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| -Land of the Free |
| American Banana Republic |
| 2013-09-21 |
| The CEO of Panera Bread, as some kind of do-gooder awareness-raising shtick, is currently attempting to live on food stamps, and not finding it easy. But being dependent on government handouts isn't supposed to be easy. Instead of trying life at the bottom, why doesn't he try life in the middle? In 2012, the top 10 percent were taking home 50.4 percent of the nation's income. That's an all-time record, beating out the 49 percent they were taking just before the 1929 market crash. With government redistributing more money than ever before, we've mysteriously wound up with greater income inequality than ever before. Across the country, "middle-class" Americans have accumulated a trillion dollars in college debt in order to live a less comfortable life than their high-school-educated parents and grandparents did in the Fifties and Sixties. That's banana republic, too: no middle class, but only a government elite and its cronies, and a big dysfunctional mass underneath, with very little social mobility between the two. Like to change that? Maybe advocate for less government spending? Hey, Lois Lerner's IRS has got an audit with your name on it. The tax collectors of the United States treat you differently according to your political beliefs. That's pure banana republic, but no one seems to mind very much. This week it emerged that senior Treasury officials, up to and including Turbotax Timmy Geithner, knew what was going on at least as early as spring 2012. But no one seems to mind very much. In the words of an insouciant headline writer at Government Executive, "the magazine for senior federal bureaucrats" (seriously), back in May: "The Vast Majority of IRS Employees Aren't Corrupt" So, if the vast majority aren't, what proportion is corrupt? Thirty-eight percent? Thirty-three? Twenty-seven? And that's the good news? The IRS is not only institutionally corrupt, it's corrupt in the service of one political party. That's Banana Republic 101. What comes next? Government officials present in Benghazi during last year's slaughter have been warned not to make themselves available to congressional inquiry. CNN obtained one e-mail spelling out the stakes to CIA employees: "You don't jeopardize yourself, you jeopardize your family as well." "That's all very ominous," wrote my colleague Jonah Goldberg the other day, perhaps a little too airily for my taste. I'd rank it somewhere north of "ominous." "Banana republic" is an American coinage -- by O. Henry, a century ago, for a series of stories set in the fictional tropical polity of Anchuria. But a banana republic doesn't happen overnight; it's a sensibility, and it's difficult to mark the precise point at which a free society decays into something less respectable. Pace Obama, ever swelling debt, contracts for cronies, a self-enriching bureaucracy, a shrinking middle class preyed on by corrupt tax collectors, and thuggish threats against anyone who disagrees with you put you pretty far down the banana-strewn path. |
| Posted by:Beavis |
| #2 This sort of dysfunction does not subside until some people who are not linesmen or drunk drivers end up having an unfortunate encounter with a lamppost. Not something that we've had any meaningful experience with here in the USofA. We may have to learn as we go... |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2013-09-21 13:00 |
| #1 " I'd rank it somewhere north of "ominous." You missed too many high speed train wrecks to notice, but according to these apologetics, it has not wrecked yet. Just because you did not see the plane pass over head does not mean it did not fly. |
| Posted by: newc 2013-09-21 00:19 |