Djelloul Marbrook

Congress made itself irrelevant to public discourse by selling ideologies instead of examining ideas. Obscured in Barack Obama’s triumph is the triumph of digital communications: the people went around their leaders to engage in the discourse a servile, self-absorbed media establishment refused to host. The people went around their leaders just as their leaders have been going around them, and so this is a hallelujah moment for many reasons.

To nurture this spirit of going around the political bullheads, why not re-examine the length and breadth of our economy? First, we’re likely to find it’s set in concrete, literally. Americans hit the road in the 1950s and never looked back. We connected mall dots and suburban dots with apocalyptic torrents of concrete. A road culture arose and we celebrated it in song, poem, novel and film. But in our fossil fuel frenzy we killed Main Street and along with it more sensible transportation. We scoffed at the electric car, tore up trolley tracks and neglected rail and water transportation and handed over our destiny to oil-rich foreign unfriendlies. Now, distracted by the housing bubble, we have sent millions of jobs overseas and abandoned our manufacturing base, narrowing instead of broadening our economy.

Circuit City, KB Toys, Mervyns LLC and Linens ‘N Things, stalwart anchors of the desolate malls, are dead, and it is likely others are looking puny, because the public is no longer spending like there’s no tomorrow. The public has seen tomorrow, and it’s bleak. The public has seen that wealth flows up and hogwash trickles down. Why is it hard to understand that corporate greed and political connivance have destroyed the security of the middle class, so it no longer has the buying power to support the economy? And no quick fix will change this until we create a broader based and more visionary economy.

Isn’t this the right time to rethink the malls? And the suburbs? Wouldn’t it be more sensible to revive our towns and cities, build fuel-efficient public transit systems, create industries instead of exporting them, develop new technologies, and undertake the research that will diversify our economy tomorrow? We have more housing stock than we need, but we don’t have enough jobs and the jobs we do have don’t pay enough and aren’t secure enough. Why should it be our destiny to revive a housing industry that ran roughshod over the environment? Wasn’t the housing bubble always the handiwork of lobbyists and predator-lenders?

The politicians are katydids. Katy did, katy didn’t: spend more, save more. They have told us the developer is Saint George and government is the dragon. They have told us Social Security, which is about all some of us have got these days, should be put in the hands of the Wall Street scoundrels who have dismantled the world’s economy to fatten their offshore accounts and pay themselves fat bonuses to celebrate their malfeasance. They have sung the praises of a health care system that ranks thirty-seventh in the world and yet is its costliest. It’s a health care system whose success can be measured by the degree to which it has created a communist state for insurers and managed caregivers.

Who can believe the katydids?

And while all this contradictory blather has been crammed between ads, we have watched local government sell out the ecology to developers, imperiling our water supply and imposing an infrastructure tax burden that almost no community in the United States can now bear. So thick has been the deceit that Americans have actually come to believe they can have the services they want without having to pay for them.

The ownership society stands naked in the court of public opinion. It was always welfare for predatory lenders and developers. No sane leader should have supposed that such a one-horse economy could serve a nation as large and diverse as ours. The press stood silent while this scam was underway because the scam produced advertising revenues.

Who can trust the katydid press?

It’s not a bad thing that our assumptions are wobbling, not if we seize the chance to rethink them. But rethinking is exactly what the crooked establishment that created this disaster doesn’t want us to do, and that is what underlies the ridiculous flip-flop foofaraw created and sustained by the press. Only mad dogs and numbskulls refuse to rethink.

Did we mean to kill Main Street with malls that depended on cheap foreign products and gas guzzling? The answer depends on how you define we. The Main Street that the politicians keep extolling was murdered by the oil industry.

Do we believe anything trickles down from the super rich other than grief and cynicism in the manner of Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, Bernard Madoff, and the many other conscienceless rascals who have graced our headlines these many years, some of them still in their gilded offices?

Did the press really believe that an economy based on buying and selling houses was a sensible economic model? Did it make sense to hand over to other nations the industrial might that saved us in World War II? How to account for the absence of real debate about such large issues? That is a question we ought to be asking ourselves.

When we were skating into this catastophe where were the Democrats and Republicans who now so exhibitionistically fret about handing over more money to the banks? They were busy giving the banks license to freewheel us into preposterous debt and a collapse of the credit market. They were busy singing the praises of the trickle-down con and convincing us that balancing the interests of the different segments of society is socialism when in fact it’s mere common sense. They were busy unlearning the lessons of history, failing to ask themselves why Thomas Jefferson feared corporations and why Andrew Jackson feared banks.—DM