Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

By Charlie Barber
Contributing Writer

“After previous recessions, people in all income groups tended to benefit. This time, ordinary Americans are struggling with job insecurity, too much debt and pay raises that haven’t kept up with prices at the grocery store and gas station. The economy’s meager gains are going mostly to the wealthiest.” - Bismarck Tribune, 7/2/11

“[The Paul Ryan Budget - voted for by Congressman Rick Berg and Senator John Hoeven] would eliminate Medicare health coverage in its present form for seniors.” - Prairie Independent, June, 2011

“There’s a real potential cliff coming for unemployed people … The federal unemployment programs all expire at the end of [2011]. This means that anyone who is laid off on July 1st or later, will ONLY receive state benefits unless Congress acts to keep these needed programs up and running … Quite frankly, this will be nothing short of a disaster - for those workers and their families, and for local economies across the country ... It’s not too early for Congress to hold good faith and open-minded negotiations about how to keep these federal programs up and running until the economy recovers enough, and creates enough jobs, that the programs are no longer needed.” - Judy Conti, National Employment Law Project

House Republicans in Congress under Eric Cantor and the Tea Party are playing a very dangerous game - not just with President Barack Obama … but with democracy itself.
In their dogged attempts to defeat an elected President they despise to the point of blind hatred, Republicans are endangering his ability to provide jobs and stability, without which no middle class democracy has ever been able to exist for long.

Like many, but not all, Presidents before him, Barack Obama has inherited problems that he did not create. The same cannot be said for some of his own Democratic Party which went along with the “Greed is Good” culture perfected by the Republican Party since the Presidency of Ronald Reagan.

Deregulation

Deregulation in 1999, with Congress doing away with Glass-Steagal protections from the New Deal Era, simply put the foxes in charge of the hen house. Although he might well have been overridden, Democrat Bill Clinton could have vetoed such legislation. As predicted by North Dakota’s Senator Byron Dorgan, elimination of Glass Steagal led directly to the Wall Street Meltdown of 2008.

Jobs - What Jobs?

“Take This Job and Ship It,” by Byron Dorgan, outlines the catastrophic and unconscionable shipping of well paying jobs out of this country by corporations - with blessings and tax breaks from both sides of the Congressional aisle. Most Democrats in Congress today have repented of this folly, but the Republican Party is controlled by men whose political and economic bottom line depends upon it.

More Government - Less Efficiency

From 1981 to 1988 Ronald Reagan succeeded in one of the most brilliant magician’s illusions in American history, but the bill for his deception has come due in recent years.

Proclaiming that “government was the problem,” Reagan proved his point by making more. It became neither smaller nor more efficient, just more ineffective. It was instead “kidnapped” for use of the rich and powerful.  When wealthy cronies like George W. Bush’s Mike Brown were left in charge of FEMA at the time of Hurricane Katrina, the fraud was exposed, but not punished. Only victims of such incompetence suffered.

Reagan created new layers of government on top of old ones. New furniture. New employees. Public sector jobs impoverished the federal budget but created fuller employment. Private sector jobs, which really matter in defining a healthy economy, were sent overseas by corporations with the blessings of tax breaks favored by virtually all Republicans, and even some Democrats.
Reagan’s illusory “trickle down economics” is still touted by candidates who call themselves “conservatives.” But these so-called conservatives have really been radical destroyers of an equitable tax system that guaranteed that the rich would pay their fair share for the costs of protecting the people’s health and safety, infrastructure, and access to quality education—the fundamental purposes of government, large or small.

The Republican mantra that “more taxes destroy job creation” is a lie.

Notice that taxes levied on the rest of us ON BEHALF OF the rich have, indeed, destroyed jobs in this country. When the middle class does not have earnings to spend in our economy, growth and Gross Domestic Product goes down, not up.

Removing taxes on the rich, as done by Reagan and Bush the younger, simply makes them richer. In addition, it removes money from circulation in the economy and rewards the wealthy with more tax advantages by sending jobs overseas.

When the likes of Michelle Bachmann repeat the Republican mantra that “taxes ... hurt Main Street businesses and prevent ... our economy from creating new jobs,” she merely repeats a lie that disguises the continuing Republican war on the obligation [and necessity] of democracy to expand the middle class.

Democracies are sustained by expanding the middle class.

Autocracy is established and sustained by destroying the middle class.

It is the middle class which preserves democracy from autocracy and the rule of the wealthy, certainly not those wealthy folks that Michelle Bachmann is fronting for - the ones who tell themselves: “I am wealthy and independent. I don’t need government.”

The real purpose in Bachmann’s rhetoric, echoed by Republicans around the United States, is to cover up the actual intent of the extremely wealthy and privileged 2% of this country: “It is my money and I am not sharing it with you!”

