A sinister force has been set loose on America, and its latest manifestation is the newly elected U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, Scott Brown.
In the past month, I spent three weeks on seasonal visits to friends and relatives from Texas, the Carolinas and Florida, culminating in the final days of the campaign to succeed the late Edward F. Kennedy.
It was a grim eye-opener on the pall that has fallen over Middle America in the year since Barack Obama’s arrival in the White House.
We know too little about Senator-elect Brown to reach firm conclusions about his own views, although his abrupt switch from proponent of subsidized health care in the Bay State, to vocal opponent on a national level, is a warning sign. It is the Republican Party that made him its candidate – and propelled him to victory with an onslaught of cynical populist demagoguery – that should worry anyone who cares about America.
Not long ago, that statement might have been dismissed as windy liberal exaggeration. Today it is the sad and terrifying truth: Abraham Lincoln’s Grand Old Party no longer stands for the fiscal integrity, national cohesion and strategic caution that marked it for more than a century. It has devolved into the backstage string-puller of the Tea Party – a political movement fueled by undisguised venom, wallowing in ignorance, and offering absolutely nothing that resembles a program for healing the nation’s many wounds or building for its future.
A FOX MONOPOLY
The tragedy, the menace of such a development, has been enormously increased by an accident of history. The descent of Republican conservatism into populist thuggery has coincided, almost precisely, with the cataclysmic decline of mainstream, objective American journalism.
The results can be read nationwide in the soaring audience figures of media billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, which pays little or no heed to its supposed attachment to “fair and balanced” reporting. In 2010, Murdoch’s operation commands a larger viewership than all other cable news broadcasts put together. Over the past four years, Fox has seen its ratings rise by 25 percent, while the nightly news ratings of the three conventional broadcast networks have fallen by an average of more than 20 percent.
Apart from the generosity and personal warmth of my hosts, two things stood out from my Christmas trip: Nearly every household had a copy of Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” proudly displayed on its living room coffee table, and Fox News was overwhelmingly the primary source of information.
When dinner table talk turned to politics, it was concentrated on a sole theme: the mortal danger of something called “Big Government,” the paranoid obsession of Fox News’s bitterly anti-Obama commentators (who now include Ms. Palin). It is also an obsessive theme of the bogus “grass roots” protests mounted all over the country by the Tea Party Movement, which are not so much covered by Fox as enthusiastically promoted.
Thanks largely to this implicit partnership, Tea Party populism has all but monopolized the attention of a broad, fearful swatch of the middle American electorate from coast to coast. There is no distinguishing its rigidly Republican voters in Dixie from their self-described “Independent” counterparts in what was long the most solid bastion of Kennedy liberalism.
The main sponsoring bodies of the Tea Party Movement – Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, which is led by former Republican House Majority leader Dick Armey – are the political instruments of large oil and pharmaceutical concerns with a vested interest in halting proposed administration reforms in energy and health care. Both groups are staffed by highly experienced lobbyists who served as low-profile choreographers of the Brown campaign, as well as the organizers and funders of allegedly spontaneous Tea Party rallies.
This week, their prospects were infinitely brightened by the U.S. Supreme Court, which voted 5-4 to suspend all restraints on corporate donations to political campaigns. The New York Times headline on the decision said it all: “Lobbies’ New Power: Cross Us And Our Cash Will Bury You.”
The lobbying groups behind Tea Party, aided and abetted by Fox, have orchestrated a remarkably successful effort to blame the Obama Administration for an economic crisis inextricably tied to Republican policies, hammered out over three decades of GOP domination in Washington and dating back to the anti-regulatory frenzy of the Reagan era. As for rage at the subsequent bank bailout, a major weapon in the Tea Party populist arsenal, it pales by comparison with the consequences if Obama had allowed the nation’s banks to fail.
REALITY TRIP
Unseating Obama is the religion of the GOP-Tea Party Axis. The dirge against Big Government is its mantra, repeated with such numbing regularity on Fox that an “ultra-liberal conspiracy against America” is now widely accepted as documented fact. To an ever-increasing proportion of the citizenry, government and its deeds are by definition evil.
How then, to account for the world in which Tea Party voters actually live, rather than the illusory one they have come to fear?
In the Carolinas, they are surrounded by beautiful lakes – formed by dams and other massive public works projects built by the Tennessee Valley Authority and its many offshoots in lower Appalachia. The same government-initiated dams provided for the area’s domestic power needs, in a once remote corner of the South that had no electricity at all before the New Deal, and very little of it before major follow-up projects undertaken by the Johnson Administration in the 1960s.
