Monday, March 13, 2006
The Real GOP
Krugman has been on a roll lately.
Recently he wrote an op-ed piece excoriating the administration critics who have so recently figured out that Drinky is “incompetent” and “vindictive,” resurrecting some of their quotes from a few years back when they criticized him for saying the exact same thing.
Today he writes another masterpiece. Check it out.
There is no better columnist at the New York Times than Krugman. That’s why the rightists hate him so much.
But I want to return to a subject I touched on briefly yesterday: the irrationality of the American electorate.
I mean that in a perjorative and a literal way: when 51% of the country believes in literal creationism, when three-quarters of the country believes in miracles, you have an electorate that is not rational. You have an electorate that uses faith and religious doctrine to inform its beliefs about the world even when that faith and doctrine flies in the face of settled science.
Chomsky says it better than I could: “These numbers aren’t duplicated anywhere else in the industrial world. You’d have to maybe go to mosques in Iran or do a poll among old ladies in Sicily to get numbers like this.” Chomsky goes on, detailing some other irrational American beliefs. “Again, you’ve got to go back to pre-technological societies, or devastated peasant societies, to get numbers like that.”
This is the religious irrationality that Driftglass rages against. It is the foundation of the Republican Party. Every time they stage another “God-and-country” rally that passes for a political rally they throw red meat to their base.
But the levers of power are firmly in the hands of the corporate elite. That’s why their tax cuts are aimed at the wealthy. That’s why Drinky won’t do anything about the illegal immigration that massively depresses labor wages until he is dragged, kicking and screaming, to the negotiating table. That’s why conservatives destroy environmental standards to make business easier for corporations.
Conservatives still have to get elected, so they throw the occasional bone to their base. That’s what Terri Schiavo was about. That’s what conservative judicial appointments are for. I can’t remember how many talk radio hosts and editorial writers said that the conservative activists they talked to worked to get Bush elected primarily for the conservative judicial appointments they knew would follow. That’s why Harriet Miers, though relatively conservative, provoked a backlash that led to her withdrawal.
It’s hard to forge a balancing act between the corporate elite and the Beast, especially when, in certain areas, their desires are conflicting. That’s why Bush lied incessantly about the nature of his tax cuts: God-and-country types aren’t too keen on giving money to people who live off on dividends. Thank God Fox News is there to spread the disinformation. Bush has taken a beating for years over immigration from all sides, especially in his base, but when it comes to issues that involve money he has proven he is willing to defy the will of the majority of the people that sent him to Washington.
Because it’s so hard to perform the balancing act, the corporatists in Washington learned long ago to beat the war drum. It’s very effective at stifling dissent. With Reagan it was Communism and the Cold War. With Bush it’s the War on Terror, another Cold War, another interminable conflict against a phantom that may take eighty years to dispel.
9/11 was a Godsend for Karl Rove, and he knew it. He knew it because Americans have always held the irrational belief that republicans are better at defending the country than democrats, ostensibly because they are more willing to wage war on countries that have nothing to do with our real enemies. Reagan found his phantom in Nicaragua, a nation that was Communist because he said it was, a pitiful third-world democracy that was a threat to our security because he said it was. Drinky found his phantom in Iraq, a nation that was allied with Al-Qaeda because he said it was, a nation that was a front in the War on Terror because he said it was.
There is no War on Terror. Terrorist attacks around the world have risen, as I have pointed out in the past. Iraq never had a “collaborative relationship” with Al Qaeda, as governmental study after governmental study has detailed. Iraq never gave any more funding or support to terrorists than Saudi Arabia, or Syria, or any other Arab nation. Iraq never had WMDs, Iraq had oil.
The security of our ports and borders is rancid, as bad as it was on September 11th, as the 9/11 Commission has reported, as many others have noted.
Drinky has failed to engage the governors of Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, and many other nations to form a cooperative relationship to quash terrorism in the countries in which it festers.
The War on Terror isn’t a policy failure, it is a shallow head-fake, a weak feint to distract the American people from the treacherous policies of a worthless corporate shill, a posturing puppet who scared his country into waging a war to secure oil supplies while he raided the treasury and raped the environment.
This is what you get when you elect the leader of a party founded on corporatism to the highest office in the land.
Whenever I listen to the least noxious, the most central ideals of what the GOP stands for I am appalled. They are always paired like Siamese twins: limit government spending and encourage corporate growth.
These are really nice ways of framing reality. Conservatives don’t want to limit all government spending: they love massive military budgets in the hundreds of billions per year. It’s those social programs that need “reform.” They should, theoretically, hate pork and earmarks, but we have seen those cancers expand explosively over the last six years.
