Saturday Morning Musings

A must-read post from Firedoglake, Contempt of Congress, cites an op-ed from the NYT If You Give a Congressman a Cookie, by Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, both of which are excellent essays on the ills of today's Washington political culture (under the Republican regime). As Ornstein/Mann state, they have never seen "the culture so sick or the legislative process so dysfunctional."

Firedoglake notes that the op-ed article: details a number of issues that the authors, both long-time policy and legislative analysts at AEI (Ornstein) and The Brookings Institution (Mann), see in this Congress and in the political culture of today's Washington, through the lens of how much more corrupt and grasping this particular incarnation of Congress has been under the Republican leadership -- how much further the GOP has taken the notion of "we can do whatever the hell we want, because we are the law."

The impact of this perversion of the process has an even greater impact on the lives of "ordinary" people. Referring to the recent Medicare drug program fiasco, Firedoglake says:

I've been hitting this Medicare problem hard because it is one that I see play itself out every day here in West Virginia, where I've seen elderly folks at the drugstore struggle to piece together change from their coin purse to finish paying for drugs that they can ill afford, where heating prices have skyrocketed this winter at a time when the Administration has cut subsidies for people on the margins, and where my family has tried to help out folks at our local Mission and other shelter options because there are elderly people who have to face a choice every day between their prescriptions and eating, and that is just, plain wrong in a nation of such wealth and prosperity for so many at the highest end of income.

I don't say this to make myself out to be some saint, because I'm not -- there is a lot more than I ought to be doing, frankly. But because it is illustrative of what I've heard from hundreds of readers, friends and family who work with the elderly, the poor, the homeless, the mentally ill, the disabled, the abused and neglected.

And where is our governing body in all of this?

We have a Congress and an Executive Branch, run by a Republican majority gone amok, drunk on power and dispensing legislative largesse on their contributors at every turn.

Right. And that's just wrong. Now, I am hardly on the lower end of the financial spectrum, but I do believe that we cannot ignore the needs of others who may be less fortunate. Have we really become so selfish that we frankly don't give a damn about anyone else but our own needs/wants? The gap between rich and poor is widening every day and I fear that the policies being implemented by the Republican party today may have disastrous consequences for many people in the not too distant future.

Changes to Medicare/Medicaid, health insurance, pensions & social security that have been proposed or passed are all ways to chip away at and eventually cause the demise of, those so-called "entitlement" programs. "Kill the beast" is the rallying cry of the right and they are well on their way to success.

The rise of the "Robber Barons" through the consolidation of big (no, make that huge) businesses does not bode well for the worker (or consumer). Wages have gone from stagnant to decreasing. Working conditions are becoming reminiscent of those same bygone Robber Baron days (a la the mine disasters in the past month), with little or no concern for safety issues in the workplace.

We have regressed in many ways. I heard a piece on NPR yesterday discussing the controversy over the new show "The Book of Daniel" (which I haven't seen). A comment made by Jack Kenny, the creator of the show, gave me pause. He remarked that programs such as, "All in the Family" and the “Maude” abortion episode were controversial in their day, but that they probably would never be able to be done in today’s environment. It’s true. We’ve become a moralistic, repressive society.

The list can go on and on. I am normally an optimistic person, but I am not so much about the direction of the country. In many ways, we’ve become the Victorian Era of the 21st Century.