If a Rubio screams from Down a Rabbit Hole, does any one hear It?

Occasionally one of the villagers gets it right (h/t to Digby).  Today’s Awake Villager Award goes to Kevin Drum of MoJo who expresses utter contempt for the current Republican strategy of destroying the country at any cost to take down a Democratic President while mentioning that said Democratic President and his crony congress cadre have basically given said right wingers absolutely everything they’ve wanted for over a decade without a fight. I bestow this prize because the piece also recognizes the complicity of “journalists” in this charade.

People who are making policies and people giving air time to policy makers these days exist  in a state of complicity in lies. The continuation of more and more of the same damned policies are basically getting the same damned result yet real analysis of the results and the connection to the policy never occurs in the public forum.  The polices of the last 12 years induced a financial crisis and are inducing another one.  They created high unemployment and falling wages and they continue to perpetuate joblessness and income inequality. No one holds the policy makers or the narrators of the results accountable to hard, cold reality.   How is it that this game continues to grow exponentially without riots in the streets by the 99% of the country that’s been hurt and continues to be hurt by this insanity?  Are we so doped up with sports and “reality” shows that we don’t have time to take stock of what these people are doing to us?

But then, for about the thousandth time, my mind wanders over the past ten years. Republicans got the tax cuts they wanted. They got the financial deregulation they wanted. They got the wars they wanted. They got the unfunded spending increases they wanted. And the results were completely, unrelentingly disastrous. A decade of sluggish growth and near-zero wage increases. A massive housing bubble. Trillions of dollars in war spending and thousands of American lives lost. A financial collapse. A soaring long-term deficit. Sky-high unemployment. All on their watch and all due to policies they eagerly supported. And worse: ever since the predictable results of their recklessness came crashing down, they’ve rabidly and nearly unanimously opposed every single attempt to dig ourselves out of the hole they created for us.

But despite the fact that this is all recent history, it’s treated like some kind of dreamscape. No one talks about it. Republicans pretend it never happened. Fox News insists that what we need is an even bigger dose of the medicine we got in the aughts, and this is, inexplicably, treated seriously by the rest of the press corps instead of being laughed at. As a result, guys like Marco Rubio have a free hand to insist that Obama — Obama! The guy who rescued the banking system, bailed out GM, and whose worst crime against the rich is a desire to increase their income tax rate 4.6 percentage points! — is a “left-wing strong man” engaged in brutal class warfare against the wealthy. And Rubio does it without blinking. Hell, he probably even believes it.

We are well and truly down the rabbit hole. The party of class warfare for the past 30 years is fighting a war against an empty field and the result has been a rout. I wonder what would happen if the rest of us ever actually started fighting back?

There are so many little gems in this assessment it’s hard to point to them all.  The Republican denial of how their policies have and continue to trash the nation’s economy is the obvious one.  The next is the obvious enabling by the press that exists in some strange struggle to seem fair or be some Orwellian version of  “fair and balanced”  that ignores facts and data and experts in fields.  The press puts party operatives and politicians on TV to lie their frigging hearts out without fact checking their statements.  Some how, fair and balanced means repeatedly letting people put out “opinions” like the sky is green and dirt is blue.  An opinion isn’t misstating facts last time I checked my notes on the scientific method and the rules of public debate.

This is what drives me craziest. The press treats “seriously” people that get on TV to present alternate reality under the guise of looking at all sides.  Misstatement of facts are not opinions.  They are damned lies.

Most journalists these days peddle in access to lies and not much more.  There is lots and lots of irrefutable, scientific evidence on evolution, climate change, and the results of “voodoo” economic policy.  One does not get an “opinion” on appendicitis except on TV news shows.  In life, a certified and trained doctor  diagnoses the condition.  Fair and balanced reporting should not mean getting a panel of grade school educated yokels on TV who insist that people can’t get appendicitis because the appendix doesn’t exist.  It also doesn’t mean that some congressman that sits on a committee looking at health issues should be freed of the burden of proving his point that the appendix doesn’t exist because god and Ayn Rand wrote it down somewhere.  There are tons of freaks these days that are funded by rich idiots–many that own said corporate media outlets–that set up “think tanks” to put out false research that basically states that the sky is green.  These freaks show up on TV news constantly.   Study after study shows that people that view Fox news–as an example–don’t just hold opinions.  They hold completely false information. This is a huge problem because an effective democracy relies on an informed electorate.  We are getting systematically fed falsehoods that are killing our country and our livelihoods. This particulary bothers me because as an economics and finance professor, I have to confront the economic and finance fairy tales daily.  I hear the economic version of “the appendix doesn’t exist” from people who think they are just expressing an opinion instead of repeating a complete falsehood.

I guess what really struck me the most about Drum’s rant was that same sense of frustration and near-depression throughout that basically haunts me too.   I have absolutely no idea how to stop what he’s described. What brought about the huge changes during the Great Depression was the vision of  a leader and the people who surrounded him and the fear of the elite that US citizens might actually take to the streets.  They feared it was the New Deal or a Communist-style revolution in which they would lose everything.  The political and economically powerful no longer fear us and we no longer have leaders with vision beyond their own re-elections.  Something is going to give eventually and I’m just hoping its not the 200+ year experience that’s called the United States of America. Over the last thirty years, all three branches of government and the press have been successfully infiltrated to represent only the most rich and powerful.  What are we going to do about it?

Oh. The answer to the question at the top is that every one hears the Rubio Down the Rabbit Hole.  That’s because we’re not only victims of crony capitalism, we’re victims of crony journalism.