Matt Taibbi has an article up on alternet called Economic Realities Are Killing Our Era of Fantasy Politics.

Taibbi has published plenty of things I disagree with and this is not a blanket endorsement of him, but he has written a fine article and fits in with what we’ve been talking about here along the lines of “can we afford the rich” and preparing for a hard winter and harder times to come.

In the beginning of the article he quotes a letter to Bernie Sanders from a single mother who had to burn furniture last winter to keep warm, and then he goes straight into the stupid BS narratives that the consultants and the Village are trying on for the race:

The Republican and Democratic conventions are just around the corner, which means that we’re at a critical time in our nation’s history. For this is the moment when the country’s political and media consensus finally settles on the line of bullshit it will be selling to the public as the “national debate” come fall.

[…]

The press, meanwhile, is clearly flailing around for a sensational hook to use in selling the election, as the once-brightly-burning star of blue-red hatred seems unfortunately to have dimmed a little — just in time, perhaps, to torpedo the general election season cable ratings. They are working hard to come up with the WWF-style shorthand labels they always use to sell electoral contests: if 2000 was the “wooden” and “condescending” Al Gore versus the “dummy” Bush, and 2004 featured that same “regular guy” Bush against the “patrician” and “bookish” John Kerry (who also “looked French”), in 2008 we’re going to be sold the “maverick” McCain against the “smooth” Obama, or some dumb thing along those lines.

But the concerns of actual Americans are a lot more serious than the “inane TV-driven fantasyland that we’ve grown used to inhabiting”, and if this is where the election is going to spend its time, we will fail to address the national emergency we’re facing.

Bernie Sanders apparently sent out a request to his constituents to tell him about their economic problems. Instead of the expected few-dozen responses, he got over 700 in the first week, and I’m sure you can imagine what the residents of Vermont told him.

More unnerving, however, were the stories Sanders received from people who held one or two or even three jobs, from families in which both spouses held at least one regular job — in other words, from people one would normally describe as middle-class.

[…]

The recurring theme is that employment, even dual employment, is no longer any kind of barrier against poverty. Not economic discomfort, mind you, but actual poverty. Meaning, having less than you need to eat and live in heated shelter — forgetting entirely about health care and dentistry, which has long ceased to be considered an automatic component of American middle-class life.

[…]

And it all adds up to one thing.

“The middle class is disappearing,” says Sanders. “In real ways we’re becoming more like a third-world country.”

We can’t afford the political campaigns as run.

Our “national debate” is always a thing where we do not talk about things like haves and have-nots, rich and poor, employers versus employees. But we increasingly live in a society where all the political action is happening on one side of the line separating all those groups, to the detriment of the people on the other side.

We have to do something about the priorities of this country, or we will soon no longer live in a country that is recognizable as the same one that I grew up in.

We have a government that is spending two and a half billion dollars a day in Iraq, essentially subsidizing new swimming pools for the contracting class in northern Virginia, at a time when heating oil and personal transportation are about to join health insurance on the list of middle-class luxuries.

This is a statement about our priorities, as Taibbi points out. And not a very nice one.

The Democratic party that was once the impetus behind much of these changes, that argued so eloquently in the New Deal era that our society would be richer and more powerful overall if the spoils were split up enough to create a strong base of middle class consumers — that party panicked in the years since Nixon and elected to pay for its continued relevance with corporate money. As a result the entire debate between the two major political parties in our country has devolved into an argument over just how quickly to dismantle the few remaining benefits of American middle-class existence — immediately, if you ask the Republicans, and only slightly less than immediately, if you ask the Democrats.

Politics is not naturally a “sport”, or reality television show. We’ve had the luxury of making our national elections into a game show, but that may no longer be possible.

These fantasy elections we’ve been having — overblown sports contests with great production values, decided by haircuts and sound bytes and high-tech mudslinging campaigns — those were sort of fun while they lasted, and were certainly useful in providing jerk-off pundit-dickheads like me with high-paying jobs. But we just can’t afford them anymore. We have officially spent and mismanaged our way out of la-la land and back to the ugly place where politics really lives — a depressingly serious and desperate argument about how to keep large numbers of us from starving and freezing to death. Or losing our homes, or having our cars repossessed.

We have to talk about class. And we have to do it soon.