News from the madhouse
By David Brooks
From the Mexican newspaper La Jornada
NEW YORK CITY – There are weeks when one cannot report from the United States in a rational manner what frequently is, objectively speaking, a mosaic of madness. If one manages to do so, it may be because one became another inmate in the madhouse.
From inside, people insist that everything has a logical explanation. But that, at times, only proves that they are mad.
For example, among the main news in recent days we find an announcement from the leaders of Congress that they no longer contemplate banning "assault weapons," which are quite simply war weapons, as part of a bill to impose greater control on the sale of firearms.
The reason: there isn’t enough support for the bill among the legislators. In fact, according to a CNN survey, public support for stricter controls over firearms has plummeted from 52 percent to 43 percent since the Newtown [Conn.] school massacre [on Dec. 14, 2012.]
The right of citizens to bear arms, Americans argue, is guaranteed by their Constitution. Using the logic that exists in the madhouse, some claim something that sounds almost revolutionary: citizens have the right to arm themselves not only for protection from "the bad guys" lurking about but also from their own government and its possible abuses of the rights of citizens, as evidenced by the government’s efforts to strip citizens of their weapons.
The pleas of the parents of 20 children slain in Newtown only three months ago, as well as the pleas of a Congresswoman whose career was ended by a bullet in the head, fired by an armed madman; the mailing through social networks this week of one of the most shocking images – John Lennon’s glasses stained with blood – with a message from his widow Yoko Ono that "more than 1 million 57 thousand people have died in the U.S. because of firearms since John Lennon was shot and killed on Dec. 8, 1980"; the daily reports of shootouts in Chicago resulting in youngsters dead; the fact that these assault weapons are the favorite of organized crime in Mexico and the United States, all these rational messages and events that favor the imposition of severe controls over firearms crash against the dynamics of the official madhouse.
"I’m ashamed that Congress doesn’t have the guts to promote this," commented the father of one of the children slain in the elementary school in Newtown three months ago.
Shame doesn’t seem to bother a Congress whose public approval rate is only 12 percent. Although the main excuse in Washington in the past several years is that there is a stagnation in the political process, where everything bogs down – from reforms in arms control and immigration to the federal budget and more – due to an alleged ideological polarization, another phenomenon suggests exactly the opposite.
An unquestionable fact is the existence of a bipartisan consensus on neoliberal policies that have generated the highest level of economic inequality since the Great Depression and have killed the much-hailed American Dream. Another unquestionable fact is the construction of an unprecedented state of national security that threatens the freedoms and guarantees that the government claims to defend, including the basic freedom of expression.
Attorney James Goodale recently described President Barack Obama’s approach to classified information and freedom of the press as "antediluvian, conservative, backward – worse than Nixon," in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review.
Goodale was The New York Times’ general counsel in 1971, when the paper made the historic decision to publish "the Pentagon Papers," the greatest leak in history of secret official documents before the case of Bradley Manning and Wikileaks. Goodale’s legal team confronted President Richard M. Nixon’s administration, obsessed with official secrets and public manipulation.
Elsewhere in the madhouse, there were other news this week. I’ll mention just a few.
• According to the Financial Times, the Halliburton company, headed by former Vice President Dick Cheney before the war on Iraq, secured contracts for $39.5 billion for services to the U.S. invasion. The blood business pays well.
• On another front, Obama, who claims to be committed to deal with climate change, appointed as his new Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, a nuclear scientist from M.I.T. who once headed a research program financed by the big energy companies. He was also a consultant to, or member of the board of several of those companies, including BP, which was responsible for one of the worst ecological disasters in the Gulf of Mexico.
• In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has announced that he will shut down about 80 public schools to cope with a budget deficit. The same is happening in other cities like New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore and Detroit.
However, those cities do have funds to open dozens of new charter schools, which are subsidized by the public but managed by private companies. In other words, this is an effort to privatize the public-school system and crush the teachers’ unions.
• In this climate of austerity there are funds to build more prisons. The federal and state governments spend about $70 billion per year in the penitentiary system. The states spend almost the same amount on jails as on universities. This happens in the country with most prisons, both in absolute numbers and in percentage of the population.
The American Civil Liberties Union reports that that translates into one of every 99 inhabitants being in prison. With 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States accounts for 25 percent of the world’s prison population.
All this, and more, is reported as if it were more or less normal. Madness has become somewhat normal. But surely that information is classified as secret, for the good of all of us who live in the madhouse.
