We're in a Dismal Place

The old stars of the New York Times Op-Ed page have decent columns today. Maureen Dowd accurately assesses the current state of our national politics in "Bottoms Up, Lame Duck":

During the 2012 campaign, the president and his top advisers liked to make the argument that if he was re-elected, the “fever” would break. Washington would no longer be the graveyard of progress, the crypt of consensus. Once dystopian Republicans accepted that Obama was not running again, they would start cooperating with him. 

But it’s beginning to sink in that the opposite may be true.

We're in a dismal place. I began this blog at the end of last November with the question, Do elections matter? The answer by now, five months later, is they obviously do not.

Thomas Friedman, that tireless booster of technology and capitalism, describes in "It's a 401(k) World" the Hell Realm we occupy today thanks to technology and capitalism. It's a brutal, super-fast, hyperconnected, survival-of-the-fittest, technologically-sophisticated world:

When I say that “everyone has to pass the bar now,” I mean that, as the world got hyperconnected, all these things happened at once: Jobs started changing much faster, requiring more skill with each iteration. Schools could not keep up with the competencies needed for these jobs, so employers got frustrated because, in a hyperconnected world, they did not have the time or money to spend on extensive training. So more employers are demanding that students prove their competencies for a specific job by obtaining not only college degrees but by passing “certification” exams that measure specific skills — the way lawyers have to pass the bar. Last week, The Economist quoted one labor expert, Peter Cappelli of the Wharton business school, as saying that companies now regard filling a job as being “like buying a spare part: you expect it to fit.”

This is the world that Friedman has been championing for over a decade. But I don't think he anticipated the extent of its destructiveness. He of course always celebrated capitalism's "creative destruction" in theory. But now that we're living through it, I think it's dawning on him that it's not going to end well. Whether we hear this from Friedman in one of his columns is doubtful.

There is an unsigned editorial today, "'Ghost Money,' and Lots of It," in which the New York Times asks Congress to "publicly call the C.I.A. to account" for delivering bags of cash to Afghan President Hamid Karzai:

There are many reasons to be outraged. Not the least of these is that the payments helped fuel corruption just when other agencies, including the White House and State Department, were pressing the Afghans to crack down on corruption and prosecute those responsible. American leaders have argued again and again that Afghanistan’s success, and America’s success in Afghanistan, including its ability to withdraw troops by the end of 2014, depended on a government in Kabul that could win the hearts and minds of its people and competently deliver services. A government riddled with corruption had little if any chance of achieving these objectives. 

Meanwhile, there are signs that Mr. Karzai will use state machinery to ensure the election next year of a handpicked successor, which would further discourage Afghans who had hoped that years of war would yield not just stability but some semblance of participatory democracy. Yet, as Mr. Karzai has shown many times, neither the C.I.A.’s millions nor the Pentagon’s billions, devoted to building his army and trying to keep his country safe, can buy more than minimal and erratic cooperation. 

The United States and other donors have warned the Afghans that continued international assistance — which the country is expected to need for years to come — will be conditioned on concrete steps to curb corruption. Now that the C.I.A. payments have been exposed, it will be harder to make that argument.