Part 2

   From Washington to Wall Street
      Anti-Government Government  
         & The New Welfare Queens

     Every nation faces pivotal turning points.  But only twice before in our history as far as I know has such a significant part of the electorate been willing to turn its back on truth and competence and harm the public health of the nation to serve its own selfish interests by holding to power they clearly no longer deserve.  To win at all costs the republicans seem willing to stoop to any political smear and to salt any wound with campaign lies in order to poison the very grounds of democratic debate so that true debate may never arise to challenge their authority again. 

1. The first instance of willful single party nullification in America was the democratic party of Andrew Jackson’s policy prior to the Civil War previously referred to.  That policy was built around a massive injustice and untruth – that slavery was an economic good and moral necessity.  That led to the perverse principle of states’ rights (and eventually to secession) which outweighed allegiance to the nation and to the public good.  Knowing the intellectual and moral thin ice they were on, in order to protect this corruption at the heart of their policy, like thorns arrayed around a rotting, smelling rose, the democrats in that day opposed any centralization of government power which threatened even obliquely to challenge the principle of slavery.  
     This made the democratic party prior to the Civil War an essentially deconstructive and nihilistic political entity.  Like the republican party of today it was an anti-government government.  So fearful were they that any effective utilization of government power, from building roads to the establishment of a central bank, would represent a potential threat to the discrete outrage of slavery they wished to protect, they tried to cut the sinews and dismantle the power of Washington.  Because this was taken to such extremes that compromise was impossible, it eventuated in the founding of the republican party, the election of Lincoln and the American Civil War.

2. Founded in the throes of the crisis just referred to, once triumphant, the republican party eventually grew fat and heavy in that power.  Republican economic predatory practices multiplied and became entrenched throughout the gilded age and the phony gay nineties.  Reform movements like the stillborn Populist Party and the republican reformer Theodore Roosevelt couldn’t begin to turn the tide against the ensconced vested interests of their day.  This era grew into the high greed and blatant excesses of the twenties - the churlish mantra of the time being ‘the business of America is business” - until, like today, big money, big churches and bad politicians unified in a concerted effort to gut regulation and funnel all the wealth and resources of the nation to the money managers and robber barons at the top of the economic scale.  
    This rendered (again, just like today) the economy obesely top heavy, at the same time fatally weakening the resiliency of the middle class and poor until eventually the economy, when as it were, looked down from the great heights to which it had risen without proper supports, had its confidence pierced by panic and the entire structure collapsed.  This gave us the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt and the rise of the modern democratic party.
 
    The situation we find ourselves in today has elements of both these crucial junctures from our past.  There is a similar insular self-destructive urge apparent in a faction of the republican party of today that values the inbred ideals of the party far more than the traditional interests and ideals of the nation.  The party of Reagan has become, at its end, just like the party of Jackson, a nihilistic, anti-government government that puts its short term ideology above those of long term national interest.  Even the duties of government they technically agree to be necessary to our nation (like the military, FEMA, FDA, and the SEC to name a few) have been hollowed out in practice by greed, intentional underfunding and willful, ideological mismanagement.  
    Once they had proclaimed that government was no good and impossible to run, the enemy of the public good, they have had no drive to improve it, only an incentive to continue to make it worse.  This goes far to explain the relentless drive to mediocrity they have championed.  At this, and at this alone, they have been wildly successful.  Until, as our final comparison, from James Buchanan at the fag end of the Jackson era to George W. Bush, who may well be the last president of the Reagan era, we have two presidents who for essentially the same reasons are destined to be united in history as two of the worst presidents in our experience.
     Though we will certainly not experience a new Civil War we are at the present time teetering on the very brink of a financial crisis not seen since the Great Depression.  Here too, since the republicans have been a deconstructive party, given their unalloyed allegiance to moneyed interests, they have yoked the interests of the people to the interests of Wall Street and big money and slipped the reins necessary to draw us back from the edge of our own destruction.
     The lessons here should be obvious.  As the current world wide credit crunch threatens to wreck our economy and destabilize the world economy with unpredictable ramifications, these politicians’ irrational anti-government bias, deregulatory fervor and pandering sensibility toward the interests of big money has left no one more responsible for these problems, both from omission and commission, than these same politicians who are now tasked with the responsibility of reforming the corrupt operations they created.  
    In this respect, Wall Street took its cues on corruption from the kings of corruption in Washington, not the other way around.  The income redistribution upwards mindlessly championed by the republicans has been mirrored in the board rooms of our corporations and regulatory agencies.  Just like oil companies, these corporations and financial institutions, siphoning profit and investment from their own corporations the way congress was siphoning solvency and investment from the national treasury, knew that whatever they did, however often or blatantly they screwed the public, that their buddies in congress and the White House would look the other way.  This nullification of their responsibilities to their own firms and clients and shareholders was symbolic of the lack of accountability and of responsibility many of our public servants have to the public whom they treat like servants.  
    Like Coolidge and Hoover, Bush and his cronies have served as devout obstructionists of the public good, refusing to help government stop the rampant speculation, irreversible environmental harm, rapacious executive wage scales, golden parachutes that reward incompetence and the ever accumulating debt which made the impending financial collapse inevitable, in the same way the democratic party of James Buchanan gutted government and rigged the courts to allow the disease of slavery to continue to spread unchallenged.

