Some dots to connect:
- Attempts to impose restrictions on voters (such as voter ID laws) are on the rise.
- Redistricting has increased the number of "safe" districts, meaning that more races are uncontested, and more candidates feel safe taking extreme positions.
- Voting machines remain hackable, and pressure for quick results over accurate results means that the demand for computerized voting systems will continue.
- Voter apathy (in no small part due to the above situations) means that political decisions are increasingly made by smaller and smaller groups of people, and those groups are more likely to hold extreme views (as a fervency of belief is part of what encourages people to go to the polls) (which reinforces the trends in the second point).
- The Citizens United case doubled down on the concept of corporate "personhood," so that it is possible for corporations to buy campaigns and political representatives. Witness the current Republican primary, the way the current administration treated BP with kid gloves after the oil spill, the way that "too big to fail" is now a valid approach to doing business, and so on.
- The media is also increasingly dominated by pro-corporation thinking, and the majority of its pundits, newscasters, and the like reinforce that thinking rather than bite the hand that feeds them.
- The mainstream media has fallen into the habit of he said/she said journalism, and prefers stories that fall into existing narratives and which require little training (or funding) to produce. There is also a preference for profit over fact-finding (again, the latter costs money and requires trained reporters). As a result, stories that entertain and stories which reinforce common wisdom and the spoonfed narratives of the powerful predominate. At their worst, you get the trifecta, as when Sarah Palin was covered as a political candidate (thus as "serious news"), as an authentic "real American" (reinforcing tropes about who Americans are, that is, white, conservative, small town or rural, gun-loving, religious, etc.), and as a hot babe (thus as telegenic celebrity).
- Groups like ALEC and the Koch brothers are emerging as sources of coordinated political action and funding, and consistently they favor legislation that reduces individual civil liberties and undermines social networks and protective regulation while strengthening the powers of politicians and corporations.
- Prisons are increasingly privatized, turning the justice system into a for-profit enterprise.
- Privatization of public goods, such as roads, libraries, and schools decreases public input into the management of said entities, replaces public good with profit as the primary goal, and makes it easier to paint the government as restrictive and expensive rather than as the provider of useful services.
- Related to this, the insistence that public schools teach primarily "to the test" encourages passive, black-and-white thinking among students, rather than an ability to engage critically with complex situations and problems. (Case in point: global climate change.)
- As college education is increasingly priced out of reach due to the reduction of state and federal funding, and the expansion of administrative staff and salaries, higher education is less prepared to provide a corrective to what happens in the lower grades; at the same time it is less able to cover more complex issues in deeper detail. Simultaneously, those rising tuition rates leave new graduates deep in debt and thus vulnerable to economic coercion on the part of employers. The emphasis on liberal arts education at the expense of vocational education (like plumbing or carpentry) also reduces the options for students who are more manually oriented. (Many of them will either end up going in debt for educations that are not functional as job-producing credentials, or taking other options such as military service.)
- Police around the country are gaining increased access to military-grade hardware and training in its use; such equipment not only increases police lethality, it also makes it easier to surveil populations without their knowledge or consent, and the laws governing such technology (such as drones, cameras, and tasers) lag far behind their use.
- The rhetoric of terrorism has enabled the government (at state and federal levels) to expand its powers of surveillance, arrest, and detainment, while at the same time decreasing transparency and promoting an attitude of passive acceptance to increasing intrusions on privacy, on the part of the general public.
- Legislation aimed at restricting access to abortion has led to increased government interference in women's exercise of bodily autonomy, and increased expectations that members of the medical profession function as punitive arms of the government, and because this legislation is enacted piecemeal state by state, there is no national conversation about what is a de facto overturning of Roe v. Wade.
- Legislation aimed at reducing companies' responsibility to include contraception in their insurance policies reinforces the message of women's unreliability and second-class citizenship, frames religious freedom in terms of the restrictive beliefs of a few religious groups, privileges corporate decisions (also framed as "religious freedom") over individual religious beliefs, and continues the trend of declining employer-provided health care insurance.
- Responses to the above legislation are used to reinforce a message of "I got mine, why should I pay for yours" (as through Limbaugh's castigating of Fluke as a "slut") and are consistently and erroneously framed as a "taxpayer" concern; this both reinforces the selfish message just mentioned, and reinforces the idea that taxes should not be used to pay for social services, whether those take the form of welfare for the poor, or mass programs such as single-payer health insurance programs.
- Other responses to the above legislation take the form of mocking the logic of those laws by proposing that similar invasions of privacy be applied to male bodies as well as female. While this satirical approach is understandable (given the media's unwillingness to cover complex issues unless they can be reduced to an entertaining soundbite) it reinforces the idea that legislative interference in medical decisions and patients' exercise of their right to bodily autonomy is okay (if it is applied "fairly" to both genders).
- Rape culture reinforces the idea that consent is not something we should be concerned about; hence it is possible for legislators to opine that a coerced ultrasound (transvaginal or not) is okay since a woman who is pregnant has already "had something up there," implying that consent is meaningless, or that one instance of consent should be construed as global consent in perpetuity.
- Laws such as Florida's Stand Your Ground law reward vigilanteeism and the murder of people who happen to be non-white, while reinforcing the notion that the Second Amendment right to bear arms is more important than laws governing personal safety.
- Media narratives about "lone" gunmen, who are "crazy," and viewed as surprises or exceptions, reinforce a world view in which violence (especially violence against women, people of color, and abortion providers) is viewed as a random, freak occurrence, rather than part of a larger system of beliefs about the nature of power and dominance. As a "bonus" the mentally ill are further marginalized and stigmatized by such narratives.
- Such narratives about the mentally ill also are wielded against those who speak out against the system (OWS for example is marginalized both as being a bunch of "lazy, dirty hippies" and as consisting of large numbers of homeless people, which is shorthand often for "crazy people") and to minimize the real and serious danger posed by people with money and power who espouse extreme views (e.g. Santorum is often framed as "crazy" in order to justify not taking him seriously).
- Continuing high unemployment is used to enable further incursions against individual privacy, as when people on unemployment are asked to take drug tests, or when job applicants are asked to turn over their email and social media passwords and user names to potential employers. Some incursions are even sanctioned by legislation linking contraception to employment, as in the Arizona legislation making it legal for employers to question their employees about birth control use and to fire them on the basis of what they discover.
- The minimum wage is lagging, often severely, behind the cost of living in every state of the union. This comes at a time when the costs of housing are rising, the costs of health insurance (let alone uninsured costs) are rising, and when unemployment in general is rampant. This leaves the population vulnerable to exploitation by unethical employers, and too stressed by the demands of subsistence to educate themselves about the issues, let alone mount an effective response to them.
- Global climate change is imposing severe stresses on an already stressed system, from increasing forest fires, an earlier (and more northerly) tornado season, droughts in our food-producing regions, immigration fueled by environmental devastation and economic downturns elsewhere, increasing demands on our fossil fuel reserves for cooling and heating during seasons of extreme temperatures (high and low).
I think that's enough for now. Are you starting to see a picture emerge?
Recent Comments