And what about encouraging corporate growth? Is that what our government should do? This is the fundamental cancer that has eaten the soul of the GOP. Should the role of government simply be to stay small and efficient and stay out of the way of corporations? Limit the ability of people to sue companies for damages? Loosen environmental standards to allow corporations to exploit our natural resources without cleaning up the mess? Lower taxes on corporations and dividends?
When this thinking permeates your political party you will send people to Washington who think that the only role of government is to serve as an appendage to companies to make life easier for them. You will get Drinky as your president. The majority of the electorate will get screwed.
Corporations are hierarchical, top-down power structures. They are dictatorships. If you don’t like the decisions coming down the pipe you can plead your case or quit. You don’t get to vote.
It never ceases to amaze me that people insist on democracies for their government but spend the bulk of their day living in an autocracy. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can form and join companies where we do get to vote. But that’s a subject for another day.
Do we want the balance of power in this country to be in this private sector? Do we want government’s main job to be to make life easy for AT&T?
How about making life easier for people? How about cheap tuition loans, Headstart, health care, social security?
As Gordon Gekko said, “Economics is a zero-sum game, Buddy!” When you shift the tax burden away from companies you place it more firmly on the shoulders of the individuals. When you enact legislation to make it harder for people to sue companies for wrongdoing you make life harder for people. Yet these ideas are the cornerstones of modern Republican political thought.
It doesn’t make any sense unless you are on the corporate payroll. Voodoo economics has never generated growth in the economy any greater than the growth in the economy in the nineties, when Clinton raised taxes. The American economy has an amazing ability to lumber along at a 3.5% growth rate regardless of Clinton’s taxes or Drinky’s tax cuts in 2002. There isn’t even a correlation, much less a causation, between growth and tax cuts.
Again, the data has never been there, but what was once the demented brain child of Reagan’s Rightists is now taken for granted by every republican like it has been proved to be irrefutably true. Because they want it to be true. Because that means they make more money.
Meanwhile, as their every wish is fulfilled by a republican congress and a republican president, real wages stagnate and job growth is feeble. The top 1% and the top .5% and the top .1% of earners in the country see their incomes explode. Alan Greenspan issues an ominous warning about this trend and then retires. But it’s champagne and caviar time in the boardrooms.
Recently he wrote an op-ed piece excoriating the administration critics who have so recently figured out that Drinky is “incompetent” and “vindictive,” resurrecting some of their quotes from a few years back when they criticized him for saying the exact same thing.
Today he writes another masterpiece. Check it out.
There is no better columnist at the New York Times than Krugman. That’s why the rightists hate him so much.
But I want to return to a subject I touched on briefly yesterday: the irrationality of the American electorate.
I mean that in a perjorative and a literal way: when 51% of the country believes in literal creationism, when three-quarters of the country believes in miracles, you have an electorate that is not rational. You have an electorate that uses faith and religious doctrine to inform its beliefs about the world even when that faith and doctrine flies in the face of settled science.
Chomsky says it better than I could: “These numbers aren’t duplicated anywhere else in the industrial world. You’d have to maybe go to mosques in Iran or do a poll among old ladies in Sicily to get numbers like this.” Chomsky goes on, detailing some other irrational American beliefs. “Again, you’ve got to go back to pre-technological societies, or devastated peasant societies, to get numbers like that.”
This is the religious irrationality that Driftglass rages against. It is the foundation of the Republican Party. Every time they stage another “God-and-country” rally that passes for a political rally they throw red meat to their base.
But the levers of power are firmly in the hands of the corporate elite. That’s why their tax cuts are aimed at the wealthy. That’s why Drinky won’t do anything about the illegal immigration that massively depresses labor wages until he is dragged, kicking and screaming, to the negotiating table. That’s why conservatives destroy environmental standards to make business easier for corporations.
Conservatives still have to get elected, so they throw the occasional bone to their base. That’s what Terri Schiavo was about. That’s what conservative judicial appointments are for. I can’t remember how many talk radio hosts and editorial writers said that the conservative activists they talked to worked to get Bush elected primarily for the conservative judicial appointments they knew would follow. That’s why Harriet Miers, though relatively conservative, provoked a backlash that led to her withdrawal.
It’s hard to forge a balancing act between the corporate elite and the Beast, especially when, in certain areas, their desires are conflicting. That’s why Bush lied incessantly about the nature of his tax cuts: God-and-country types aren’t too keen on giving money to people who live off on dividends. Thank God Fox News is there to spread the disinformation. Bush has taken a beating for years over immigration from all sides, especially in his base, but when it comes to issues that involve money he has proven he is willing to defy the will of the majority of the people that sent him to Washington.
