Adventures in Tab Closing #3

Because I need to start cleaning up what's on this computer and transfer stuff on it to the new one fairly soon, I'm gonna try to do these at least once a day until I'm done, and I'll be doing seven main links instead of six.  (Unrelated: I started doing this yesterday by trying to pare down my huge iTunes library.  It's not going as well as I'd like; there's a lot of music I know I'll never listen to, but I still can't bring myself to delete them, and I don't know why.  :PPP)

Paul Krugman: "America Goes Dark"

The lights are going out all over America — literally. Colorado Springs has made headlines with its desperate attempt to save money by turning off a third of its streetlights, but similar things are either happening or being contemplated across the nation, from Philadelphia to Fresno.

Meanwhile, a country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself: in a number of states, local governments are breaking up roads they can no longer afford to maintain, and returning them to gravel.

And a nation that once prized education — that was among the first to provide basic schooling to all its children — is now cutting back. Teachers are being laid off; programs are being canceled; in Hawaii, the school year itself is being drastically shortened. And all signs point to even more cuts ahead.

[...]

How did we get to this point? It’s the logical consequence of three decades of antigovernment rhetoric, rhetoric that has convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a dollar wasted, that the public sector can’t do anything right.

The antigovernment campaign has always been phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud — to checks sent to welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats uselessly pushing paper around. But those were myths, of course; there was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed. And now that the campaign has reached fruition, we’re seeing what was actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.

And what happens when this kind of anti-government rhetoric becomes prominent? Citizens disengage from the democratic system they're supposed to be maintaining, leading to more corporate control of politics, more fueling unnecessary wars and colonialism, and a lower quality of life for most Americans. What I'm afraid of is that the things Krugman is complaining about will seem quaint within the next few years.

RELATED LINKS:
--Glenn Greenwald: "What collapsing empire looks like"
--Grist: "Rule of Enragement: the filibuster and Senate reform"
--Johnathan Cohn: "The stupidity of liberal apathy"

( Six more under the cut... )

And finally, an unrelated extra link: This is pretty much my philosophy regarding what I write in this journal.