The Republicans, through a combination of deregulation of banks by elimination of the Glass-Stegal Act that separated commercial bank operations from investment bank operations, and by passing even more unwarranted tax cuts for the most wealthy, drilled holes in the bottom of the ship of state, and left it awash and sinking to the Obama administration. It was headed for the depths of depression when Obama took office.
In the efforts to keep the economy from totally disintegrating, the Obama administration took dramatic steps, albeit in a bi-partisan way, to prevent the impending disaster. The bailout of Detroit carmakers, most of which has been paid back, saved the largest American industry from total failure and in the process saved millions of jobs. The 2009 Economic Stimulus put money into the economy, improved American infrastructure, and gave working Americans a temporary tax cut. We will see a 50% increase in the debt during this 4 year term, which is, on average, about what we got from George W. Bush.
So spare me the accusatory rhetoric about Democrats. The reality is quite different. It is the Republicans who spend profligately, but instead of raising taxes to responsibly pay for their excesses, they would rather increase the nation’s debt to foreign lenders. This fact was brought home to me last week, when I heard Mitt Romney’s latest campaign ad. He is the front runner among the Republican candidates for the presidency, and looks like maybe may be the person who is up against President Obama in the election in November. So what did Romney say in his ad? Here it is.
Mitt Romney: The test for me is "is this program is so critical - so important - that it is worth borrowing money from China.”
Excuse me! Are my ears playing tricks on me?
Shouldn’t the test be “whether a program is so essential, so critical, that it is worth Americans paying their hard-earned taxes to pay for?”
Why should the default be to assume that we will borrow the money we need to pay for our government programs?
You see, the Republican playbook is to pretend that it isn’t necessary for us to pay taxes. Their goal is to cut taxes, particularly the taxes on their most wealthy friends. And that necessarily means increasing our national debt. That, simply, is the strategy that they have used on America for the last 31 years, since Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. It has not only assured the richest among us of unprecedented increases in income, but more importantly, it has kept average Americans from getting ahead. The income of median American males has been flat or going down since 1981, and their income today, adjusted for inflation, is about where it was in 1973. Meanwhile, the income for the top 1 percent of the population is 250 percent of what it was in 1980. It isn't a coincidence that the big money, the big profits for the very rich, lies in manipulating the money involved in borrowing to pay the US debt. So when the US borrows money from China, the rich get richer, and we pass on the debt to our children and grandchildren.
This disparity in income has had several dramatic impacts on our economy. The top ten percent of the population now has as much or more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. In fact, the bottom 90 percent only own 26.9 percent of America’s net worth. That means the top 10 percent own 73.1 percent.
In effect, we haven’t borrowed money from the Chinese (and others) to finance our government programs, we have borrowed money from the Chinese (and others) to put it into the pockets of the people who were already the wealthiest in this country.
Ordinary working Americans need to wake up. We are playing in a rigged game, where the working people are prearranged to be the losers and the people who live on investments, stocks, bonds, and credit default swaps, are prearranged to win, and win big.
As I have pointed out elsewhere on this website, the Tea Party folks and the Occupy Wall Street folks both have common complaints. They feel like they don’t have a voice inside the Washington Beltway, and they are right.
Congress has sold its soul to the bankers, Wall Street, health insurance industry, and other lobbyists for big business. Members of the US House and Senate have been sold a philosophy that falsely maintains that whatever is good for the stock market is good for America. In pursuit of that principle, they have, since 1975, restructured our laws, particularly the Internal Revenue Code, which, along with regulations, revenue rulings, private letter rulings, and other tax gobblety gook, amounts to nearly 80,000 pages of special deals for influential taxpayers.
After World War II, America enjoyed an unprecedented period of economic prosperity. A large percentage of the American work force worked in union-represented jobs, and earned respectable wages with good benefits. Industry prospered, because working people with good jobs tended to spend a lot of money on the products those industries produced. Even with the top income tax rates above 90 percent, rich people did very well indeed. But that wasn’t enough for them. They wanted more.
What has happened over the last 35 years is that Congress has carefully and methodically, under the influence of Republican “think tanks,” stacked the deck against the majority of the American people. State legislatures, under the influence of those same Republican think tanks, have systematically passed anti-union or union-busting laws, euphemistically called “right to work” laws, to enable big corporations to exclude labor unions from representing their employees. In order to insure maximum profits, laws have been passed and policies implemented that have resulted in millions of American jobs being exported to low wage countries. The result is discussed on my “Triangle Fire” page, under “Straight Talk.” The result of all these Republican policies was revealed in 2011, when it was disclosed that 48 percent of the American people are now either in “poverty” or “poor.” Poverty is defined, by the agencies responsible for those analyses, as an income of $22,500 per year for a family of four. Some commentators point out that that value should be much higher, which would mean many more Americans are in poverty than is being reported.
Ordinary Americans, who consider themselves “conservative,” haven’t figured out that they are being systematically screwed by the Republicans they have elected to represent them. Those voters continue to be distracted by artificial issues, such as “abortion” and “partial-birth abortion,” “gay marriage,” and “gun owners’ rights,” despite the fact that no changes are likely in those issues, no matter who wins. Then, once elected, the Republicans come to town and vote law after law that screws the majority of the American electorate, and puts even more money into the pockets of the ultra-rich.
What Republican policies, in the hands of Republicans elected to Congress, have done to America is a disgrace. These same people crow about the American flag, but have no hesitation at screwing the Americans who voted for them. They have no honor, and I’m proud to say, as an American, that they are NOT my kind of people. They are the kind of people who put Hitler and Mussolini into power.