     The thirst for personal gain by republicans today has taken such a virulent position in their party that it has replaced all else.  Today many republicans are offended when money is used for anything but for the pandering of gifts to the rich.  Some republican propagandists even ridicule charity and deride generosity as anti-Christian.  On the contrary, greed and selfish self-interest they promote as the height of a sort of machismo patriotism and pseudo religious piety.  
    They have corrupted the simple, more efficiently designed, closed system of tax money going from the public to the government and then back as services to the public’s benefit.  Wherever possible they have outsourced the traditional responsibilities of government to politically connected companies without adequate bidding, effective quality control or even rudimentary oversight, often duplicating responsibilities or allowing government programs to atrophy in the meantime, adding another unnecessary step or two to these programs while compounding costs over and above what they would have amounted to if merely done in-house.  
     Instead, they now insist that public money must never actually be spent for the benefit of the public or tax money go to the benefit of the tax payers.   They say it must be recycled through politically wired middle men and corporations (even in life and death situations like health care and Iraq) and back into the hands of the wealthiest of us so their patrons may extract very private profits from these erstwhile “public” expenditures before they ever reach the public’s hands.
    Republicans call these “free market” inducements, though they are obviously just predatory corporate welfare and extraneous costs that victimize the taxpayer exponentially, getting them both coming and going.  On the other hand, tax money spent to provide health care or ensure social security or as subsistence payments to the weakest of our citizenry, the republicans of today, with exquisite sensitivity and selectivity, dismiss as socialistic, and an “extravagance” somehow injurious to the poor who depend on them for their sustenance.  
     Concurrently, a seven hundred billion dollar (as an initial ante) bailout of Wall Street which their careless deregulation and decided lack of oversight did so much to make necessary, they hypocritically deride as unfair to the same humble tax payers they despise and caricature as freeloaders.  Yet at the same time they are secretly and indefensibly trying to continue to abet the depredations of the same corrupt corporate interests they are pretending to criticize with craven little baubles like additional capital gains tax cuts.
     Since apparently the republicans consider themselves part of a New Aristocracy rather than our old democracy, they dismiss as parasites and begrudge tax dollars to all those who are only down on their luck primarily due to the predatory practices of the unregulated corporations these politicians have promoted with our tax dollars. They praise the same Wall Street business interests and political patronage lobbyists who have been so assiduously selling us out as omniscient entrepreneurial geniuses even though they are more glued to the teat of big government handouts than a middle aged 300 lb. baby to its poor overworked mother struggling beneath him to get free.  
     Along the same lines (which render the wealthy double and triple dippers at the public trough, squeezing out the public which is left to fight over the leftover slop), even though the wealthiest Americans already pay the least taxes, their representatives in Washington continue to leave no stone unturned, or no public service undiminished, or no deficit unenhanced trying to relieve their non existent tax burden from their backs.   The middle class and poor, meanwhile, more burdened with individual and household debt than at any time in our history, are increasingly reduced under the onerous weight of the very injustices the republicans are anxious to increase.  
    The only difference between these wealthy individuals and giant corporate multinationals and the “welfare queens” once made infamous by Reagan is that they are a drug habit that costs us many, many more billions to support than the poor ever did or possibly could.  The only real difference between these two groups being that the rich can afford to offer sweet bouquets of campaign kickbacks and golfing junkets to the politicians that the poor and middle class cannot.

