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Friday, December 28, 2012

In A Surprise Move, People Who Hate Government Govern Badly

PoliticalWire:
As 2012 comes to a close, the 112th Congress is set to go down in American history as the most unproductive session since the 1940s... Obama has signed 219 bills passed by the 112th Congress into law. With less than a week to go in the year, there are currently another 20 bills pending presidential action. In comparison, the last Congress passed 383 bills, while the one before it passed 460. The 104th Congress (1995-1996) currently holds the ignominious distinction of being the least productive session of Congress ... Just 333 bills became law during that two-year period, meaning the 112th Congress needs to send nearly 100 more bills to Obama's desk in the next few days if it wants to avoid going down in history -- an unlikely prospect, considering that both chambers are squarely focused on averting the 'fiscal cliff' before the new year.
In case you were wondering, the shitty 104th Congress this Congress is even shittier than was the Republican Congress of the Gingrich Revolution. In case you were wondering, the infamous "Do Nothing Congress" was also run by Republicans, who were far less shitty back then than Republicans are today, as was their shitty Congress, but still obviously pretty shitty. As I remark in one of my Dispatches from Libertopia: "II. Whenever a right wing politician declares all government wasteful, criminal, and corrupt you should pay close attention, because he is announcing his plans."

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

the Rethugs and Norquist want a govt. "small enough to drown in a bathrub" but still contain a gigantic military industrial complex AND had morality police...

Black guy from the future past said...

Hello Dale. If "good democracy eventually leads to socialism", then why do so many people in the USA hate socialism? I mean the very word socialism is enough to spark furor. Why is that? And also please explain how socialism will eventually correct many of the problems of the US. Thanks.

Dale Carrico said...

Explaining socialism is a book not a post. Part of the difficulty, of course, is that widely diverging governmental forms, both imagined and actually existing, have been assigned that title (or not) historically, in ways that don't always reflect their differences or similarities.

Although it is true that many Americans boggle at the very word "socialism" many Americans call climate change a hoax, too, indeed, many of the same Americans say both and usually the same sort of ignorance of the world is involved. My understanding is that pollsters have noticed the fortunes of the socialist term have been rising in the US over the last ten years, no doubt at least partly an unintended consequence of wingnuts railing against Medicare and Social Security and Solar Energy and Obama as socialism -- which, since so many people like so many of these so much, leads many to think socialism must be pretty good after all.

Some self-identified socialist states have been tyrannical, and I am one of many sympathetic to socialism who tends to describe my views are democratic socialist or even social democratic to indicate my awareness of these dangers (dangers which, after all, even classical liberal worried about which lead their theories to come up with notions of published rights, federalism, separation of powers, multilateral institutions, and so on). Actually, I identify more forcefully with democracy than with socialism if I have to choose.

Again, I can't do justice to the topic in a comment or a post, but I can recommend a few posts that summarize my political view:
[1] Left and Right: Back to Basics,
[2] Eight Propositions on Taxes,
[3] Democracy, Consent, and Enterprise,
[4] It Turns on Power,
[5] Consensual Prosthetic Self-Determination and Progressive Democratization,
[6] Arendt, Fanon, King on Violence,
[7] Riot, Try It,
[8] Happy Birthday, Occupy!
[9] Non-Violent Politics and the Democratization of the State,
[10] Dispatches from Libertopia.

Black guy from the future past said...

Thanks for the reply. I will look into all the links you provided.