A large number of the region’s men
are avid hunters. The national forests where they stalk their prey are protected and conserved by Washington. They drive to their jobs on Interstate freeways, constructed as a result of the immense Federal Highways Act budget passed in the 1950s by a Republican congress under a Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Most of those with educations attended state universities, as have most of their children. Their parents are negotiating old age with income and health support from Social Security and Medicare. No one, in our discussions about “Big Government,” complained about these programs. Indeed, they didn’t mention them.
The blindness to these realities defies explanation. What matters is its result: a population so immersed in fear of change – and denial of the problems that make change imperative – that they can be depended upon to vote against their own interests time and time again. Their opposition to health care reform, in a nation where the middle class is devastated by the current system’s mind-boggling costs, deficiencies and uncertainties, is a perfect example. But it is hardly the only one.
Unreasoning fear, born of institutionalized ignorance, has transformed millions of decent Americans into perfect tools for the ruthless professional operatives and fat cats behind a full-scale assault on democracy.
HIDDEN SUBTEXT
There is another, more troubling element in this woeful picture, especially in the prosperous cities of Southwest Florida. Nearly every person I spent time with there on my Christmas journey had emigrated south from the Rust Belt after its industrial economy collapsed in the 1970s, and its cities rapidly acquired impoverished and angry black majorities.
The northern émigrés on Florida’s Gulf Coast were the vanguard of what eventually became known as “white flight.” Its roads carried them to places where fleeing was no longer necessary. Places where most people were white.
Their sense of unease with multicultural and multiracial America – the America that is literally embodied in Barack Obama – is unmistakable. On the national scene, it is the moot subtext of the Tea Party protests, where African-American faces and Hispanic accents are as rare as copies of the Little Red Book or the Communist Manifesto. If anything, the name “Barack Obama” is even more reviled by the Tea Party movement than those of Chairman Mao or Karl Marx.
The visceral hatred for Obama goes far beyond anything that can be explained simply by disagreements over policy means or goals. The real reasons are hidden in code words, employed by people who are sophisticated enough to avoid the blunt language of an openly racist past.
But to paraphrase William Faulkner, “the past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” The racial legacy that has haunted the United States since its birth throes still yawns before every opportunity at reconciliation and progress. Any objective assessment of the Obama Administration’s first year, or of Obama himself, would find consistent efforts to do just that: reconcile a nation’s differences and move ahead toward common goals.
The young president “has run a competent, disciplined yet heterodox administration,” the editors of the Economist, an influential London business weekly, summed up in mid-January, just before the Massachusetts debacle. “Mr. Obama has resisted the temptation to give in to the populists in his own party and saddle Wall Street with regulations that would choke it. He has eschewed punitive taxation on the entrepreneurs who animate the economy.”
This is the sober, considered verdict of a conservative publication in the capital city of our closest foreign ally. Americans should be asking themselves why it is so much more positive, so much more hopeful, than the message rung out from the polls of Massachusetts on January 19.
Frank Viviano – barganews staff reporter – World View CBS5
It seems that the obama american dream is not going to happen..The lobbies in USA are to powerfull to let him go forwards.. his popularity has gone down and down and USA will never have free health system as the european countries//..Its a country with no future and like the big empires will go down..They want to rule the world bringing democracy and liberty around the world and they don t have in their own country, Obama is no change as he promised he is just continuing what Bush started..
Hi Gianmarco,
I must admit that living in the US has been quite frustrating recently. While perhaps not quite an “onslaught of cynical populist demagoguery”, as Frank writes, as usual in societies the ‘beware of the bogey man’ message is much easier to articulate to the masses than reasoned thought and educated discussion is.
It’s not even about a “free health system” (there is no free anything… everything has a cost.. its just about who and how it is all paid for), its about the easy excuse of ‘self determination’ that comes out very quickly in arguments in America.
“God damn it, if I want to drive a Hummer, if I can afford it then I will and no one will tell me I can’t”
These proclamations are made by the same people who buy the argument that universal health care can only be a product of taking away from people who have earned the right to have and giving to the people who have NOT earned the right to have (because the are no good and lazy).
