So yeah, most people who know me know I’m prettly liberal/progressive/whatever. I don’t march in lock step, and frequently veer in strange directions (does that make me a drunk liberal? I think it does)…but I’m not above the time honored liberal tradition of kicking other liberals in the shins.
I go to Huffington Post at least once a day. There are a few people who blog there that I’m interested in who write interesting stuff. Robert Reich, Johann Hari, and a few others off the top of my head.
That said, Arianna has made a website for famous people with big soapboxes to have yet bigger soapboxes. Occasionally her people “deign” to allow “little people” a say in things, but typically, those posts get cleared away fast in favor of her favorite socialites’ ramblings. And very few of them seem to paint a picture that is different from her own, which has always made me suspicious of their vetting process.
Not to say that her own posts that get highlighted repeatedly aren’t self-indulgent ramblings. They are. Frequently.
Arriana Huffington is a person who has built a career on complaining about things. It’s how she connects with people who have similar complaints. Unless its HER or one of “her people’s” ideas. Obama gives a tremendous speech about health care, takes ownership of the public option, makes it perfectly clear that this thing is his and he wants it to work…and this is what her response is. She waits for some people to start nitpicking it because they didn’t hear exactly all the bullet points they wanted to hear, and she opens up by saying “the public option is dead” and as usual, infers that Obama is no better than George W. Bush. That’s just what she does. If she doesn’t get exactly what she wants, she throws a little online tantrum and throws stones from her glass house. It’s no surprise, given that she’s essentially built a big chunk of her life on complaining about things. Whether it was Bill Clinton back in her old conservative-independent days, or George W. Bush when she had a “change of heart” and became a progressive, and now Obama because he isn’t “progressive enough” or “doing enough”.
That’s a common complaint. After all, we’re just a bunch of little kids hoping daddy can make everything all right, right? Some of us are just less mature about it than others, I suppose. Of course, daddy’s trying to make things better while there are rifles pointed at him from every direction, poor folks running around with signs who were spun around by deceitful corporations with the intent to cause “disruption” by astroturfing a pseudo-libertarian “movement” with the ultimate goal of causing the “change” to be “good change” for their bottom lines. And what does Arianna do with her big soapbox? Kick daddy in the shins for not getting her that triple scoop ice cream and only getting her the single scoop because that was the most he could get out of the store. The problem isn’t “daddy”, the problem is those people making daddy’s job pretty much impossible.
Arianna could be using her soapbox to consistently push for getting everyone in this country who works independently, the self-employed, the unemployed, to join up with a union or unions. The reason why corporations were held in check in the old days was because there were big, tough unions that could take down any politician who veered too far into the corporate mass. That said, they balanced each other out because the corporations could donate to campaigns. That balance is what kept this country going for decades…it’s no surprise that politicians became totally corrupt when the unions went from having 30% of the workforce unionized to 8%…where they hardly even matter anymore. It’s really that simple. If a union could offer group health care plans through its own union based health care co-op, you could afford health care as part of your union dues. But Arianna has decided that co-op is a bad word, so there. I’d love single-payer too, unfortunately, because we disrupted the balance between the democratic institution of unions and the autocratic institution of corporations, we basically made that impossible in this political climate.
There has been a lot of change, it’s just that a whole lot of Arianna’s people wanted a whole lot more and didn’t get it instantaneously. A lot of that is predicated on irrational fear of problems so complex that you really can’t wrap your brain around them. That fear leads to two different points of view, typically…change everything, or touch nothing. The result of that causes extreme polarization, with one side thinking the other side is trying to destroy everything. It’s a problem as old as humanity itself, and it rears its head every so often in times of crises such as this one.
We could go out and take everything back from the people who caused this mess by force. We could demand that no fossil fuel burning cars be sold in the US. We could demand a single-payer health care option. The other side sees it like this: If you try and take the cash that was stolen by all these mortgage brokers back by force, where will it end? Will we be robbing guys who didn’t realize it was part of their salaries? If you take every fossil fuel burning car off the market and I total my car…but have to get to work at this place that is not on mass transit, and the auto companies are charging a fortune for first generation electric cars…does this mean I have to quit my job? If we kill all the health insurance companies in favor of a single payer system, does this mean that my brother who has sold health insurance for 20 years and has no other skills is going to be on the street?
That’s why we make compromises. And maybe they aren’t enough. Maybe we have to work towards a more progressive goal over time. But even a compromise, at this point, IS change. Because we weren’t even discussing any of these things in the last administration. The Bush Administration had an agenda and they rammed it down our throats, whether we liked it or not. The fact that we can discuss and compromise and work things out IS change. It’s a hell of a lot of change from the virtual autocracy we had been living under for the past 8 years. These guys could go to war and they didn’t even care if they could get congressional support for it or not. They just would go and do it and to hell with the consequences. If they wanted to force some corporate giveaway on us, they just did it. If they wanted to make rich people who inherited wealth even richer, they just did it. They didn’t even care. Their right wing radio guys apologized for it, but they didn’t have to, really…except in a weak attempt to try and keep “everyone cool” for the next election.
We got plenty of change already. And if you’re too blind to see it, then I certainly can’t help ya.