental irresponsibility: To simply ignore global warming, to pretend it’s not happening, is so stupid. Mercury, carbon dioxide, mad cow disease, arsenic—they behave as though corporate profits were more important than people’s lives. Irresponsible about terrorism, we have thrown away the goodwill of the rest of the world, ruptured alliances, threatened friends, and publicly dismissed and condescended to the United Nations. We have done nothing but create more terrorists and cost ourselves the most valuable tool that exists in hunting them down: international cooperation.
Benito Mussolini, who knew whereof he spoke, said “Fascism should more properly be called corporation, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.”
“So, Stanley, a fine mess you’ve gotten us into this time.” And what’s to laugh about in this sorry pass? There’s always that reliable cheerer-upper: Things could be worse. For example, the current governor of Texas is a lot dumber than the last one, and he could run for president. And things could get better. I think we have taken a wrong turn, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get back on the high road. It’s already been a great political year, in that the Internet has finally arrived as a major political player, and all to the good. Interactive politics, people participation, and, best of all, money—real, serious political money, being raised in small amounts from regular folks. Wow, that’s new, and that’s important.
Rejoice, beloveds, we’ll weather this brush with fascism and come out as noisy and as badly behaved as ever, our politics back to the usual national Roller Derby. As Marianne Moore said, “It is an honor to witness so much confusion.”
