Frank Rich: "What We Don't Know Will Hurt Us"

[Me.]

What We Don’t Know Will Hurt Us

By FRANK RICH
Published: February 21, 2009

“AND so on the 29th day of his presidency, Barack Obama signed the stimulus bill. But the earth did not move. The Dow Jones fell almost 300 points. G.M. and Chrysler together asked taxpayers for another $21.6 billion and announced another 50,000 layoffs. The latest alleged mini-Madoff, R. Allen Stanford, was accused of an $8 billion fraud with 50,000 victims.

“I don’t want to pretend that today marks the end of our economic problems,” the president said on Tuesday at the signing ceremony in Denver. He added, hopefully: “But today does mark the beginning of the end.”

Does it?

No one knows, of course, but a bigger question may be whether we really want to know. One of the most persistent cultural tics of the early 21st century is Americans’ reluctance to absorb, let alone prepare for, bad news. We are plugged into more information sources than anyone could have imagined even 15 years ago. The cruel ambush of 9/11 supposedly “changed everything,” slapping us back to reality. Yet we are constantly shocked, shocked by the foreseeable. Obama’s toughest political problem may not be coping with the increasingly marginalized G.O.P. but with an America-in-denial that must hear warning signs repeatedly, for months and sometimes years, before believing the wolf is actually at the door.

This phenomenon could be seen in two TV exposés of the mortgage crisis broadcast on the eve of the stimulus signing. On Sunday, “60 Minutes” focused on the tawdry lending practices of Golden West Financial, built by Herb and Marion Sandler. On Monday, the CNBC documentary “House of Cards” served up another tranche of the subprime culture, typified by the now defunct company Quick Loan Funding and its huckster-in-chief, Daniel Sadek. Both reports were superbly done, but both could have been reruns...cont...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/opinion/22rich.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

[FreakinDJ]

1. Out Sourcing and Free Trade are the Economic problem

until we deal with that its all a Band-Aid

[Me.]

3. They're Still In Denial About That

The roof is on fire and they still think they can invite the neighbors over for dinner

[hay rick]

5. Somebody bring the marshmallows.

[FreakinDJ]

7. This kind of says it all

snip-

Pity our new president. As he rolls out one recovery package after another, he can’t know for sure what will work. If he tells the whole story of what might be around the corner, he risks instilling fear itself among Americans who are already panicked. (Half the country, according to a new Associated Press poll, now fears unemployment.) But if the president airbrushes the picture too much, the country could be as angry about ensuing calamities as it was when the Bush administration’s repeated assertion of “success” in Iraq proved a sham. Managing America’s future shock is a task that will call for every last ounce of Obama’s brains, temperament and oratorical gifts.

-end snip

[Skittles]

8. YOU KNOW IT FREAKINDJ

DAMN STRAIGHT

[FreakinDJ]

12. When you get to a point where you are Exporting Debt.

You just might be a Crooked Wall St RATpubliCon DeRegulation Banker

[OwnedByFerrets]

13. Dont forget about our lack of tariffs and our skewed

tax system.

[FreakinDJ]

15. You mean USA's 2% tarrif to China's 20-40% tarrif

I would love to hear the rational for the decision to let that stand.

I mean a RATpubliCON can spin anything - but I would love to hear the logic behind that 1

[OwnedByFerrets]

16. If you listen to Thom Hartman...my hero, politically, you know

that he has on many conservatives. They have NO problem defending our stupid tariff system. And, its one of Thom's pet peeves.

[Tangerine LaBamba]

2. He nails it

We've become a nation of sheep.

Ostriches. Heads in the sand.

We've become passive, neutered. Look at how long Chimpy Fucknuts got away with all the shit he pulled.

I don't know why this is. I'm old enough to remember the vehemence and passion behind the Vietnam protests, how we - college students - never stopped. We never shut up. We were relentless because lives were on the line.

Maybe we're just too scared, and we've gone numb.

I don't know.

But I do know that we're in a depression, and soon, no one's going to be afraid to use that word.

[Blue_In_AK]

4. That's an excellent bit of writing.

Thank you.

[seafan]

6. 'Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose.....'

Frank Rich pens the stark reality:

.....

This cultural pattern of denial is hardly limited to the economic crisis. Anyone with eyes could have seen that Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire resembled Macy’s parade balloons in their 1998 home-run derby, but it took years for many fans (not to mention Major League Baseball) to accept the sorry truth. It wasn’t until the Joseph Wilson-Valerie Plame saga caught fire in summer 2003, months after “Mission Accomplished,” that we began to confront the reality that we had gone to war in Iraq over imaginary W.M.D. Weapons inspectors and even some journalists (especially at Knight-Ridder newspapers) had been telling us exactly that for almost a year.

