It is only an opinion piece but Charles M. Blow's "We Should Be in a Rage" comes as a shock. In the blogsphere, strong language is everywhere.
When Blow invites us to be in a rage about voter suppression, he touches a nerve at EOM. Right along side absentee ballot fraud, voter suppression is a key tactic of those seeking to influence the outcome of elections.
"A vote is the great equalizer, but only when it is cast. The strategy here is simple: Break the spirit. Muddy the waters. Make voting feel onerous and outcomes ambiguous. And make it feel like a natural outgrowth of tedium and bickering, and not a well-funded, well-designed effort. Make us subsist on personality politics rather than principled ones. The greatest trick up the sleeves of the moneyed and powerful is their diabolical ability to render themselves invisible and undetectable, to recede and operate behind a front, one relatable and common. Our politics are overrun with characters acting at the behest of shadows."
So true. The Shadows that Blow writes about are everywhere in South Florida; in fact, "the diabolical ability" of insiders to manipulate political campaigns and policy outcomes has found some of the most fertile earth in the nation, in Florida.
Wouldn't it be special, if the city's only daily newspaper -- The Miami Herald -- would focus its editorial attention on those diabolical abilities and why Miami voters should be in a rage, too.
The Opinion Pages|OP-ED COLUMNIST
We Should Be in a Rage
APRIL 9, 2014
Charles M. Blow
The New York Times
Voter apathy is a civic abdication. There is no other way to describe it.
If more Americans — particularly young people and less-wealthy people — went to the polls, we would have a better functioning government that actually reflected the will of the citizenry.
But, that’s not the way it works. Voting in general skews older and wealthier, and in midterm elections that skew is even more severe.
As David Wasserman wrote on the Cook Report last year:
“Voters under the age of 30 were 19 percent of all voters in 2012, but just 12 percent of all voters in 2010. Likewise, voters 65 and up were 17 percent of all voters in 2012, but 21 percent of all voters in 2010. Herein lies the biggest danger for Democratic candidates in 2014.”
Now we hear murmuring that Republicans hold a slight advantage going into 2014, not strictly because that’s the will of the American people, but because that may well be the will of the people willing to show up at the polls.
There is an astounding paradox in it: too many of those with the least economic and cultural power don’t fully avail themselves of their political power. A vote is the great equalizer, but only when it is cast.
The strategy here is simple: Break the spirit. Muddy the waters. Make voting feel onerous and outcomes ambiguous. And make it feel like a natural outgrowth of tedium and bickering, and not a well-funded, well-designed effort. Make us subsist on personality politics rather than principled ones.
The greatest trick up the sleeves of the moneyed and powerful is their diabolical ability to render themselves invisible and undetectable, to recede and operate behind a front, one relatable and common. Our politics are overrun with characters acting at the behest of shadows.
These are the politicians to whom we have become accustomed — too much polish, and too much beam — which is precisely the reason they should warrant our suspicion and not our trust, the way one cannot trust a cook with pots too pretty and not burned black on the bottoms.
And yet too many people shrug or sleep when they should seethe.
We should be in a rage over the Roberts court’s seemingly implacable drive to vest corporations with the rights of people and unleash the full fury of billionaires to bend our politics to their will.
We should be in a rage over the widespread attempts to disenfranchise voters, from the gutting of the Voting Rights Act to the rise of the Voter ID movement — a near-naked attempt by conservatives to diminish the number of Democratic voters.
We should be in a rage over Republican efforts, particularly on the state level, to drag the range of women’s reproductive options back to the 1960s.
We should be in a rage over the extraordinary pressures facing ordinary families. According to The New York Times’ Economix blog, college costs have risen over 500 percent since 1985, medical and gas costs more than 300 percent. And, the Pew Research Center reported Tuesday that “in inflation-adjusted dollars, average weekly child care expenses for families with working mothers who paid for child care” rose 70 percent from 1985 to 2011.
And yet, a report last week from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that “some 69 percent of the cuts in House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s new budget would come from programs that serve people of limited means.”
We should be in a rage that this country’s infrastructure is literally crumbling beneath us. The “2013 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure,” produced by the American Society of Civil Engineers, gave our infrastructure an overall grade of D+ and estimated that $3.6 trillion would be needed by 2020 to fix it.
We should be in a rage that we are spiraling toward cataclysmic, irreversible climate change with little interest or effort in averting it, with little coverage and less than accurate coverage.
But where rage should be, there is too often a whimper.
When will we demand the country we deserve: reflective of its people, protective of its people, simply of its people? When will the young and the poor and the aggrieved and the forsaken walk abreast to the polls and then to the public squares?
If we don’t like the government we have, we can change it. If we don’t like the path we’re on, we can alter it.
Democracy is durable, but not incorruptible. The very purity of the concept invites those determined to alter it, to tilt it toward oligarchy, to slowly, imperceptibly if possible, bring it to a calamitous end.
The drift of the boat seems inconsequential until it encounters the falls.
When Blow invites us to be in a rage about voter suppression, he touches a nerve at EOM. Right along side absentee ballot fraud, voter suppression is a key tactic of those seeking to influence the outcome of elections.
"A vote is the great equalizer, but only when it is cast. The strategy here is simple: Break the spirit. Muddy the waters. Make voting feel onerous and outcomes ambiguous. And make it feel like a natural outgrowth of tedium and bickering, and not a well-funded, well-designed effort. Make us subsist on personality politics rather than principled ones. The greatest trick up the sleeves of the moneyed and powerful is their diabolical ability to render themselves invisible and undetectable, to recede and operate behind a front, one relatable and common. Our politics are overrun with characters acting at the behest of shadows."
