Our increasing reality as Americans: zombie politics

Henry Giroux was featured on Bill Moyers' most recent show, and he regret that we are headed toward "zombie politics."

In his book, Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism, author and scholar Henry Giroux connects the dots to prove his theory that our current system is informed by a “machinery of social and civil death” that chills “any vestige of a robust democracy.” This week on Moyers & Company, Giroux explains that such a machine turns “people who are basically so caught up with surviving that they become like the walking dead – they lose their sense of agency, they lose their homes, they lose their jobs.” What’s more, Giroux points out, the system that creates this vacuum has little to do with expanding the meaning and the substance of democracy itself. Under “casino capitalism,” the goal is to get a quick return, taking advantage of a kind of logic in which the only thing that drives us is to put as much money as we can into a slot machine and hope we walk out with our wallets overflowing.

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The cost of buying a seat in Congress

From OpenSecrets.org:

We've already determined that the 2012 elections overall produced in the most expensive election cycle ever, costing an estimated $6.3 billion. Newly updated numbers that we released today in the Historical Elections section of OpenSecrets.org, though, show that the average "price of admission" went up as well. The average winner in a Senate race spent $10.2 million, compared to $8.3 million in 2010 and just $7.5 million in 2008. That's an increase of 19 percent since 2010. Senate Democrats seemed to have to work particular hard to win their seats, spending an average of $11.9 million, compared to the average Republican winner who spent $7.1 million. On the House side, there was a smaller but still quantifiable increase in the cost of winning. On average, a winner in the House spent $1.5 million, compared $1.4 million in 2010 and $1.3 million in 2008. In the House, it was Republicans who had to work a bit harder: The average winning House Republican had to spend $1.59 million to win a seat, a bit more than the $1.53 million spent by the average Democratic victor.

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Approaching crisis point for journalism and corruption – Bill Moyers talks with John Nichols and Robert McChesney

Bill Moyers, John Nichols and Robert McChesney are three of the people I admire most in the world. Here they are sitting at the same table discussing what to do about the massive corruption of our political system, specifically, the challenges faced by those who are trying to do responsible journalism to report on this travesty. These issues are discussed with precision in the latest book by Nichols and McChesney: "Dollarocracy," a stunningly sober look at the situation (I've almost finished reading it). Toward the end of this excellent video, McChesney and Nichols indicate that they are "optimists." They argue that we are at one of those acute crisis points periodically faced by Americans and thus positive change is in our grasp. The authors further argue that it is becoming apparent that we need to make the case for publicly funded journalism. This is an approach taken by many functional governments, and it was one of the cornerstones of early America, a topic discussed by Nichols and McChesney in one of their previous books.

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