Such selfishness will bring a democratic nation to grief.

Holes in the safety nets

Increasing debt run up by bi-partisan greed and folly in the past thirty years has sobered up the Democrats, but the Republican Party still drunkenly trots out old hypocrisies about their beliefs in smaller government. They have many faithful around the country, and in the emergent Tea Party, still taken in by this ghastly falsehood.

Republicans in Mandan, for example, smile at me in a condescending way and say smaller government is always better, passing over whether it is effective or not. Chamber of Commerce rhetoric is forgotten, of course, when floods and other disasters occur.  Clamor goes out for federal government intervention, but once the crisis is past, the same anti-government sentiments prevail.

Republicans in Congress are not so naive as some of my Republican friends in North Dakota. They know there is a price to be paid for more expensive and less efficient government, but have no intention of making their wealthy clients pay for it. Instead, they seek to remove government safety nets from the unemployed and attack pensions, Medicare, Social Security, and other places of safety for the white and blue collar middle class. Governors like Scott Walker in Wisconsin, for example, are going after teachers’ pensions in 2011 the way that Jimmy Hoffa used to go after Teamsters’ Pension funds in the 1950s. Deep in the frozen hearts and lock-jawed minds of Republican leadership across this nation is the nagging, paralyzing fear that someone, somewhere, who is not wealthy and well connected, might get a governmental benefit that they really need.

While some take advantage of government benefits, abuses are nowhere near the proportions or bogus examples claimed by right wing publicists. Bi-partisan budget hawks, like North Dakota’s Kent Conrad, are well aware of those who use and those who abuse benefits, and if he is allowed by Republican leadership to have his way, a difficult, but more rational set of choices could make their way to the President’s desk.

The national debt crunch

In their nastiest ploy to date, Republicans in Congress have held social programs for ransom against the impending August 2, 2011, “drop dead date,” when the United States is in danger of default on its debts without massive cuts in its budget or a raise in the debt ceiling.  Ronald Reagan resorted to this latter short term solution 19 times.

Part of Republican motivation is their usual cynicism in favor of the rich, but there is also “politics as usual.”

If Barack Obama succeeds in moving this country towards fuller employment, and in protecting the lion’s share of vital programs for the middle class like Medicare and Social Security, historical precedents suggest that he is virtually assured of a second term, and Republicans might face major beatings at the polls in 2012.

Republican leadership in Washington desperately needs to keep miseries caused by the Reagan and Bush Presidencies continuing into 2012. Their obstructionism since Barack Obama took office has been to that end, but they are hoping that a majority of Americans do not discover their game and consequently blame Democrats more than Republicans. It scarcely occurs to Speaker Boehner and Minority Leader McConnell that damage they do to democracy is far greater than damage they do to the President.

In order to cover up such unseemly and unpatriotic motives, more nonsense from Republicans about the President’s birth certificate and other attempts to distract Americans from his workmanlike approach can be expected.

Relative silence about Barack Obama’s achievements is deafening, but not surprising, in our “what have you done for me lately” society. Gratitude in politics is as rare as a smile on a miser’s face.

However, Barack Obama’s continuing grace under pressure is beginning to unnerve his opponents, and break through layers of media agendas that so often distract Americans from discerning those who govern in our real interest from those who serve other masters, not a middle class democracy.

Editorial shenanigans aside, Americans don’t care which political party creates more jobs, or, at this point, even if the decisions are arrived at democratically.

Illusions are dreams when they are confined to individual goals, but they turn into nightmares when manipulated by clever politicians and unscrupulous businessmen. In waking up, people may vent their anger in violent ways, not at the perpetrators, but at closer targets, responsible officials who simply are trying to make things work.

John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, blinded by their quests for personal power, have cast aside any sense of service to the nation’s interest in their manic desire to “make President Obama a one term President.” They have been outdone in fanaticism by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor to the point where they are getting nervous—not about the gridlock they have created, but that Americans are catching on to their game.

If Republican driven gridlock succeeds in bankrupting the United States on August 2, or forcing systemic crippling of social programs and damaging blows to a struggling economy from overly drastic budget cuts, it will be push this country further away from its middle class, democratic traditions. Even if they fail this time, malefactors of great wealth, with a strong foothold in Congress and on the Supreme Court, will not let up their relentless assault on middle class democracy until it is crushed.

It has happened before - in one of the most advanced of western civilized countries, one which had modeled its Constitutional Democracy on the best that British and American experience could provide.

Weimar Germany.

But that couldn’t happen here could it?

There are disturbing signs that it could—with different wolves in different sheep’s clothing than what plagued Germany and the world in the 1930s.

I will explore these signs in “Part II: Into the Abyss.”

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