I must say however, that the climate does not look very encouraging at the moment…
On the contrary, Obama did promise to change things — and his election itself was a sign of remarkable changes. The usual tired anti-American rants shouldn’t obscure that fact, or confuse the target of reactionary politics with its authors. As soon as Obama’s reforms promised to bear fruit, a well-organized and well-funded campaign moved into full gear against him. But it remains to be seen where this will go in the long run, as the demographic evolution of the United States overwhelming favors what Obama represents. Italy, by contrast, is rapidly moving in the opposite direction: ever deeper into mindless and self-defeating violence, under a government that plays games with irrational fears whenever its power is called into question. Consider a recent appraisal by Roberto Saviano: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/25/opinion/25saviano.html?h
Da un’intervista di Affaritaliani a Giuseppe Genna per la presentazione del suo “Italia de profundis”:
“L’Italia in questo momento è un paese di avanguardia, una frontiera dell’osceno dove stanno arrivando a maturazione processi disgregativi e trasformazioni dell’umano che sono la china su cui discenderà tutto l’Occidente”.
E ancora:
“L’Italia ha avuto una mutazione antropologica e sociale negli ultimi 30 anni, da noi l’oscenità si sta manifestando in modo più potente che in altri luoghi. Si è inverata la profezia pasoliniana dell’involgarimento di massa, della spettacolarizzazione, del discorso unico che sostituisce il dialogo”.
http://www.affaritaliani.it/culturaspettacoli/l-intervista-italia-avanguardia-osceno-giuseppe-genna280109_pg_1.html: sono andato a ricercare quest’intervista perché è la prima cosa che mi è venuta in mente leggendo l’articolo di Frank, prima ancora del piccolo dibattito “meglio l’Italia/meglio gli Stati Uniti”. Eppure, fatte le debite differenze, da noi un controllo dell’opinione sul modello Tea Party Movement/Fox News è risultato vincente in politica da una quindicina di anni, in campo culturale almeno da una trentina, come dice Genna. Le conseguenze le vediamo ogni giorno ed il limite viene sempre spostato in avanti (“ever deeper into mindless and self-defeating violence, under a government that plays games with irrational fears whenever its power is called into question”). Negli Stati Uniti, al momento, le istanze di cui si parla nell’articolo sono all’opposizione. Ma per quanto ancora? Che abbia ragione Genna quando dice che l’Italia di Berlusconi non è un’anomalia (come spesso viene vista dall’estero), ma un’avanguardia dell’occidente?
Genna (and our astute friend Mato) are right on the mark, however much the nostalgic or myopic among us might wish otherwise. Italy has been in the political vanguard for a very long time. Consider the Italian origins of both National Socialism and Euro-Communism — or even proto-Communism, in the radically charged violence that swept Palermo in 1848, and a kind of proto-Maoism in the movement of the Fasci in rural Sicily in the 1890s. What, then, to make of its advances in the scope and intensity of the phenomenon Genna calls “obscenity?” Where is it likely to carry a western world that seems to have grown fatally weary of of stolid, immobilized democracy?
The answers, it seems to me, lie in the peculiarly transparent obscenity of this movement’s inspirational leaders, their utter dismissal of pretenses to honesty or dignity. (A man as weak and colorless as George W. Bush couldn’t hope to equal Silvio Berlusconi in this regard). As Genna rightly notes, the new social paradigm concerns itself above all with spectacle, with the public display of contempt for restraint of any sort. Without public spectacle, obscenity has no political force; it is a lonely man abusing himself in a porn shop cubicle. But in the context of a public arena that only responds to ever-increasing jolts of sensation, the obscene becomes mass religious experience. What matters is not the content, of which there is none in any case. It’s the pure jolt, the junky’s ride that erases every thought of meaning or consequences.
Reason, the keystone of functional democracy, has no place here. Just ask a Berlusconi voters or American Tea Party enthusiasts to list the main objectives of their leaders’ programs. The response in both cases is the equivalent of static on a broadcast frequency. Pure noise, empty of meaning. Sound bites.
Proprio così: puro rumore, diffuso ovunque e ad un volume talmente alto da rendere impossibile sia il dialogo, sia la riflessione.
