Politics
February 25, 2011
Recent events in Wisconsin, Washington, DC, and state capitols around the country have brought into sharp focus the dramatic difference between Republicans and Democrats.
Interesting that numerous Republican office-holders, who, with or without Tea Party help, won the election in November 2010, some by the slimmest of margins (here in Florida the governor did not get even half the votes cast, and eventually won by only a few thousand votes) but are acting more like they were carried to victory by a popular landslide, and are trying to totally and rapidly dismantle the machinery of government that has been built through decades of bipartisan effort. The reality is that, unlike the election of 2008, in 2010 many Democrats, disenchanted with the failure of a Democrat President, a Democrat Senate, and a Democrat House of Representatives to pass real health care reform, including a public option, simply stayed home from the election.
In any case, the behavior of the Republican office holders, particularly Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, Florida’s Rick Scott, and Massachusetts' Scott Brown (is there a sudden upwelling of “Scotts” from somewhere?) has shown us their true stripes. Their stripes are plain to see and ugly.
One of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s first acts was to give corporations in Wisconsin hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks. He then announced that the state was in such bad shape financially that it had to cut pensions for its employees, insist that they pay significant percentages of their salaries for their health care and pension plans, and by the way, eliminate their ability to have collective bargaining, an obvious anti-union measure.
Indiana's governor, Mitch Daniels, who is frequently identified as a potential 2012 presidential candidate, recently tried to blame Indiana public employees as the 'bad guys' in Indiana's budget problems, citing the fact that they make more on average than the ordinary citizen in Indiana. He conveniently ignored the fact that public employees are much more likely to have bachelor's degrees or master's degrees, and special certifications (like teachers) than the average Indiana taxpayer.
Additionally, they have, in most cases, incurred thousands of dollars of educational expense and spent many years getting the experience that is the basis for their higher pay. It is a deliberate and contemptible attempt by Governor Daniels to mislead Hoosiers about the real causes of Indiana's budget woes, which is that taxes have been cut for the wealthy and the state has spent money on programs that feed directly into the pockets of the wealthy. I am from Indiana, and I can verify that there are plenty of poor people and lots of people who are doing very well there.
The problems of Indiana, Wisconsin and others, in their high costs for pensions for public employees, is not the fault of the public employees and their unions, although that is how it is being painted by the Republicans who would cut those pensions and eliminate their ability to bargain through their unions, but by the failure of the respective governments to properly fund the pension system to pay the pensions it promised to pay out. Public employees who have served the public for their working lives should not be made the scapegoats for incompetence by their employers and dishonest bookkeeping by prior administrations.
Similar actions have occurred in Congress, where the House of Representatives wants to pass a law that denies the fact of global climate change and prohibits EPA from acting to prevent air pollution. Who will benefit from such a law? The big polluting corporations and their executives and stockholders. Who will be damaged? The ordinary Americans who work in factories and businesses, breathe the polluted air, get sick from air pollution, and have to face the dramatic and serious negative impacts of global climate change.
The House of Representatives has passed proposals to cut the most beneficial, and relatively cheap, programs for the least affluent Americans, which will have no measurable effect on the deficit
Step back and look at these events, and then recall the bizarre decision of the United States Supreme Court’s ultra conservative majority in the “Citizens United” case that was announced last year. That case said that corporations are entitled to the same free speech rights as human citizens, and that they can contribute to partisan political campaigns without disclosing their identities. That is one of the factors that led to the present situation.
It is plain to me that we have two very different concepts of America displayed by the Republicans and Democrats. The Republicans, and their five henchmen on the U.S. Supreme Court, believe that only the policies that maximize the revenues (and cut the taxes) of corporations. are good for America. This concept is responsible for the richest Americans becoming many times as rich as they were 30 years ago when Ronald Reagan took office and began to implement “trickle down” (Voo Doo) economics. Recall that during the same period, adjusted for inflation, average working people’s incomes have fallen.
The Republicans are smart though, they tell the working people to vote for them because they will “cut their taxes”, when actually the people for whom they are really cutting the taxes are the richest of the rich. During the run-up to the election last fall, one of the big issues under discussion was “should the Bush tax cuts for the richest of the rich be continued?” Democrats argued for a fiscally responsible end to the tax cuts. Republicans argued that not continuing those cuts would amount to a tax increase on poor people and Americans of ordinary means, which was not true. Apparently, the voters believed the Republicans.
Then there is the issue of “jobs”. Anyone who takes the time to look on the Internet for the actual job numbers will immediately realize that the bottom fell out of the economy during the Bush administration and the Obama administration almost immediately after taking office turned the numbers around. In December of 2008, a month before President Obama took office, the US lost something like 750,000 jobs. That number, of job losses, increased one more month, and then began to decline. By mid-2010, the job losses were eliminated, and the economy was again creating more jobs than were being lost. But the huge number of unemployed isn’t going away any time soon, and even modest gains in the economy (which are now reflected in the increasing price of gasoline) are only going to slowly reduce the number of unemployed.
So the benefits to working Americans of the continued tax cuts for the rich are non-existent, but in fact only put America more in debt. For example, last fall, when the “Bush” tax cuts were extended for the wealthiest Americans, the benefit to an average American was less than $1,000.00. But for an American making a million dollars, continuing the cut saved them about $100,000.00. Then, having reduced the government’s income by an enormous amount, the Republican solution in the House of Representatives to balancing the budget (which it actually doesn’t do) is to cut funding for very important programs like “WIC” that provides food for Women, Infants and Children.
Now we know. The Republicans are ONLY interested in raising the income for corporate stockholders and the richest of the rich, i.e., their friends and campaign contributors. Their actions speak louder than words. For ordinary working people, they not only don’t care, they are actively attempting to make conditions worse for America's working families.
These events are not happening by accident. They are being orchestrated by those same people who benefit from the Bush tax cuts for the richest of the rich. Average American voters are being ‘played’ to exploit their fears of ‘big government’, their fear of immigrants, their disapproval of abortion, their fondness for their guns, into voting for office-holders who could care less about any of those issues, but whose real agenda is to make themselves and their wealthy friends as rich as possible, by stealing from our grandchildren, who will be saddled with the huge debts they are incurring.
If you are interested in how this process actually works, I recommend reading Thomas Franks’ excellent book, “What’s the matter with Kansas.”
How long will it take for American working voters to catch on? Will they catch on? Stay tuned.
I am getting out my copy of George Orwell’s "1984" and rereading it. I think I’m beginning to see it coming to reality.
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