Bob Herbert’s last column is a good one.
Overwhelming imbalances in wealth and income inevitably result in enormous imbalances of political power. So the corporations and the very wealthy continue to do well. The employment crisis never gets addressed. The wars never end. And nation-building never gets a foothold here at home.
I expect a lot of “liberal” pundits to heh-indeed this to show that they haven’t lost their religion and indeed Joe Klein is on the job. No matter how much time you spend looking for Black Panthers and Weathermen, trashing unions, and gushing to Hugh Hewitt about your undying love for George W. Bush, agree with Bob Herbert or quote Bob Dylan and you’re a real man of the people again!
vhh
I reckon Obama visited Rio to get a feel for what the GOP economic program leads to.
Bruce S
Heard Paul Pierson – of “Winner Take All Politics” – talk the other night, and it’s clear that the dramatic increase in income inequality is both a result of – and feeds relentlessly – the imbalance in political power. Cause & effect tend to be the same thing – as well as, of course, the intent…
Villago Delenda Est
This phenomenon is why “conservatives” are not conservative. They’re working, relentlessly, to destabilize society, by feeding this imbalance.
Nothing good will come of this.
New Yorker
@vhh:
I dunno. The leftist government of Lula looks like it made great strides in reducing income inequality in Brazil. Obviously, they’ve got a long way to go down there, but at least they’re moving in the right direction, unlike us.
patroclus
Paying attention to what Klein-Hoekstra says is an utter and complete waste of time.
Yutsano
@New Yorker: Add to that they just elected a former Marxist rebel as President plus they are close to being totally energy independent (there’s a possibility that if Petrobas gets the huge oil field discovered online soon it will all be exports) and it might be time for Brazil to assert itself as an economic powerhouse.
Bruce S
“Villago” – I’m really on a tear about this. There’s nothing conservative about today’s GOPers. They are right-wing radicals pushing crackpot ideology and/or shills for the economic elite. Even among their “little people” outbursts of populist cultural and racial resentment aren’t conservatism as I’ve understood it. My family were Eisenhower Republicans, and they recoiled from these monsters…
Cliff
@patroclus:
There’s a certain pleasure to be found in telling Joe Klein that he’s a clueless blowhard.
Annamal
I’ve decided that conservatives in America bear a lot of resemblance to ants in a death spiral.
They follow each-other ever downwards and ever rightwards even when their actions (defunding freaking disaster monitoring fer gawdsakes) will inevitably result in death and destruction (possibly even for themselves, it’s not like the wealthy never visit beaches).
Other countries have conservatives you guys have religous fanatics who have conflated god and the market at the expense of any and all common sense.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@Annamal: For them “god and the market” are one and the same.
Karen
Last week when I was watching a TV show that like most of them started off with mentioning giving to the Red Cross in Japan, I thought about when we did the same thing for Haiti. And the other Asian tsunamis in 2004. And then I thought about the people in this country who are suffering and how the very same people who give so generously to other countries don’t seem to care. I even thought about the commercials I keep seeing about the ASPCA and about the sufering pets that need people’s help.
Now I have a cat, I’m an animal lover. But it bothered me that celebrities do the psas for pets and children in poverty in other countries but not for the poor in their own country.
Why is it that the people in poverty here, in the States, don’t get those same psas? Why is it that starving families in the US are seen as lazy yet in other countries are given sympathy even children with terminally ill parents don’t get?
You could say that the people in other countries need it more because they’re REALLY poor. But what’s the difference between a starving child in Ethiopia and a starving child in the US? Both children are starving.
Master of Karate and Friendship
How many people on this site will endorse this?
Chris
@Karen:
Or, there’s the fact that $20 there will feed a larger number of children and/or for a longer while, than $20 here.
I’d prefer that we simply (hah) tax ourselves enough to help ourselves enough not to need lots of charitable giving at home. (Yeah, lots of luck there)
Aunt Moe
He was a damn good columnist. He was grounded and never lost sight of what was important.
His biggest sin though? He never let it become about him. He didn’t join the celebrity culture which the likes of Friedman enjoy so much.
He was a plain spoken, deeply thoughtful man and I’ll miss the hell out of him.