Nell’intervista citata, Genna fa un’altro esempio:
“Ricordo che nel ’69, quando venne fermato dalla polizia l’anarchico Pietro Valpreda, a pochi giorni dalla morte di Giuseppe Pinelli, c’era un giornalista che intervistava il questore di Milano e dava per certo, usando un tono quasi autoritario, che fosse stato preso il colpevole. Il giornalista veicolava una falsità, spacciandola per verità, in relazione a un fatto intricato e complicatissimo… Bene, quel giornalista era Bruno Vespa, che oggi continua a fare le stesse cose. Questa è l’Italia. Si veicolano falsità e spettacolo come se fossero verità… La realtà viene spogliata della sua verità, in modo pop… e poiché, salvo poche, luminose eccezioni non ci sono intellettuali in grado di opporsi, il paese è in balia di un unico linguaggio, di un unico discorso”
… and in any case – in America as in Italy – the means (political/economic) are in the hands of a small number of families/groups who therefore dominate an agenda which invariably is not in the interest of the vast majority of citizens who continue to excercise their futile democratic rights in the conviction that “we can change” – or some other trendy sound bite of the moment.
Change does not happen in the space of a sound bite. Real change involves overturning and destroying a rabidly entrenched status quo – and indeed the economic and therefore social implications are mind boggling.
Obama, like all his predecessors, has paymasters of his own to account to .. he may indeed be a more benign, urbane and socially concerned expression of the fundamentally corrupt and self-serving American ruling elite than Bush, but the rules of the game are the very same.
Ditto of course for Italy and the other (in)glorious members of the “free” world, whomsoever actually leads the cavalcade:
… some may be lead, some may follow … the direction is the same!
I think you are missing the main point – The visceral hatred for Obama goes far beyond anything that can be explained simply by disagreements over policy means or goals. The real reasons are hidden in code words, employed by people who are sophisticated enough to avoid the blunt language of an openly racist past.
sometimes not even in code words. Cup of tea anyone?
So now these ass clowns are? trying to put together a Tea Party Convention and guess what?
They have been outed as nothing more than commercial opportunist trying to exploit the bottom feeder racist in America.
Sarah Palin wants $100,000 for a speech at the Convention and tickets were something like $500 to attend.
I can hear them now:
"Holy shit Harvey, we're gonna have us a big group get together with flags and stuff and we can even yell racist slurs and not be arrested or noth'n."
[youtube -VMXz6xGeqc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VMXz6xGeqc youtube]
Poco da eccepire sulla questione sollevata da Jack, almeno a livello di opinione personale: l’estabilishment politico è espressione di un estabilishment economico/finanziario per tutta una serie di motivi che stanno anche alla base di quella crisi della democrazia e dell’informazione di cui lo stesso Frank si è occupato spesso sulle pagine di barganews.
Su questo, credo proprio che i singoli cittadini abbiano scarso potere.
Personalmente, mi interessa di più la “mutazione antropologica”: se prima si pensava che i molti avessero poco perché pochi avevano troppo, adesso si crede che i molti abbiano poco perché quelli che hanno ancora meno rubano il lavoro, la casa o quello che volete (il “bogey man” da noi è diventato letteralmente l’omo nero). Mi interesserebbe capire come la casalinga del Midwest (da noi si direbbe di Voghera) possa pensare che “universal health care can only be a product of taking away from people who have earned the right to have and giving to the people who have NOT earned the right to have (because they are no good and lazy)”. In questo senso, ho paura che l’Italia di Berlusconi e della Lega (dai modelli imposti dalle tv private ai programmi di governo) sia stata davvero un’avanguardia ed un laboratorio per buona parte del mondo occidentale.
Mato,
I hope I understand you correctly, (I do not yet speak Italian, and I understand very little), so if I am getting your point wrong, I apologize.
But I think your point is that the Midwestern house wife is ‘led to believe’ that universal healthcare can only occur if people who “have” are forced to give up what is theirs and only theirs.
The argument that “if they want health care, they can go out and get a job” or “do better in America (because of what America is)” and so they had better not try taking things from me only to give to those who do not have is one that comes up over and over again. It’s about the “American dream” for them, this is where they get this argument.
It blows my mind……..
At least this is what is being fed to them and they are foolish enough to believe it!
Some time ago words to the effect that “Trying to govern the Italian people is not difficult … it is useless” were reportedly uttered by a “major player” in Italian politics.
Amongst other things he was, of course, alluding to the propensity of the masses for cutting off their collective noses in order to spite their faces.
It would seem that sentiment is as relevant now as it was then, and that it also applies to the U.S.
Oh … the “major player”?
Benito Mussolini
“Governing” the people isn’t a necessary objective for contemporary politicians, as it implies directing collective energy toward productive ends in the common interest. The goal today is to fatten, enrage and manipulate them.
