Krugman: Kansas on My Mind (Attack on AARP)

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/25/opinion/25krugman.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=

Call it "What's the Matter With Kansas - The Cartoon Version."

The slime campaign has begun against AARP, which opposes Social Security privatization. There's no hard evidence that the people involved - some of them also responsible for the "Swift Boat" election smear - are taking orders from the White House. So you're free to believe that this is an independent venture. You're also free to believe in the tooth fairy.

Their first foray - an ad accusing the seniors' organization of being against the troops and for gay marriage - was notably inept. But they'll be back, and it's important to understand what they're up to.

The answer lies in "What's the Matter With Kansas?," Thomas Frank's meditation on how right-wingers, whose economic policies harm working Americans, nonetheless get so many of those working Americans to vote for them.

People like myself - members of what one scornful Bush aide called the "reality-based community" - tend to attribute the right's electoral victories to its success at spreading policy disinformation. And the campaign against Social Security certainly involves a lot of disinformation, both about how the current system works and about the consequences of privatization.

He has of way of condensing and clariying issues that is breathtaking.

when DUers slam their state...

Thank you, Mr. Krugman, for slamming my state like a warped screen door. Today Dr. Dean was in Lawrence, a town no major Kansas democrat would get within 20 miles of today. Today our AG continued his perverted quest to leer at the sex lives of 40 or more Kansas women at once, for a fishing expedition that will trash the Dr/patient relationship in Kansas forever.

But he just has to know the sexual secrets of 14 year olds, in the worst way.

And Kansas, with its rural and aging population, will doubtless encourage our wingnut freaks in the Senate to put two in the head of the best retirement safty net for the elderly yet implemented by society.

Go figure. But thank you again Mr. Krugman, for beating my state like
the toothless banjo-pickin pervert that it is. Here, I'll hold its elbows up while you kidney punch it a few times for me.

Anti-privatization forces should not assume that winning the rational arguments is enough - Bush wins gains for the rich by selling those he hurts that he is the defender of mainstream values.


Kansas on My Mind
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: February 25, 2005

<snip>The slime campaign has begun against AARP, which opposes Social Security privatization. There's no hard evidence that the people involved - some of them also responsible for the "Swift Boat" election smear - are taking orders from the White House. So you're free to believe that this is an independent venture. You're also free to believe in the tooth fairy.


<snip>
The message of Mr. Frank's book is that the right has been able to win elections, despite the fact that its economic policies hurt workers, by portraying itself as the defender of mainstream values against a malevolent cultural elite. The right "mobilizes voters with explosive social issues, summoning public outrage ... which it then marries to pro-business economic policies. Cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends."

In Mr. Frank's view, this is a confidence trick: politicians like Mr. Santorum trumpet their defense of traditional values, but their true loyalty is to elitist economic policies. "Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. ... Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization." But it keeps working.

And this week we saw Mr. Frank's thesis acted out so crudely that it was as if someone had deliberately staged it. The right wants to dismantle Social Security, a successful program that is a pillar of stability for working Americans. AARP stands in the way. So without a moment's hesitation, the usual suspects declared that this organization of staid seniors is actually an anti-soldier, pro-gay-marriage leftist front.

It's tempting to dismiss this as an exceptional case in which right-wingers, unable to come up with a real cultural grievance to exploit, fabricated one out of thin air. But such fabrications are the rule, not the exception.

For example, for much of December viewers of Fox News were treated to a series of ominous warnings about "Christmas under siege" - the plot by secular humanists to take Christ out of America's favorite holiday. The evidence for such a plot consisted largely of occasions when someone in an official capacity said, "Happy holidays," instead of, "Merry Christmas."

So it doesn't matter that Social Security is a pro-family program that was created by and for America's greatest generation - and that it is especially crucial in poor but conservative states like Alabama and Arkansas, where it's the only thing keeping a majority of seniors above the poverty line. Right-wingers will still find ways to claim that anyone who opposes privatization supports terrorists and hates family values.

Their first attack may have missed the mark, but it's the shape of smears to come

Kansas On My Mind
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/25/opinion/25krugman.html
by Paul Krugman

.rog.

:-)

Thanks for understanding!

I saw Gore Vidal speak in Durham, North Carolina yesterday and he opened with comments about this column! Vidal said that Krugman is the only reason to read the New York Times these days.

The kind of corporate dictatorship being formed is based upon mass politics. The underlying receptivity of the public to repeated lies is based upon the pluralistic institutions of society being corrupted and giving up on the principles of democracy and the Constitution.

This involves many faux religious institutions represented by the likes of John Hagee and his thousands of institutional counterparts in the country. These are the equivalent of the "volk" in Nazi Germany. Their amorphous culture is based upon ignorance, fear, and impotence. The volk culture and its essentially irrelevant values and icons provide a sense of certainty and belonging for people who otherwise would have to acknowledge that they are impotent politically as a matter of fact. Thus we can regularly see religious leaders in the mass media advocating ruthless warfare and the audience members down to the last soul dutifully nodding their heads in compliance. These people don't have a clue. Where are the traditional churches on this corruption of state policy and church?

The mainstream press has also capitulated. The Congress has capitulated. Those capitulations are largely the result of 911 manipulations and direct death threats to important public figures of the loyal opposition exemplified by the anthrax plot. These people in the rump legislature can either do what they are told and be rewarded by the corporate paymasters or they can risk having their careers destroyed or even being killed. Some Senators off the record without attribution did acknowledge that the general consensus was that Senator Wellstone had been murdered. My feeling is that if you work in the public forum and no one has threatened to kill you, fire you or ruin your career yet, you are probably not doing your job. Stand alone and face getting cut down.

The executive branch institutions including the many former agencies totally reorganized are rendered politically impotent by the "homeland security act" and "intelligence reform." We are on the way to being a complete totalitarian dictatorship. The so called Patriot Act and related "security and surveillance" legislation formalized the repressive police state security machinery. Gitmo and Abu Ghraid tortures and deaths and illegal detentions and kidknappings are the implied threat to the individual citizen.

The targeted corruption of our electoral processes by private corporations with unauditable evoting machines was the death knell for the Constitution.

I'm not saying there aren't courageous leaders and public figures out there because there are. Krugman is one of them. I hope I am wrong and events will prove me wrong.

it was saying.
Now I know!!

.......And this week we saw Mr. Frank's thesis acted out so crudely that it was as if someone had deliberately staged it. The right wants to dismantle Social Security, a successful program that is a pillar of stability for working Americans. AARP stands in the way. So without a moment's hesitation, the usual suspects declared that this organization of staid seniors is actually an anti-soldier, pro-gay-marriage leftist front......

want to dimantle SS and they will do anything to do it!!


So it doesn't matter that Social Security is a pro-family program that was created by and for America's greatest generation - and that it is especially crucial in poor but conservative states like Alabama and Arkansas, where it's the only thing keeping a majority of seniors above the poverty line. Right-wingers will still find ways to claim that anyone who opposes privatization supports terrorists and hates family values.

Their first attack may have missed the mark, but it's the shape of smears to come.

"What's the Matter with Kansas" is a fine, well written book. It is also depressing. Thomas Frank obviously loves (even as he mourns) his home state, Kansas, as Paul Krugman obviously loves his country. These two honorable writers are the most patriotic people we have in this country, along with all of us at DU (!), and I listen to them with great respect.