Because it’s so hard to perform the balancing act, the corporatists in Washington learned long ago to beat the war drum. It’s very effective at stifling dissent. With Reagan it was Communism and the Cold War. With Bush it’s the War on Terror, another Cold War, another interminable conflict against a phantom that may take eighty years to dispel.
9/11 was a Godsend for Karl Rove, and he knew it. He knew it because Americans have always held the irrational belief that republicans are better at defending the country than democrats, ostensibly because they are more willing to wage war on countries that have nothing to do with our real enemies. Reagan found his phantom in Nicaragua, a nation that was Communist because he said it was, a pitiful third-world democracy that was a threat to our security because he said it was. Drinky found his phantom in Iraq, a nation that was allied with Al-Qaeda because he said it was, a nation that was a front in the War on Terror because he said it was.
There is no War on Terror. Terrorist attacks around the world have risen, as I have pointed out in the past. Iraq never had a “collaborative relationship” with Al Qaeda, as governmental study after governmental study has detailed. Iraq never gave any more funding or support to terrorists than Saudi Arabia, or Syria, or any other Arab nation. Iraq never had WMDs, Iraq had oil.
The security of our ports and borders is rancid, as bad as it was on September 11th, as the 9/11 Commission has reported, as many others have noted.
Drinky has failed to engage the governors of Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, and many other nations to form a cooperative relationship to quash terrorism in the countries in which it festers.
The War on Terror isn’t a policy failure, it is a shallow head-fake, a weak feint to distract the American people from the treacherous policies of a worthless corporate shill, a posturing puppet who scared his country into waging a war to secure oil supplies while he raided the treasury and raped the environment.
This is what you get when you elect the leader of a party founded on corporatism to the highest office in the land.
Whenever I listen to the least noxious, the most central ideals of what the GOP stands for I am appalled. They are always paired like Siamese twins: limit government spending and encourage corporate growth.
These are really nice ways of framing reality. Conservatives don’t want to limit all government spending: they love massive military budgets in the hundreds of billions per year. It’s those social programs that need “reform.” They should, theoretically, hate pork and earmarks, but we have seen those cancers expand explosively over the last six years.
And what about encouraging corporate growth? Is that what our government should do? This is the fundamental cancer that has eaten the soul of the GOP. Should the role of government simply be to stay small and efficient and stay out of the way of corporations? Limit the ability of people to sue companies for damages? Loosen environmental standards to allow corporations to exploit our natural resources without cleaning up the mess? Lower taxes on corporations and dividends?
When this thinking permeates your political party you will send people to Washington who think that the only role of government is to serve as an appendage to companies to make life easier for them. You will get Drinky as your president. The majority of the electorate will get screwed.
Corporations are hierarchical, top-down power structures. They are dictatorships. If you don’t like the decisions coming down the pipe you can plead your case or quit. You don’t get to vote.
It never ceases to amaze me that people insist on democracies for their government but spend the bulk of their day living in an autocracy. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can form and join companies where we do get to vote. But that’s a subject for another day.
Do we want the balance of power in this country to be in this private sector? Do we want government’s main job to be to make life easy for AT&T?
How about making life easier for people? How about cheap tuition loans, Headstart, health care, social security?
As Gordon Gekko said, “Economics is a zero-sum game, Buddy!” When you shift the tax burden away from companies you place it more firmly on the shoulders of the individuals. When you enact legislation to make it harder for people to sue companies for wrongdoing you make life harder for people. Yet these ideas are the cornerstones of modern Republican political thought.
It doesn’t make any sense unless you are on the corporate payroll. Voodoo economics has never generated growth in the economy any greater than the growth in the economy in the nineties, when Clinton raised taxes. The American economy has an amazing ability to lumber along at a 3.5% growth rate regardless of Clinton’s taxes or Drinky’s tax cuts in 2002. There isn’t even a correlation, much less a causation, between growth and tax cuts.
Again, the data has never been there, but what was once the demented brain child of Reagan’s Rightists is now taken for granted by every republican like it has been proved to be irrefutably true. Because they want it to be true. Because that means they make more money.
Meanwhile, as their every wish is fulfilled by a republican congress and a republican president, real wages stagnate and job growth is feeble. The top 1% and the top .5% and the top .1% of earners in the country see their incomes explode. Alan Greenspan issues an ominous warning about this trend and then retires. But it’s champagne and caviar time in the boardrooms.
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 10:43 AM 