Quello che mi stupisce di più è che ad un anno e passa dalle elezioni c’è ancora chi si ostina a sbandierare il “change we can” Obamesco, non vedendo o facendo finta di non vedere i fatti. Obama non ha fatto altro che rimpinguare il contingente invasore in Iraq e in Afghanistan, investendo nuovi astronomici capitali nell’infame e assassina industria della guerra, perpetrando ed ampliando gli orrori che quelle disgraziate popolazioni sono costrette a subire in nome del dollaro e continuando imperterrito con la campagnia del terrore messa in scena da Bush e soci.
Mi ricordo una discussione di un anno e qualcosa fa qui su barganews, dove io e altri commentatori di questo articolo prevedemmo in modo innegabile ciò che poi si è verificato in questo anno di amministrazione Obama e c’era chi, enusiasta ed infervorato, ci sbeffeggiava e ci accusava di preconcetti con generici “aspettate e vedrete”. Bè, ora abbiamo visto, ma definizioni come “remarkable changes” continuano ad essere promulgate.
Cecità o ipocrisia?
Il governo americano ha sempre manipolato i cittadini americani attraverso televisioni e giornali.. Tutto e’ un grande show soprattutto le elezioni del presidente.. Vince chi ha gli sponsor piu grandi e potenti dietro e chi dice che Obama non gli ha avuti sbaglia.. Berlusconi sta provando in italia lo stesso metodo ma spero non ci riesca… Ma per fortuna in Europa abbiamo una sanita’ pubblica eccellente e gratis per tutti. Non abbiamo la pena di morte cosa negli stati uniti esiste sempre anche se si definiscono una nazione all avanguardia… Il 90% dei soldati americani non sa dove e’ l Iraq e il popolo americano non conosce la storia e la geografia ,conoscono solo la loro… Per quello la televisione riesce a manipolare e convincere la gente su quello da fare.. E se dietro l attacco delle torri gemelle e del pentagono ci fosse la mano della cia? Non mi sorprenderebbe.. Obama come ho gia detto non ha nulla di diverso da i precedenti presidenti stessa mentalita e posizioni..
… be’ … un po’ riduttivo, ma cmq l’allusione all’ignoranza che pervade l’elettorato sia Statunitense sia Italiano è pertinente alla discussione – infatti è proprio questo il punto!
Volendo abbiamo già tutti gli strumenti per risolvere qualsiasi problema: d’altronde la democrazia è lì per offrirci la possibilità di dire la nostra nell’interesse della collettività – non occorre aspettare l’Obama della situazione per salvare la patria!
Certo se il popolino continua a pretendere la democrazia come diritto e non come un dovere da rispettare, allora non ci si può sorprendere se i vari compagni di merende e furbetti di quartiere continuano con i loro sporchi affari. La democrazia deve partire dal basso, già dalle elezioni di associazioni popolari, dei comuni, delle comunità montane, ecc… e da subito!
In questo senso Grillo e il suo movimento di presa di coscienza democratica popolare (vedi referendum per disegno di legge, ecc…) hanno capito qualcosa che forse andrebbe preso in considerazione – al di là delle simpatie o antipatie che può suscitare il personaggio …
[sassolino nello stagno]
Jack e Gianmarco: conoscete l’inglese molto meglio di me e quindi magari mi sbaglio, ma ho avuto l’impressione che il punto dell’articolo di Frank fosse un altro:
“A sinister force has been set loose on America (…) a political movement fueled by undisguised venom, wallowing in ignorance, and offering absolutely nothing that resembles a program for healing the nation’s many wounds or building for its future (…) Not long ago, that statement might have been dismissed as windy liberal exaggeration (…) The descent of Republican conservatism into populist thuggery has coincided, almost precisely, with the cataclysmic decline of mainstream, objective American journalism (…) Unreasoning fear, born of institutionalized ignorance, has transformed millions of decent Americans into perfect tools for the ruthless professional operatives and fat cats behind a full-scale assault on democracy”. E la chicca finale: “The visceral hatred for Obama goes far beyond anything that can be explained simply by disagreements over policy means or goals. The real reasons are hidden in code words, employed by people who are sophisticated enough to avoid the blunt language of an openly racist past”.
Ho capito male?
si puo concentrare tutto solo in poche parole.. Obama ha fallito o meglio la societa’ americana,le lobby ecc non permettono un cambiamento del genere…Non verra’ rieletto al termine del suo mandato.. O forse fara’ la fine di Kennedy con un bel complotto dietro..Staremo a vedere.. Gli americani sono capaci di tutto..