     This, of course, encapsulates in practice their infamous “Trickle Down” theory of economic stimulation which only considers the already proven wealthy worthy of more wealth and worthy of receiving and managing the nation’s fiscal largess.  The economic formula its partisans employ, without any particular evidence to support their theory, works something like this: money invested at the upper end of the economic ladder is always worth more than the same investment in the lower end.  Or, millions of dollars given to a few thousand wealthy people is far more stimulative to our economy than a few thousands of dollars given to millions.  This implies that money is not a fungible commodity and is theory that clearly stands directly opposite the truth.  
    “Flow Up” economic policy through investment and aid to the underprivileged is far more conducive and stimulative to the general good, and eventually even conducive to the health of the wealthy, than “trickle down” economic policy, which merely starves the nation of its just revenues and crushes for millions any real opportunity for advancement.  Investment at the upper end of the economy, like indiscretions done in Vegas stay in Vegas, largely stay at the upper end of the economy.  Investment at the bottom end causes money to rise of its own measure and eventually reach the upper end of the investment cycle.      
    Stimulation of the entire economy in a Flow Up economy is guaranteed.  In a Trickle Down economy such widespread stimulation is generally limited. By giving a hand up to the weakest and most vulnerable of our citizens, we provide an investment in the foundation of our economy on which a stronger economic edifice may be built in the future.  Trickle Down consumes the wealth of our past others have provided through hard work while offering no guarantee of the hard work necessary to ensure long term future growth in return.
    Yet the republican party of the last lost twenty eight years has only believed in living off the land, adding more gaudy penthouses to the top of our economic skyscraper while simultaneously allowing the neglected foundation of its core structure to grow ever weaker and debt ridden.   It is hard to either respect or fathom such incompetence and shortsightedness and greed as this.
     The republicans have reneged on their deal with the people.  The optimism and promise of Reagan has been lost by these pretenders of the public good.  Put aside for a second the unfairness of their tax cuts, which always go to benefit the already well to do at the expense of the yet to have and never can hope to see. For decades the republicans have pretended that cutting taxes is a good deal for the American people even though the money they “save” us with one hand is merely added to the federal deficit with the other which will have to be paid down at ruinous interest rates and much greater costs later.  This is not savings but the worst kind of expenditure, deferred costs, waste and debt.  It is bait and switch, a shell game, a pyramid scheme on the taxpayers.  It is a borrowers’ economy they have created, a sordid embrace with the devil of permanent decline.
     This is not even “supply side” economics since its benefits go only to a small proportion of one “side” of the population – the top.  It is “another day older and deeper in debt” economics.  It is easily the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on a free people by its own government. 