In 1941, science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein, in a thinly-veiled criticism of the power politics of that time, wrote the following lines, which are as true today as they were before World War II.
“We see the history of the world as a series of crises in a conflict between two opposing philosophies. Ours is based on the notion that life, consciousness, intelligence, ego is the important thing in the world.” …. “That puts us in conflict with every force that tends to destroy, deaden, degrade the human spirit, or to make it act contrary to its nature. We see another crisis approaching…”…”This crisis has been growing on us since Napoleon. Europe has gone, and Asia – surrendered to authoritarianism, nonsense like ‘leader principle,’ totalitarianism, all the bonds placed on liberty which treat men as so many economic and political units with no importance as individuals. No dignity – do what you are told and shut your mouth! Workers, soldiers, breeding units . . .” “This continent has been a refuge of freedom, a place where the soul could grow. But the forces that killed enlightenment in the rest of the world are spreading here. Little by little they have whittled away at human liberty and human dignity. A repressive law, a bullying school board, a blind dogma to be accepted under pain of persecution – doctrines that will shackle men and put blinders on their eyes so that they will never regain their lost heritage.”
Since the Presidential election of 2008, Republican strategists and their anonymous supporters have been waging a war against President Obama and the Democrats in Congress. This unprecedented campaign has included numerous instances of character assassination and lies, repeated over and over, apparently on the theory that even a blatant lie, repeated frequently enough, will be believed by someone.
We have all heard the lies. Obama wasn’t born in America. Obama is a Muslim. Obama is a communist. Obama doesn’t respect our troops. There are lies that deliberately mis-quote the president. There are similar lies about Democrat leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, and other Democrat office-holders. All lies and easily shown to be lies. When one lie is spread, it could be simply a mistake. But when there are lies being circulated across the nation, about many Democrat candidates, it is more than a mistake, it is a program designed to create a false impression in those receiving the lies, and to persuade them to cede power to those for whom the control of power is everything.
I ask you, where is the honor in the lie? Where is the honor in the liar? The answer, of course, is that there is no honor. Is that important? I think so.
As Americans, and particularly as American voters, we have to ask ourselves what kind of America we want?
Do we want an America where, if you work hard, you are likely to be able to get ahead and equally likely to be able to set aside some savings for your retirement or for college or other major expense? That is the America that existed 50 years ago, before Republicans started nibbling away at the American economy.
Or do we want an America where rich people automatically get a preferential tax rate, and the laws are designed to create “tax-shelters” where the wealthy can put their savings to avoid paying taxes on the income it generates, while the ordinary people pay disproportionately high taxes? That is the America that Republicans have created for us today.
As an aside, here, I speak about the foregoing tax provisions from the perspective of one with a graduate law degree in Estate Planning. I spent the entire week, last week, attending an estate tax institute and hearing all week long about all of the tax devices available to enable the rich to become richer. So I am not making this up.
If we want the former kind of America, rather than the latter, we need to elect Democrats, who historically have done a better job of passing laws that were good for ordinary Americans.
Democrats have brought us clean air and water, after a time when a river (the Cuyahoga River in Ohio on June 23, 1969) actually caught fire and people died from air pollution (Donora, Pennsylvania October 27-31, 1948). Democrats brought us safe working conditions, reasonable working hours, minimum wages, elimination of child labor, and equal rights for everyone.
Republicans fought against all of those policies, arguing that they should be “free” to impose any kind of working conditions on anyone who was desperate enough to work for them. They oppose all regulation, claiming it hurts their business. Of course, they mean it hurts their profits. Again, I refer you to the Triangle Fire page under “Straight Talk” elsewhere on this website.
Today, the reality of global climate change is becoming a daily factor in the lives of people all over the world. Rising sea levels are threatening some island nations with extinction. Coastal regions, where most of the world's population live, such as Bangladesh, are threatened with inundation. American cities, such as Norfolk, Virginia and Miami Beach, Florida, are beginning to have frequent flooding due to sea level rise. Long ago, Republicans proposed "cap and trade" as a method of dealing with acid rain, and passed laws to make necessary reductions in air pollution. Now, when virtually all the world's scientists say we humans have to make dramatic reductions in the amount of CO2 we release in the air, the Republicans pretend that climate change is unrelated to human activity, and label efforts to pass a new "cap and trade" bill as some kind of communist plot. Those of us who have looked at the facts know better, but if it might impact corporate profits, count on the Republicans to oppose it, and by the way, to label those who support it as some kind of traitors to democracy.
Even within the last four years, Democrats finally began to deal with the sky-rocketing cost of health care, with the help of a few more independent-minded Republicans, through the passage of the Affordable Health Care Act. It certainly isn’t a perfect law, but it is a good beginning, and will be adjusted over time to insure that everyone has the ability to get health insurance by 2014, instead of the alternative, which is to have one American in six without coverage, as it was before the passage of the act. It also has the promise of containing the rapid rise in health care costs, which were totally out of control before its passage.
Bearing all of the above in mind, we have to make serious decisions about whom we are going to elect to public office. If we elect Democrats, rather than Republicans, to Congress and to the Presidency, our chances are much better to have the kind of country we really care about.
It is important for each of us to realize and remember that our country is not guaranteed anything. The great American experiment with democracy could fail, if we don’t make responsible decisions when we vote for public office-holders.
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