Government Paralyzed

MANIFESTO

David Ignatius has a column in today's Courant wherein he opines

Take any big issue that matters to the public—from immigration to energy to health care to fiscal policy—and what you see is a failure of government. The logjam in Washington is so complete that Congress and the executive branch are paralyzed, unable to do the public's business. That problem has been growing for several decades, but now it's a national disaster.

The writer zeroes in on this situation as it relates to airlines, but, as he says, "hold off on airlines for a moment and ponder [the] larger point."

Ever since free market zealots began the era of deregulation (and I include hideous referenda such as Proposition 13 in this), state governments and the feds have thrown up their hands and essentially stated that there's nothing they can do to help solve society's problems. The Bushies, especially, have used this dodge to avoid fulfilling any kind of responsibility toward their fellow citizens. (In other words, the notion of a "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" has been lost.)

What we have left, then, as Lewis Lapham so poignantly puts it in the latest edition of Harpers, is a

foreign policy that assures the profits of the defense industry, not the safety of the American people; we have financial policies that protect the creditors but not the debtors; we have health-care policies that guarantee the well-being of corporations, tax policies that shelter the holdings of the rich and multiply the burdens of the poor.

As Lapham points out, the current system is no less than an outright suppression of the liberties and seizure of the property of the American people. ("That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends ...") I agree wholeheartedly with both Ignatius and Lapham, and, given this situation, I can't for the life of me understand why we haven't seen riots in the streets.

Be that as it may, at least one government entity sees its proper role vis-à-vis corporate interests:

With one vote to spare in each chamber, the [Connecticut] state legislature voted Monday to override Gov. M. Jodi Rell's veto and guarantee a 35-cent increase next year in the state's hourly minimum wage.

The unusual override marked a significant political defeat for Rell: It's only the second time that the Democrat-controlled legislature has overturned the Republican governor in the nearly four years since Rell took office. It also marked the first override on a major policy issue.

I realize I'm grasping at straws, but at least it's something.