     So, as inevitably as a lead parachute with a fist sized hole in it these republican fiscal policies have led us first in slow motion, then ever faster toward an approaching violent crash with earth.  In this way the republicans of today are exactly like the democratic party of Andrew Jackson.  As one examines their popularity and their sources and cynical abuses of power, the parties of Jackson, Hoover and Reagan have been almost identical in their destructive approach to government.  
    Each, to enhance their party’s power, steadily exhausted their country in pursuit of their own failed policies and prejudices, which were designed more to hold and expand their own power than to utilize it properly on behalf of the general public.  They each plundered the nation of its resources, each cynically worked to keep the people divided against each other for their own purposes and each eventually burrowed the country into a bottomless pit from which they offered no clear extrication.  Yet, still, even now, even with all the evidence of their failure around us, the republican party of today is profoundly unrepentant and seems gleeful at the opportunity to destroy the functionality of government in America further.
     The naked intention of these policies has slowly emerged into the open and simultaneously reached its nadir with our current president, George W. Bush.  He has served as perfect cipher to all the worst and weirdest ideas of each group of his supporters and amalgamated them into a perfectly dreadful brew of fiscal profligacy and anti-democratic demagoguery. He has simply tried to bludgeon the American people with the worst of these ideas without regard to democratic principle, tradition or balance of power.  He has intentionally tried to uncheck the checks and imbalance the balances which have always held our nation together.  He has tried to unhinge the democratic pendulum and ripped apart the fabric of consensus government in order to draw absolute power to himself and make himself into exactly the type of tyrannical chief executive the constitution was carefully written to prevent. 
     Why?  Because the republicans had reached the limits of what power was available to them under our laws.  The consolidation of unilateral power in executive was necessary in order to continue the consolidation of money and power into republican hands without the troublesome and balancing and unpredictable intermediary of representative government able to intrude to prevent it. At heart the Bush administration, using terror as an excuse, was a crude attempt to disenfranchise democracy from any effectual control of or check on their actions.  They used their power not to help the country but only to increase their power over the country.  If they had been competent enough to keep the public’s trust it is hard to see where their actions would have reached a natural end.  Certainly they would never have stopped on their own due to any sense of propriety or self-restraint or ceded power back to the people once they had usurped it.  
     This is a cautionary tale.  Just because this virtual coup of our democratic principles failed does not mean that it wasn’t close to succeeding.  The precedents of autocratic and unilateral behavior the Bush administration tried to impose on our government must be carefully and thoroughly discredited and disavowed or, rest assured, they will live inside our system like a cancer and in a time of structural weakness begin to spread again.  After all, ultimately, the Bush administration was never reined in by law or by congress or even by the courts but by their own ineptitude.  
    In fact, one of the architects of their insidious power grab, David Addington, was quoted as having said that they would continue to grab authority until someone made them stop.  Clearly this was one of the most dangerous moments in US history, no less terrifying or destructive just because their own incompetence finally undercut their own pretensions.  
     Amazingly the republican party, from its principle representatives in Washington to its foot soldiers across the land, has blindly supported even the very worst of these policies with nary a flinch of conscience.  From the Bush administration’s sordid beginning with the conservatives on the Supreme Court abrogating a free election to elevate the candidate they preferred to office; to rigged intelligence leading us into misbegotten and mismanaged warfare; to torture and the illegal wiretapping of American citizens; to bizarre signing statements unilaterally pretending to negate congressional authority; to ludicrous claims of executive privileges which don’t exist in law and have never been previously claimed; to constant cover-ups, lies, scare mongering and abuses of authority; to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the republican party has fiercely supported it all.  
    From their dreadful foreign policy, their pork bloated spending bills packed with extravagant favors, their ignorant anti-science and anti-intellectualism, and all their autocratic excesses, the republican party of today has consistently placed its own interests above those of the nation, all while working only two days a week for a scant half the year.  Seldom have so many worked so little to achieve so much harm.  For all of this the republican party will be remembered over the last eight years of the Reagan era as the worst functioning political party in American history.
    Particularly now, when we are the world’s only superpower, the scale of their irresponsibility and betrayal of our ideals is breathtaking, as their mistakes and errors in judgment are not just our own but are visited on the whole world.  The great power this generation of leadership has been given, accumulated at such great cost, effort, diligence and sacrifice over many generations by Americans whose greatness we revere, has been treated like a dog to be kicked, chained and starved.  Our great inheritance has been used and squandered casually, profligately, callously, carelessly and even vindictively for small purposes by small minded men and women with nothing of the care, responsibility, wisdom and effort it took to accumulate it.  
    But this scheme against the country, the so-called conservative "agenda” (apparently distinct from any American one) has about run its course, we hope.  You can tell a movement has reached its downward spiral when its supporters are known primarily not for what they are striving for but mainly by who or what they are ranting against.  Even Reagan used part of his message to preach optimism and say what he believed in.  Yet the McCain - Palin campaign only speak the language of fear, character assassination, vituperation, terrorists and “pro” American parts of the country vs. some unmentionable alternative part.  They look at this nation as a country of winners and losers rather than as equals.  When basically, all they seem mainly to be against is losing power.   As Mr. McCain’s supporters become increasingly shrill and delusional, his campaign becomes increasingly dirty and shallow.
     George W. Bush, the so-called “uniter”, has actually practiced the politics of deception and division.  His would-be successor John McCain, has wholeheartedly adopted his win at all costs by all means necessary tactics even as he has aligned himself with many of the same political operatives who were privy to and responsible for the poisonous policies of the last eight years he now pretends to decry.  So when John McCain - arrayed in his new foul fitting, faux fowl, fox suit - claims he is going to Washington to root out and roust all the opportunists who have created all the problems the country now faces it sounds more like the leader of the old foxes sent to determine what has happened to all those dead chickens.
     But, it’s too late as here in the late great Election of Aught Eight, all those imaginary chickens seem to be coming back home to roost against them.  Where did they expect they would go?