I also think part of it is because we have a lot of money tied up in our military and century-old industries controlled by powerful people who won't relinquish their ability to print money for their benefit. The only thing we are exceptional at now is our ability to maintain and defend the status quo of the rich.
I don't think it's quite that dire, although looking at "how they make sausage" in Congress is pretty revealing if you read through some of the amendments tacked onto bills in the works, either as wish-list items or poison pills. The desired outcome sometimes seems to be "let's pass a law looks like we give a damn and gave it our best shot while respecting everyone's interests". Which, yeah, translates to an effort to maintain status quo of at least the lobbies with the biggest war chests.
But ordinary Americans are still often motivated to become political activists when they get pushed too far. The Superfund program was not started because some congress critters or corporation heads rolled out of bed one morning and decided that toxic waste sites had become something a little more problematic than an eyesore.
Not that lobby groups haven't tried (and sometimes succeeded) in trying to weaken obligations to the Superfund. However, when industry lobbies try too hard to defang environmental or worker safety laws, etc., there is still citizen pushback, and House seats can even be flipped if people get riled up enough about the idea of going back to the days of unregulated industrial smog and poisoned ground water.
I'll grant you it all has the look and feel of a Sisyphean task though, to try to make our elected officials live up to that riff in the Constitution about "the general welfare" of the people. Still, Biden has already overseen rollback of some of the egregious assaults on environmental, consumer and worker safety rules that occurred during the Trump era. The trick is to get more of those into legislation as opposed to agency rules that can be flipped again.
Unfortunately the Republicans are aware of that, and in fact managed to pass some laws under Trump that forbid certain revised or ditched agency rules from being revisited. That can be undone by further legislation but not by executive order.
And how many ordinary Americans are aware of these options? Heh. It's easier to attack pols as variously "socialists" or "right wingers" or in their entirety as ignorant or corrupt. It's easier than getting into grassroots efforts to get a particular law protected or repealed, or to get a certain legal but environmentally undesirable action stopped in its tracks.
At one point I thought social media could be put to pretty good effect in organizing grassroots movements to improve things like climate change mitigation efforts, but on a given day now if I scroll through some "trending" hashtags, I see a lot more exhortation against "the other side" in general on the subject of the environment or climate change... and not so many practical tips on how to help stop a new pipeline or rail siding or river berth for export of petroleum products. Been thinking lately to start making a little more effort myself rather than just retweeting links to related news. But the pull of summer loafing is really strong in me lately.
And so I remain part of the problem.
inhabitat.com
