Let's start with James Kunstler at Clusterfuck Nation . (Via Mark)
The greatest loss of the last decade was not in 401-Ks or manufacturing jobs or foreclosed houses, but the rule of law. Without genuine rule of law, anything goes and nothing matters. As a consequence of that, finally, everything goes. The rule of law is what kept foreigners buying our debt all these years (the fumes we've been running on). They kept buying because they believed, when all was said and done, that Americans would enforce contracts and regulate behavior in the direction of fair dealing - not for its own sake but because it made things work better. But when the rule of law goes here, the rest of the world will notice its absence. They'll stop believing in our money and our future. They'll cash out and we'll wash out. Then, as human tribes are wont, they may just turn around and kick our ass because we're down.
I think it goes even deeper than that, and I think, given the totality of the post (a post you should definitely find time to read), Kunstler would probably go along. As horrifying as the destruction of law is, what allows it - along with the destruction of the economy, the destruction of the social contract, and the destruction of representative democracy itself - is the wholesale assault on reality by what Mark has been calling "the Confederate Right".
Mark summed up the Confederate Right's contempt for reality along with everything else that won't reinforce their ideology.
[T]his fall's Republican smears of Democrats will be completely unhinged. The new Republican Party: fuck the environment, fuck the uninsured, fuck the unemployed, fuck the military, fuck teachers, fuck government workers and fuck everyone else who isn't us and who doesn't think exactly like we do.
But the confederate Right really have no choice but to redefine reality when it's the kind of reality Kunstler describes. Or the reality Krugman describes.
[A] country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself: in a number of states, local governments are breaking up roads they can no longer afford to maintain, and returning them to gravel.
And a nation that once prized education - that was among the first to provide basic schooling to all its children - is now cutting back. Teachers are being laid off; programs are being canceled; in Hawaii, the school year itself is being drastically shortened. And all signs point to even more cuts ahead.
We're told that we have no choice, that basic government functions - essential services that have been provided for generations - are no longer affordable. And it's true that state and local governments, hit hard by the recession, are cash-strapped. But they wouldn't be quite as cash-strapped if their politicians were willing to consider at least some tax increases.
Or the reality Herbert describes.
The employment situation in the United States is much worse than even the dismal numbers from last week's jobless report would indicate. The nation is facing a full-blown employment crisis and policy makers are not responding with anything like the sense of urgency that is needed.
The employment data for July, released by the government on Friday, showed that private employers added just 71,000 jobs during the month and that the unemployment rate remained flat at 9.5 percent. But as bad as those numbers were, if you look beyond them you'll see a horror show.
Government workers were walking the plank from coast to coast. About 143,000 temporary Census workers were let go, and another 48,000 government employees at the budget-strapped state and local levels lost their jobs. But the worst news, with the most ominous long-term implications, was that the reason the unemployment rate was not higher was because 181,000 workers left the labor force.
With many of them beaten down by the worst jobs situation since the Great Depression, they just stopped looking for work. And given the Alice-in-Wonderland way in which we compile our official jobless statistics, they are no longer counted as unemployed.
The motivation of the Confederate Right's assault on reality certainly includes a heavy dose of self-delusion, but it is also required if the oligarchs they represent are to succeed in what they've always wanted:to turn America into a Third World-style banana republic that they both own and control. In that scenario, if you haven't figured it out already, we're the landless, poverty-ridden peasants.
In order to keep doing it, they have to convince us it isn't happening, or if it is, it's somebody else's fault. Illegal immigrants, Muslims, and liberals, for instance. They've got to get us to keep eyeing that pie-in-the-sky, as Joe Hill called it, that shining city on a hill, as Reagan put it, without ever letting us get close enough to it to realize that, as Terry Gilliam put it when he let the cat out of the bag in Holy Grail after King Arthur went into raptures when he sighted Camelot on top of a distant hill, "It's only a model."
I've said it before: you can't fix problems you refuse to admit exist. If we continue to let the conservatives, Dem or Pub, play samurai sell-out to corporations and our burgeoning aristocrat class, we can look forward to living out another scene from The Holy Grail, and it won't be over in 2 hours.
Eric Idle: There's a king.
Michael Palin: How do you know he's a king?
Eric Idle: He hasn't got shit all over him.
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