Damon Winter/The New York Times
By CHARLES M. BLOW
Published: May 21, 2011
Wow. What a week.
This week we lurched back and forth between the prurient and philosophical, between personal egos and our national ethos, between Schwarzenegger and Strauss-Kahn and President Obama and his considered-but-contentious vision of a new Middle East.
But, interestingly enough, this week's big news, both high and low, has no more legs than last week's fake furor over a rapper reciting poetry at the White House or the week Osama bin Laden was killed in a Pakistani safe house.
The one true constant in this country for the foreseeable future, and the issue that'll likely consume the summer, is the economy. As a Gallup poll reported earlier this week, "Three in four Americans name some type of economic issue as the 'most important problem' facing the country today - the highest net mentions of the economy in two years." Only 4 percent each mentioned "ethics/moral/religious/family decline; dishonesty" or "wars/war (nonspecific)/fear of war."
For the poor and unemployed struggling to land a job and provide some family security, the sexual exploits of rich sexagenarians may provide a moment of socio-economic schadenfreude, but it'll do nothing to salve the long-running, underlying angst.
For the powerless and voiceless making choices between bills and food, articulating a more coherent North African and Mideast policy that doesn't sacrifice our moral standing to our strategic interests may feed the soul, but not the stomach.
For far too many Americans, this will not be a summer for the silly or even democratic existentialism. This will be yet another summer to simmer, yet another summer to wonder when the recovery that now wafts freely between the Temples of Greed on Wall Street will make its way to the half-barren bungalows on Main Street, yet another summer to see just how little regard "job creators" - a favorite Republican term of art for the G.O.P.'s corporate Geppettos - have for the American people who built this country.
Take these recent examples:
As The New York Times reported last Friday, health insurers are reporting record profits for the third year in a row as people postpone or forgo care. Yet the insurance companies are still pressing for higher premiums.
And who among the insured is cutting back on needed health care? Many doing so are seriously ill.
According to a July 2009 report from the Kaiser Family Foundation entitled "Health Care and the Middle Class: More Cost and Less Coverage": "Nonelderly adults with medical debt are almost twice as likely to have an ongoing or serious health problem compared to others with private coverage. Unfortunately, the privately insured who have medical debt are also as likely as the uninsured to postpone care, skip recommended tests and treatments and not fill drug prescriptions - any of which can lead to more serious illness and even disability, which are difficult and costly to treat."
In short, we as a country may pay for these companies' profits later with a sicker population.
Also last week at a hearing of the Senate Finance Committee about oil subsidies, John Watson, C.E.O. of Chevron - which reported last month that first-quarter net income rose 36 percent from the same period last year to $6.21 billion - said that "I don't think American people want shared sacrifice. I think they want shared prosperity." The problem is, Mr. Money Bags, that you and other corporate interests are the only ones sharing in the prosperity. For Americans on the lower end of the income spectrum, it's all sacrifice.
And a USAToday/Gallup poll released earlier this week found that nearly 7 in 10 said that higher gas prices were causing financial hardship, more than half said that they "have made major changes" to compensate and 21 percent said that the impact is so dramatic that "their standard of living is jeopardized."
And lastly, The Wall Street Journal reported last week on some 40 states that use prepaid debit cards to issue payments like unemployment benefits and child support. Turns out, the banks love these cards because "they largely escaped the recent crackdown by U.S. lawmakers and regulators on fees, interest rates and billing practices for credit and debit cards."
So the fat-cat bankers are allowed to fleece the most needy and most vulnerable in the most outrageous of ways. Some charge fees for checking the balance on the card, others charge high withdrawal fees, and the most callous even charge an "inactivity fee" when the recipient doesn't use the card. According to The Journal, one bank executive said of his bank: "Prepaid debit cards and other products will help the company recover roughly half of the revenue likely to be lost from swipe-fee rules being written by regulators." How do these people sleep at night? On pillows stuffed with cash, no doubt.
This summer has the potential to be another turning point for the electorate, and it's not necessarily pegged to the performance of the president. It may hinge largely on the callousness of conservatives and their seemingly inexorable desire to overplay their hand.
This may be the summer that we see more clearly that the working class has developed a lingering sense of disillusionment, that right-wing politicians have developed an unshakeable immunity to empathy and that corporations have developed a taste for blood squeezed from turnips.
And it may be the summer for seeing through the right-wing squawk machine that hopes to distract us from the damage the rich and the right are doing by manically hurling torches at the Obama administration to see if something catches fire.
This week, Representative Paul Ryan, a Republican of Wisconsin, suggested to the Economic Club of Chicago that the president's attempt to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans amounted to "class warfare" and promoted "class envy." Ha! The war is already being waged against the poor and vulnerable, and the envious have-nots didn't start it. The right and its cabal of economic cannibals did.
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