from the cutting room - ranting about Iowa stuff
hey all,
I assume none of you live in Iowa and fair enough (“can you call this living really?”) so this might not be of any interest, and again, fair enough! Anyhow, I wrote an op-ed about some Iowa stuff and have failed to find anyone who will run it. I probly didn’t work very hard by the standards of actual journalists or whatever, but I’m very lazy and easily intimidated so that work I did feels like a lot of hard work. In any case, the thing’s below!
Iowa DOGE: The Clowns are Running the Circus while the Rest of Us Scramble for Bread
Recently Governor Reynolds announced an Iowa Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, to emulate the federal DOGE associated with billionaire Elon Musk. The federal DOGE is wreaking havoc in public infrastructure that ordinary people need, for reasons that have no benefit to ordinary people - that's why they have Musk as their billionaire mascot. The project is partly a matter of greedy rich people wanting to be that much richer at the expense of the rest of us and partly a matter of us being captive to the midlife crises of people who have far too much money and so as a result too much power. Emulating this here in Iowa is a terrible idea. Then again, terrible ideas are true to form for Reynolds and her fellow troglodytes.
Our state is a wonderful, vibrant place home to many great artists, thinkers, communities, and people of good conscience. Unfortunately, thoughtful, creative, conscientious people don’t run the state, which is part of why conditions here are, to put it mildly, pretty bad for many of our fellow Iowans. Iowa has a maternal mortality rate of 20 deaths per 100,000 people, meaning we rank right about the middle of the US for being dying from complications during pregnancy. Just over 11 percent of Iowans live in poverty. Worse yet, the poverty rate for children is even higher, at 12 percent. A little over eighty thousand children - kids!! - in Iowa are going hungry or at risk for doing so (the technical term is food insecurity). We are at or close to record levels of homelessness in our state. Only 41% of Iowa college students plan to stay in the state after graduation. Our state has long standing and worsening water quality issues.
These are not conditions in which people thrive, to put it mildly. More pointedly, these and other issues in our state involve a great deal of suffering by vulnerable people. That suffering is preventable. These problems could be addressed by the government if there was political will among the people who run our state: we don’t have to abandon so many of our fellow Iowans to suffering. That abandonment is a choice, by people who care less about good lives for those of us who aren’t rich than they do about so-called efficiency. (To be fair, they don't just care about efficiency. They also like promoting bigotry against queer and trans people while pretending they’re protecting children.)
The idea of DOGE in Iowa is especially silly given that Republicans have controlled the governorship and both houses of the state legislature since 2017. If they’ve been inefficient up until now, well, then that should be seen as disqualifying. Of course, the point isn’t really about efficiency. It’s about further transferring wealth upward - basically letting the already rich afford additional mansions and so on - and about getting or staying in with winners in (and donors to) national Republican politics.
To be clear, this applies to both parties. Across the board, actual well-being for actual people rather than a rich few, just is not a governmental priority among US politicians. (Senator Bernie Sanders has been making this point in his recent Fighting Oligarchy tour, though that tour has important limitations as well.) As one case in point, under President Biden in 2021 the United States saw historic policies that dramatic cut rates of poverty and hunger. Under President Biden in 2022 those policies were reversed or allowed to expire, plunging millions back into poverty and hunger. The reason for all of that is, as I said, that human flourishing is not a government priority, regardless of which party is in office - those policies happened to support businesses in a time when the economy was disrupted by COVID-19, and those were reversed in order to benefit businesses as well. The two parties have to pretend and distract in different ways because they have different traditions and different donors who own them. For the Republicans, that comes in the form of supposed efficiency.
DOGE is going to be a cover for more of the same at best - worsening quality of life overseen by a smug group of mutual backslappers. It’s a kind of circus performed by clowns for other clowns, all of them rich. At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, DOGE federally and in Iowa is elites talking to fellow elites, egging each other on, and all of the rest of us will pay for their actions in reduced quality of life. Ordinary Iowans are not really the audience here. Part of what this circus is trying to ignore is that human flourishing simply is not a priority. The real priority is more money for the moneyed, and keeping the rest of us disorganized and demoralized so that we don’t make trouble. The pattern of US history makes very clear that none of this will really end until large numbers of people break out of the trap of demoralized disorganization and start making a great deal of trouble. Neither political party has a real role in that.
With even the best possible political party, we just can not handle the serious injustices immediately before us through the slow and limited electoral system. That system is as much a means for governing over us – and so keeping us headed toward a car crash – as it is a means for us to govern ourselves and get off the terrible path we are on. Part of how that system serves to govern us is by getting us to accept its slow pace and relatively polite, impersonal procedures despite the urgency and the personal nature of the suffering forced onto us. People of conscience who argue, with the best of intentions, that we must turn to the electoral system to solve the current nightmare we are forced to live through are ultimately going to keep us away from more effective and faster-acting responses. For just one example, think of the Civil Rights Movement and its victories against racist segregation. Those didn’t come by election but by disruptive civil disobedience.
I close with the words of the activist Mario Savio in 1964: “There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus – and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it – that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all!”