Hai capito perfettamente, Mato. Grazie.
mi piacerebbe un altro intervento del nostro amico Frank se abbiamo capito male..Ma penso che quello che stiamo dicendo sia pertinente all articolo..
… be’ – diciamo che leggendo tra le righe mi sono allacciato a quel che ci sta dietro:
In sostanza si parla della degenerazione del dibattito democratico – volutamente una parte, inconsapevolmente il resto.
Alla base di tutto c’è la mancata assunzione di responsabilità da parte di quasi la totalità dell’elettorato. Trattasi della responsabilità nel prendere coscienza e valutare con senso critico e cognizione di causa il mondo che ci circonda. E’ banalmente riscontrabile che la democrazia più che un diritto è un dovere – un dovere che richiede costante impegno, pena la perdita della stessa. Di conseguenza quando si parla di “institutionalized ignorance” si parla di uno status quo dove sistematicamente questo impegno è venuto a mancare già da molto tempo, per non dire da sempre, al punto che i “ruthless professional operatives and fat cats” possono commettere la loro “full-scale assault on democracy” col benestare del popolo (bue – vedi citazione del Buon Anima di cui sopra), complice il “cataclysmic decline of mainstream, objective American journalism” – ma, se per quello, anche nostrano.
Che poi nel contesto U.S.A. la dimensione razzista pervade ogni aspetto della dialettica politica – anche da elementi “who are sophisticated enough to avoid the blunt language of an openly racist past” è un fatto che risale a molto prima dell’attuale abbronzato Presidente (vezzeggiativo cortesia del nostro caro Berlusca) …
The state of the Union
The recent election result in Massachusetts could be seen as a wake-up call. Is it not possible that Brown, having seen the cost and benefits, felt that his state's health-care model – expanded with even more government control – might be a mistake?
I have immense respect for Frank's journalistic ability, however I feel that phrases such as "cynical populist" and "populist thuggery " may undermine his credibility when criticizing Fox for their "fair and balanced" coverage. The reason for the dramatic change in viewing figures could well be that the people are at last getting some of the truth – anyone who has actually watched the Glenn Beck Program would have to admit that his opinion of Bush policy is just as damning as it is of Obama's.
Frank's view of the Tea Party Rallies is fair, but if you watch the video you will notice all of the placards are obviously home-made and with a variety of messages, compare this with shots of an Acorn Rally where all placards are factory-made identical and the demographic reversed.
Bank bail-outs? For some yes, but to reward Goldman for fabricating crap, selling it to everyone after persuading Moody's to say it was kosher and then making a second fortune selling it short? I think not. Could the number of ex-Goldman employees in this and the previous administration have anything to do with this? Heaven forfend.
It's funny, but I don't hear people saying that the "Government and its deeds are by definition evil". However if its intention is to increase its power and control over the people by hiding such instruments within an incomprehensible 2000 page bill, one might look askance. The People elected Obama and The People elected Brown – I thought this was democracy – what am I missing? Perhaps someone more erudite than I could also explain what "institutionalized ignorance" actually means.
I have always enjoyed open and free debate on all subjects, in the spirit of Voltaire, but now all too often I find myself on a very high wire – to question any Obama policy or suggest that the fiscal outcome might be a disaster risks being classified as a racist or an elitist – I assure you I am neither.
In the light of the latest Obama tax proposals I doubt The Economist would still opine "he has eschewed punitive taxation on the entrepreneurs who animate the economy".
In my opinion the American people are fortunate to have a Constitution written by thoughtful, intelligent and perspicacious people – ALL members of both houses should be required to re-read, learn and inwardly digest its content – it might just save them (and the UK & Europe) from the impending financial disaster which will hand victory to the East without a shot being fired.
More in sorrow than in indignation…
Institutionalized ignorance means that the USA politicians like to keep their citizens in ignorance and controll them with TV and Newspapers..Where is democracy in USA? They dictate the world and Obama is no change..The only change is that he is the first black president..
If Gianmarco's understanding of "institutionalised ignorance" is correct then we should welcome Fox News as the only chanel that the current administration fears. Democracy is where it has always been , at the ballot box, it is imperative that the government fear the people not the reverse.
The change has nothing to do with the president's colour but far more to do with "progressive policies" which he espaused during his campaign. If you think "progressive" means good ( as I did ) think again and turn to history – starting with Woodrow Wilson.
My favorite recent quotation is "The only thing you learn from history is that people do not learn from history"