“Faking” Bad

“Breaking Bad is the TV series about Walter White (Bryan Cranston), a struggling high school chemistry teacher who is diagnosed with advanced lung cancer at the beginning of the series. He turns to a life of crime, producing and selling methamphetamine with a former student, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), with the aim of securing his family's financial future before he dies.” The title comes from the idea that someone whose life has normally been lived well, suddenly “breaks bad”.

Change a couple of letters around in the title and you have the preferred strategy of our political process – “faking bad”. And both parties do it. Normally it’s emphasized more  by the party whose claims and policies are being proved wrong by actual events. When combined with pettifogging, (making molehills look like mountains to distract us from  the actual issues) this strategy is a powerful device for taking our attention away from seeking bi-partisan solutions. In fact, it is being used just about any time a political candidate of either party opens his or her mouth.

One such recent, well-organized program was sent out by memo from the Republican National Committee. The three topics are the national debt, gas prices and unemployment. So if you listen carefully, every Republican will repeatedly cast these issues in a bad light.  But there’s another side to every story.

Let’s start with the national debt. China holds about 8 percent of the 24 percent owned by other countries. U.S. citizens hold the most at 76 percent. It’s costing us almost nothing in interest (0.6 – 1.5 percent) compared to countries like Italy who have to pay 6-7 percent. Debt is a natural part of the ups and downs of economics. No business or government would function long without an ability to borrow.

Let’s move on to gas prices. No president past, present or future controls the price of gasoline. The price of crude oil is based on International markets, sensitive to supply and demand, artificially stimulated by speculators ( as much as 40 percent) and driven upwards by increasing demands from other parts of the world (China, India and Brazil). Of course, there’s always price controls like what Nixon did in August of 1971. But President Obama is not going to provoke the powerful oil industry by freezing prices?

Finally there’s unemployment. It’s true that unemployment remains too high. But we have had job growth for 24 straight months. The last 3 months were the best. About 500,000 people re-joined the workforce causing unemployment to remain at 8.3 percent even though last month 227,000 jobs were added. And remember, this recession is not cyclical. It is structural, which takes a lot longer to rebound.

Okay what about the Democrats? I think the best current “faking bad” example is the accusation that the Republican party has “declared war on women.” The reason? Well many conservatives are conscientiously against abortion and many also disagree with this government requiring a religious organization to provide insurance coverage for contraceptives because it violates their values. That’s a far cry from declaring war on women. But the term “war on women” contains enough emotional ammunition to get lots of people excited about those scary misogynists – some of whom are women themselves.

The list goes on but the real point of this column is not to argue who’s right or wrong.  It’s to expose a political game played by both parties.

Faking bad is so damaging to our country. It distracts us from the real issues. It works us up into such a frenzy that we can’t hear each other. And while we shout across the political divide, the real problems continue. In essence, faking bad is a partisan device employed to keep the ranks of both parties loyal by making the folks in the other party look bad. It obscures the real issues and allows our problems to continue.

Robert DeFilippis