“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
William Faulkner
A few days ago, I re-tweeted a piece by longtime contributing editor to Rolling Stone and now fellow Substack writer, Matt Taibbi, who interviewed author and activist, David Sirota, about his new podcast, “Meltdown”:
Today, CNN journalist and host of “Reliable Sources”, Brian Stelter, also interviewed David Sirota about his new podcast.
Sirota’s “Meltdown” draws a connection —a direct line, really— between the way the Democratic party handled the financial crisis in 2009-2010 when it had the presidency and both houses of Congress (with larger majorities than today), and the way Democrats currently are handling the negotiations on the Reconciliation bill.
In 2009, President Obama and the Congressional Democrats whittled down their stimulus bill, and rather than directly help the millions of individuals and small business owners devastated by the financial crisis, bowed to demands from Wall Street and the very banks that caused the meltdown of our economy, and bailed them out instead. I do understand that what happened was more complex than this summary, but I also know from first-hand experience, that the bailed out banks, in turn, did a terrible and slight-of-hand job of implementing the mortgage modification process intended to help homeowners. (I’ll write about this issue in a forthcoming post).
The people were promised help and they didn’t get it—the big companies got the help and it was supposed to “trickle down” to the regular folk, but it didn’t. And Democrats were whipped in the 2010 midterm elections and lost their majority by a humiliating margin. And now it looks like we’re repeating the same negative pattern: caving to the very industries that are causing our most pressing problems, like climate change, unaffordable health care and skyrocketing drug prices, just to get a deal of some sort, or worse, to appease large donors. And what both the President and Congress are doing is caving on the American people yet again, and the backlash likely will be the same in the 2022 midterms.
As a specific example, Sirota says that today, the mainstream media conveniently leaves out the money trail driving the negotiations on the Reconciliation bill: “Writing the money behind the Infrastructure bill out of the story of the bill is a huge problem and doesn’t give readers the context they need.”
Maybe that’s why we need independent Substack writers to bring up that very subject.
During this interview, Stelter specifically asks Sirota: “How can we infuse more historical context in today’s news coverage?” Stelter seems to answer his own question when he says: We need “Less of the hysterical minute-by-minute and more of the broader story, here.”
Watch the full segment with Stelter and Sirota:
I agree that there never seems to be much historical context provided for today’s issues, at least on television news, and Stelter is right that coverage tends to jump from the hottest and latest news story to the next, with hardly a breath in between. That’s why I enjoy reading those sprawling New Yorker pieces because I learn so much from the historical background each provides. And the writing is so good that it just weaves naturally into the story and supports its points without sounding like a history lecture. Not that there’s anything wrong with history lectures, of course.
But it seems that it is mostly independent journalists, like Taibbi, Sirota, Glen Greenwald, and historians like Heather Cox Richardson and others who are unafraid to draw comparisons with the past and show us that we’re repeating the same negative patterns, yet expecting a different result. I get angry, for example, when it looks like our country is repeating the same, unsuccessful response to our nation’s atrocious poverty rate; again focusing on the literal cost of a piece of legislation rather than its long term value; the roots of income inequality; and the history behind the creation of credit scores, pay day loans, and our country’s bankruptcy laws.
Yes, I’m tooting my own horn, here. Admittedly I haven’t done the in-depth historical research that many other writers have done, but I will. And I ask that you join me on this journey to learn from the past, and apply those lessons to solve today’s problems that so many of us believe are worthy of more research, like the economic, racial and environmental inequality that continues to plague the United States.
Speaking of learning from the past…check out this New Yorker article on the lessons to be learned from the 1968 Presidential campaign:
Here’s an interesting opinion piece from The New York Times that reflects on the power of FDR’s New Deal policies to break up monopolies:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/29/opinion/biden-fdr-antitrust-monopolies.html
And finally for this evening, a fascinating look into The New York Times “1619 Project”:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html
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Putting Today's Issues In Historical Context