The writer Mark Danner, who early on chronicled the Bush administration’s practice of torture for The New York Review of Books, reminded me last week that that story first began to emerge in December 2002. That’s when The Washington Post reported on the “stress and duress” tactics used to interrogate terrorism suspects. But while similar reports followed, the notion that torture was official American policy didn’t start to sink in until after the Abu Ghraib photos emerged in April 2004. Torture wasn’t routinely called “torture” in Beltway debate until late 2005, when John McCain began to press for legislation banning it.

Steroids, torture, lies from the White House, civil war in Iraq, even recession: that’s just a partial glossary of the bad-news vocabulary that some of the country, sometimes in tandem with a passive news media, resisted for months on end before bowing to the obvious or the inevitable. “The needle,” as Danner put it, gets “stuck in the groove.”
For all the gloomy headlines we’ve absorbed since the fall, we still can’t quite accept the full depth of our economic abyss either. Nicole Gelinas, a financial analyst at the conservative Manhattan Institute, sees denial at play over a wide swath of America, reaching from the loftiest economic strata of Wall Street to the foreclosure-decimated boom developments in the Sun Belt.

.....

In states like Nevada, Florida and Arizona, Gelinas sees “huge neighborhoods that will become ghettos” as half their populations lose or abandon their homes, with an attendant collapse of public services and social order. “It will be like after Katrina,” she says, “but it’s no longer just the Lower Ninth Ward’s problem.” Writing in the current issue of The Atlantic, the urban theorist Richard Florida suggests we could be seeing “the end of a whole way of life.” The link between the American dream and home ownership, fostered by years of bipartisan public policy, may be irreparably broken.

Pity our new president. As he rolls out one recovery package after another, he can’t know for sure what will work. If he tells the whole story of what might be around the corner, he risks instilling fear itself among Americans who are already panicked. (Half the country, according to a new Associated Press poll, now fears unemployment.) But if the president airbrushes the picture too much, the country could be as angry about ensuing calamities as it was when the Bush administration’s repeated assertion of “success” in Iraq proved a sham. Managing America’s future shock is a task that will call for every last ounce of Obama’s brains, temperament and oratorical gifts.

.....

Nationalization would likely mean wiping out the big banks’ managements and shareholders. It’s because that reckoning has mostly been avoided so far that those bankers may be the Americans in the greatest denial of all. Wall Street’s last barons still seem to believe that they can hang on to their old culture by scuttling corporate jets, rejecting bonuses or sounding contrite in public. Ask the former Citigroup wise man Robert Rubin how that strategy worked out.
We are now waiting to learn if Obama’s economic team, much of it drawn from the Wonderful World of Citi and Goldman Sachs, will have the will to make its own former cohort face the truth. But at a certain point, as in every other turn of our culture of denial, outside events will force the recognition of harsh realities. Nationalization, unmentionable only yesterday, has entered common usage not least because an even scarier word — depression — is next on America’s list to avoid.

Stark.

[HughBeaumont]

9. Well hey, we always have GD to remind us how shitty things are . . . .

. . . and how infinitely worse things are apparently going to get.

Day. After day. After day. AFTER DAY.

And people wonder why I wrote this. I mean, is life NOT bad enough that I gotta come here and read about how we're doomed to a post-apocalypse-level Mad Max times 100 nightmare? Is there anyone out there who still thinks things ARE good?

We KNOW they're not. We KNOW this recovery isn't going to be easy. EVERYONE NEEDS TO STOP WITH THE MELODRAMATIC "OMFGZ WE'RE ALL DOOMED SCOOB IT'S BEYOND SAVIN' MAD MAX" BULLSHIT ALREADY. Things aren't going to get THAT BAD. Don't worry, middle classers, you aren't going to be dumpster divin' or eating grubs in the woods or guardin' the homestead with yer boomsticks.

Jesus, when did we become such cowards? You're getting all fetal because of what a bunch of rich dickheads and their coddlers did to the economy? HUNT THEM DOWN. Drag them into the streets. Send the message to the other fire-a-thon wealthmongers to START PLAYING BALL.

Things COULD be worse, you know. McCAIN could be your president right now. Then you'd truly have reason to drain the blood.

[girl gone mad]

10. It's always darkest before...

it's completely pitch black.

lol..

[JVS]

14. Working people need a Malcolm X

One could argue that such a role was filled by Lenin, Mao, or even Stalin. But when looking at Americans, Malcolm X is the best example of a leader who understood the concept of the people taking control of their own destiny

[glowing]

11. Doom and gloom is for people and a world who are willing to stand idoly

by and watch themselves be thrown into the stone age.. A new system will and must be devised.. the only reason the old one hasn't been scrapped is from fear of the wealthy people who wouldn't know what to do.. but I don't think anyone wants to go back to the stone-age. Perhaps, scrapping the old make- believe money schemes will finally allow more people to enjoy life on this planet.. if we do it right... Rich is right, the one's who cannot face up to reality are the one's who have been living large... Mainstreet already knows its depression-like.. now its time for those in D.C. and Wallstreet to understand it.