| | |  Editorials | Opinions | November 2009 
In This Together
 Roger Cohen - The News
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November 12, 2009
 |  | After 9/11 half of America went to war and the rest went shopping. Wall Street coined newfangled financial instruments to leverage the universe and Main Street fell for them. Division grew, fellowship withered. |  | | |
When two Northwest Airlines pilots get so into their laptops that they overshoot their destination by 150 miles, breezing past Minneapolis like they'd never heard of the place, American self-absorption has clearly reached new heights. No longer just bowling alone, Americans are flying alone. I couldn't believe that story. Nobody could when they heard that the Cheney-Cole pilot-first-officer team had swept eastward toward Milwaukee last month. How, even with a name like Cheney, can you forget that you've got 144 people on board and are supposed to land a plane?
But the more I thought about it the more I felt those Northwest pilots were symbolic enough.
After 9/11 half of America went to war and the rest went shopping. Wall Street coined newfangled financial instruments to leverage the universe and Main Street fell for them. Division grew, fellowship withered. Everyone knew money could not really rain from the sky in the American dream factory but they went on playing their own versions of online solitaire.
The Obama victory was a reaction to all this. His message was that we are all Americans in this together. The country at war and the country in the mall are one. American possibility is alive but depends on American responsibility. That kicks in when you look up from your laptop to see this beautiful, battered land (or, as the case may be, the runway).
Nine months into his administration, President Obama has had a hard time delivering. Washington politics are still ugly. The taxpayer-funded economic recovery, such as it is, has accentuated rather than eased inequalities. Wall Street and Main Street are more estranged than ever. Guys with families and no jobs see bankers back on the fat-bonus gravy train.
In other words, U.S. corporate management has used the crisis to slash jobs well beyond what economic decline strictly demanded - ruthless prudence, they would argue. Elsewhere on earth job preservation has been a priority.
Economist David Hale called the resultant rise in American productivity "stunning." U.S. businesses are more competitive than ever, which could eventually bring jobs. But for now, the newly jobless ask, "What recovery?"
"If managements are raising profits by cutting jobs, and that gives them a stock market gain of 55 percent, in the end you're magnifying inequality," Hale said. Yep, you can't oblige businesses to use their profits to hire. That's the American way. But impunity is not the American way. After the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s, more than 3,000 bankers went to jail. Well, this global crisis stemmed from dishonest bankers writing bad loans, and selling and securitizing them in the knowledge they were fraudulent, while ratings agencies collected big fees for giving triple-A ratings to garbage. And who's gone to jail? Just about nobody.
None of this has reinforced the republic or the commonwealth nor given the sense the same rules apply to everybody. That's hurt Obama. He's appeared powerless at best, complicit at worst. In any context, I would argue, health reform was important for America, but in this fractured one, the health care reform bill that just passed the House is critical. It's critical because it does involve the acknowledgment that, when it comes to health, we are indeed all in this together rather than zoned out on our individual screens. Pooling the risk between everybody is, as the rest of the developed world knows, the most efficient way to forge a healthier society.
U.S. health care has been grossly inefficient and a proposed new government insurance plan and national insurance exchange will help force waste out of the system. A surtax on the wealthy will help pay for it. There's going to be some sacrifice in the name of the general good. That's an important idea right now. The Senate should quickly approve the legislation. It won't "socialize" America but will solidify it by at last framing basic health care as a moral obligation rather than financial opportunity.
As Archibald MacLeish once wrote: "If we had not held these truths to be self-evident, if we had not believed that all men are created equal, if we had not believed that they are endowed, all of them, with certain unalienable rights, we would never have become America, whatever else we might have become." |
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