Perils of Democracy

Perils of democracy
We are proud of our democracy and with good reason. Our government, with all its imperfections, is vastly preferable to the crude despotism the government of Burma or Zimbabwe.
At the same time, democracy is always precarious. We must be extraordinarily vigilant and speak out about abuses, if we want to save what democracy we have. Here are two examples of the major threat to our democracy: the role money plays in our electoral system.
A person who is very well informed told me recently that representatives in Congress must contribute large amounts of money—on the order of half $1 million or so --to their respective parties to, in essence, pay for their committee assignments in Congress. I had never heard that it; I tried to check it by googling a number of different related topics. Only with considerable effort did I find some articles in a reputable social science journal confirming the story. The major parties raise funds from elected officials by tithing them in proportion to the importance of their committee assignments.
Surely, you may say, the major parties should be free to raise money as they please as long as the methods are not illegal. True, but consider this: members of the House and Senate spend more time fund-raising than doing anything else. Instead of writing bills or reading the bills they are about to vote on, elected representatives are on the phone asking people for money or conferring with their fund raisers. Hence many bills remain unread when they are voted up or down. The members of Congress are too busy raising money to do the job we elected them for. Members who are running unopposed do not need as much money and would therefore be free to attend to their proper business of legislating and running the country. But since they have to pay large sums of money to their party for their committee assignments, they are still forced to fund-raise first and legislate second.
My second example is quite amazing: Pres. Obama asked for and Congress voted for stimulus funds for improving transportation. The state of New Hampshire, through its elected officials, planned to ask for stimulus funds to build a high-speed train between Nashua, NH and Boston, MA. This train would have to run on a track owned by a private railroad company. The CEO of that company does not believe that this is the time to think about high-speed public transportation. He has therefore refused to negotiate with the State of New Hampshire about the use of the right of way. One man is blocking a project considered important by a whole slew of elected officials. What gives him this power to interfere with the plans emerging from the democratic process? You know the answer: money. Private ownership of the railroad right-of-way trumps democracy.
These are two example of a pervasive evil. At the ballot box we may each have only one vote regardless of how much money we have. But between elections money talks much too loudly in our democracy.

How high IS our standard of living?

A young man I know plays in a band. He is a dedicated and promising musician. He went off to college planning to prepare himself for a career as a high school music teacher. But every time he opened the paper, he saw another story about school systems cutting their arts and music programs because they did not have enough money. He was forced to give up that plan.
His story made me think about the work life of many other Americans. Ours is a competitive system that most people consider good because it produces ever more new and cheaper goods. But goods become cheaper when they are cheaper to produce. Production costs are often lowered by substituting machines for human beings. Jobs that, at one time, required skilled workers are now done by intricate machines. Workers have become machine minders, feeding raw materials to the machine. Any child could do that. It takes little skill to do that work and it is very boring.
Richard Sennett, a sociologist, describes how baking bread used to be highly skilled work. Now the loaves all ready to be baked are trucked to the store from a central kitchen. The workers in the local bakery put the frozen loaves into a very sophisticated, computerized oven, push some buttons and wait until the machine is done and signals them to take the bread out. All they do is mind the machine. When the machine breaks, they are forbidden to try and fix it. Instead they must call for the technician who repairs the oven. The people in the bakery have no skills; they wait on the machine; in case of malfunction they wait on the technician. Mechanization has produced more and cheaper goods but it has also ruined many a good job and replaced it with a very tedious one. The price of more consumption goods is often the work life of those who produce them.
Reflecting about this, we must ask what constitutes a “high standard of living.” In terms of economic statistics, we are doing very well. We have more things, newer things, and more money than most other people in the world. But does money buy happiness?
Robert Lane, a sociologist at Yale University, has documented in considerable detail that the explosion of goods and money in the last decades in the US has not increased happiness. Most people, his research shows, lead good lives to the extent that they have lively and extensive relations to family, friends and neighbors and to the extent that their jobs are challenging and allow them to take some pride in it. But people are becoming more and more isolated; relations to family and friends are more distant and are loosing intimacy. Work no longer nourishes self-esteem because,. more and more, it is done “just for the money.”
If our children cannot get a decent education unless we send them to private school; if the good job you had migrated to Asia and the job you have now pays less and is less desirable; if the jobs that were once available demanded a good deal of skill and the jobs that exist now are routine and numbingly repetitive, are we living a good life? Will the HD television set, the cell-phone that plays movies and gives you access to the internet and to e-mail really compensate for being bored at work and being unable to get a decent education for your children?
We call ourselves “the richest nation in the world” but cannot afford music classes in schools.
We need to stop talking about how high our standard of living is and ask ourselves: what really matters, whether electronic gadgets are more important or satisfaction at work, a better image on the tv or a good education for children.
Do we really have such a high standard of living if we loose happiness with every year?