I feel compelled to comment on this essay written for Bill Moyer's Journal. Here's the link to it.
The author seems to blame the country's ills and primarily the great inequality that presently exists on an underground cabal of elites who owe allegiance neither to Republicans nor Democrats but to a wholly separate subculture that exists exclusively around that area we have come to know simply as "THE BELTWAY".
It's a very long article and by the time I got through reading it I wasn't convinced that he was talking about the disease so much as he was talking about a symptom. I really don't think there is a cabal of any sort hiding inside the Beltway. I think they are the minions (a popular word these days, I know) of the 1% who purchase politicians, federal rules and regulations, laws and Supreme Court Justices as if they are investments upon which they expect a handsome return on investment.
I think this article, written by Thomas Frank is a much more useful prescription for the inequality trap. It says that the change we seek must come from the bottom up. We cannot count on our elected representatives to save us in the current state of affairs. Moreover, we can't count on the academics to save us either. In fact, he faults us liberals for our over-dependence on academics for charts, facts, figures and the purest academic principles to convince others that we are on the right track. He says what we really need is some of that good, old-fashioned populist outrage that pulled us back from the brink in years and crisis' past.
I'm beginning to think he's right.
In What's the Matter with Kansas, the same author, Thomas Frank probed the depths of the problem and discovered that people voted freely against their own self-interest in Kansas because the right wing gave them a moral issue to stand upon when the political lines between the two parties became otherwise blurred. We, as progressives or maybe neoliberals, won't use the word "class" to describe our current problems, but maybe we should...Frank thinks so....
In this context, Mike Lofgren's scholarly piece simply describes what Frank has been shouting from the rooftops since 2004.
It's time for some serious outrage. Shouted in the public square in words even a Tea Partier can understand.
Publius
