Let's all take a money bath

“Your time to enroll is quickly approaching!” trumpets one mailing, in bold capital letters. “Call me about making this important decision in your health care coverage.” It is signed by some dude named Steve who works for an insurance company, doesn’t know me from Eve, and wants, not my good health, not my comfort and security, but, ah yes, my money.

Well, corporations are supposed to want my money. It is the government’s job — isn’t it? — to be concerned, to some extent, about my welfare. In fact, you could argue that this is the government’s only job: to attend to the welfare of its citizens; to work toward the common good. You could also argue that we citizens are the government.

So why are we doing such a lousy job? Why don’t we have high-speed rail service between our major cities? Why is our health care the most expensive and least effective of any developed nation? (And some not-so-developed nations.) Why are our oil companies sitting on 68 million acres of untapped oil fields and demanding the right to drill in our national parks and to destroy our beaches as well? Why, on top of everything else, are our banks now collapsing?

Most puzzling of all, why do we seem not to care? Or as economic editor and analyst James Grant asks in an extraordinary piece on the front page of the Wall Street Journal’s weekend section, “Why no outrage?” Grant goes on to say that unlike citizens of earlier eras, “America’s 21st-century financial victims make no protest,” even though the Federal Reserve is about to start “showering dollars on the people who would seem to need them least.” He wonders why Barack Obama and John McCain have also been strangely silent on the subject of our current financial crisis. Is the whole thing so complicated that they think we won’t understand it? Do they not understand it themselves? Are they afraid there’ll be hell to pay when we figure out that we — not those glamorous financiers currently preparing for their money shower, but you and I — will be footing the bill once again for Wall Street’s “recurrent chain of blunders” and its “reckless love affair with heavy borrowing.”

I can only guess, based on my own experience, that we ordinary Americans are silent because we are so totally and completely flamboozled by all of the greed, corruption and mendacity that has gone on, and the massive amount of disaster it has wrought, that we hardly know where to begin.

I personally think we should start by making lobbying illegal, and paying our senators and representatives enough so that they can maintain two comfortable residences (one in Washington and one in the place they were elected from), which is what we expect them to do. Thus relieved of their financial burdens, perhaps they could focus on ours for a change. Somebody had better; I myself am going to have to focus on this Medicare thing. Did you know it had four parts? Now where did that slide rule get to?

Susan Harper is director of the Commerce Public Library. She lives in Commerce.