So true. The Shadows that Blow writes about are everywhere in South Florida; in fact, "the diabolical ability" of insiders to manipulate political campaigns and policy outcomes has found some of the most fertile earth in the nation, in Florida.
Wouldn't it be special, if the city's only daily newspaper -- The Miami Herald -- would focus its editorial attention on those diabolical abilities and why Miami voters should be in a rage, too.
The Opinion Pages|OP-ED COLUMNIST
We Should Be in a Rage
APRIL 9, 2014
Charles M. Blow
The New York Times
Voter apathy is a civic abdication. There is no other way to describe it.
If more Americans — particularly young people and less-wealthy people — went to the polls, we would have a better functioning government that actually reflected the will of the citizenry.
But, that’s not the way it works. Voting in general skews older and wealthier, and in midterm elections that skew is even more severe.
As David Wasserman wrote on the Cook Report last year:
“Voters under the age of 30 were 19 percent of all voters in 2012, but just 12 percent of all voters in 2010. Likewise, voters 65 and up were 17 percent of all voters in 2012, but 21 percent of all voters in 2010. Herein lies the biggest danger for Democratic candidates in 2014.”
Now we hear murmuring that Republicans hold a slight advantage going into 2014, not strictly because that’s the will of the American people, but because that may well be the will of the people willing to show up at the polls.
There is an astounding paradox in it: too many of those with the least economic and cultural power don’t fully avail themselves of their political power. A vote is the great equalizer, but only when it is cast.
The strategy here is simple: Break the spirit. Muddy the waters. Make voting feel onerous and outcomes ambiguous. And make it feel like a natural outgrowth of tedium and bickering, and not a well-funded, well-designed effort. Make us subsist on personality politics rather than principled ones.
The greatest trick up the sleeves of the moneyed and powerful is their diabolical ability to render themselves invisible and undetectable, to recede and operate behind a front, one relatable and common. Our politics are overrun with characters acting at the behest of shadows.
These are the politicians to whom we have become accustomed — too much polish, and too much beam — which is precisely the reason they should warrant our suspicion and not our trust, the way one cannot trust a cook with pots too pretty and not burned black on the bottoms.
And yet too many people shrug or sleep when they should seethe.
We should be in a rage over the Roberts court’s seemingly implacable drive to vest corporations with the rights of people and unleash the full fury of billionaires to bend our politics to their will.
We should be in a rage over the widespread attempts to disenfranchise voters, from the gutting of the Voting Rights Act to the rise of the Voter ID movement — a near-naked attempt by conservatives to diminish the number of Democratic voters.
We should be in a rage over Republican efforts, particularly on the state level, to drag the range of women’s reproductive options back to the 1960s.
We should be in a rage over the extraordinary pressures facing ordinary families. According to The New York Times’ Economix blog, college costs have risen over 500 percent since 1985, medical and gas costs more than 300 percent. And, the Pew Research Center reported Tuesday that “in inflation-adjusted dollars, average weekly child care expenses for families with working mothers who paid for child care” rose 70 percent from 1985 to 2011.
And yet, a report last week from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that “some 69 percent of the cuts in House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s new budget would come from programs that serve people of limited means.”
We should be in a rage that this country’s infrastructure is literally crumbling beneath us. The “2013 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure,” produced by the American Society of Civil Engineers, gave our infrastructure an overall grade of D+ and estimated that $3.6 trillion would be needed by 2020 to fix it.
We should be in a rage that we are spiraling toward cataclysmic, irreversible climate change with little interest or effort in averting it, with little coverage and less than accurate coverage.
But where rage should be, there is too often a whimper.
When will we demand the country we deserve: reflective of its people, protective of its people, simply of its people? When will the young and the poor and the aggrieved and the forsaken walk abreast to the polls and then to the public squares?
If we don’t like the government we have, we can change it. If we don’t like the path we’re on, we can alter it.
Democracy is durable, but not incorruptible. The very purity of the concept invites those determined to alter it, to tilt it toward oligarchy, to slowly, imperceptibly if possible, bring it to a calamitous end.
The drift of the boat seems inconsequential until it encounters the falls.
6 comments:
Eloquent.
Hear, Hear!
The reality at the moment is that too many sleazy lobbyists funnel money to weak immoral politicians. The public ends up with corrupt and/or stupid elected officials.
The worst problem at The Miami Herald is their all out support for certain politicians in order to push its political agenda. In 2012, the worst absentee ballot fraud in the history of Florida was committed in Miami Dade County in the offices of Representative Rene Garcia and County Commissioner Esteban Bovo. The beneficiaries of the fraudulent vote were current Mayor Carlos Gimenez and State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle. The fraudulent election was not as significant as the subsequent cover up of the police investigation that followed by the State Attorney's Office. This stuff was worthy of Time magazine due to the severity of the crime, yet two years later, no one remembers and voter apathy is even worse. People deserve the kind of government they choose to have and here in Miami Dade County we have one of the worst in the nation.
How about the Miami Herald constantly touting the Marlins "deal". Every educated citizen in South Florida knew it was a scam. But ... No ... not the dimwits at the Herald, they endorsed the scam through every step of the process. Now the taxpayers are stuck paying over $3 Billion to cover the bonds sold to pay for the scam. WTF.
To the above re; the Marlins....taxpayers do not buy ad space in the herald. to paraphrase Poe, "Believe only half of what you see and none of what you read" \siri
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