As Ted Cruz waxed apoplectic about Obamacare and Boehner and Reid symbolically butted heads over an arbitrary debt ceiling, some of the more fortunate Americans were able to actually be distracted by their stage movement. Now that it’s ceased, though, we’re back to normal: general despondency.
The Article: Mainstream economics is in denial: the world has changed by Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian.
The Text: Rebellions aren’t meant to kick off in lecture theatres – but I saw one last Thursday night. It was small and well-read and it minded its Ps & Qs, and I think I shall remember it for some time.
We’d gathered at Downing College, Cambridge, to discuss the economic crisis, although the quotidian misery of that topic seemed a world away from the honeyed quads and endowment plush of this place.
Equally incongruous were the speakers. The Cambridge economist Victoria Bateman looked as if saturated fat wouldn’t melt in her mouth, yet demolished her colleagues. They’d been stupidly cocky before the crash – remember the 2003 boast from Nobel prizewinner Robert Lucas that the “central problem of depression-prevention has been solved”? – and had learned no lessons since. Yet they remained the seers of choice for prime ministers and presidents. She ended: “If you want to hang anyone for the crisis, hang me – and my fellow economists.”
Environmental advocate, civil rights activist and attorney Van Jones on the individual mandate: “Insurance is what you buy when you don’t know if something bad is going to happen. Maybe I’ll crash my car. Maybe I won’t. I don’t know. So I’m going to get car insurance just in case. Everybody’s going to get sick and die, so you know every single person’s going to need health insurance. That’s not something you can provide insurance for, that’s called a service.”
Let public school system administrators cozy up with private test companies, have ’em set some unreasonably high standards for aid that teachers–especially in impoverished districts–can never reach, and as you make your way to the bank lament the laziness inherent in today’s public school teachers. It’s brilliant.
The Article: How shameless Christian con artists took over the GOP by Amanda Marcotte in Salon.
The Text: The culture of fundamentalist Christianity has had profound impacts on the Republican party in the past few decades, moving Republicans to the right on various issues and forcing Republicans to prioritize gay-bashing and attacks on reproductive rights. The shutdown, however, ended up demonstrating something even more sinister. Republicans are no longer just cribbing their political ideology from fundamentalist Christianity. Increasingly, conservative politicians are abandoning the basic task of representing the interests of their voters and instead are exploiting their voters in the same way televangelists and other fundamentalist charlatans exploit the true believers that come to them looking for spiritual salvation.
Ted Cruz is the most prominent example, at least in the past month. After the shutdown debacle, it became clear that Cruz has no interest in using his position as a Texas senator to work on behalf of the voters who got him there. Instead, his M.O. is pure sleazy televangelist: Lots of public grandstanding to convince his marks, previously known as constituents, that he’s on their side, for the sole purpose of shaking them down for money and support without offering anything in return.
