The Fortnightly Rant for April 22, 2011, from The New Hampshire Gazette, Volume 255, No. 15, posted on Thursday, May 12, 2011.
With the fiscal year more than half over, Congress finally passed a budget for 2011 on April 14th. To placate Republicans who were threatening to shut down the government, Democrats agreed to inflict billions of dollars in cuts upon those who are already bleeding.
Cruel though it was, the budget bill was not cruel enough to satisfy 59 House Republicans who voted “nay.” Fortunately for Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH), 81 Democrats ran true to form and betrayed their constituents with “yes” votes.
The Democrats were at a disadvantage during budget negotiations this year because Republicans control the House. Last year the Democrats were at a disadvantage because George W. Bush’s tax cuts were on the table as an election was looming.The Republicans have a permanent advantage for two reasons: 1) since they are ideologically opposed to government in the first place they don’t care if it shuts down or not, and 2) their opponents are Democrats.
Their appetites thus whetted, Republicans immediately passed a budget for 2012 which would eviscerate the Great Society and repeal the New Deal, cutting the tax rate on people making over $373,650 a year from 35 to 25 percent, while raising medical bills for seniors by $12,000.
The crucial term here is “would,” because when it gets to the Senate the bill will be dead on arrival. The Senate won’t pass it, and the President won’t sign it. None of that matters, though, because the budget bill will have achieved its real mission: thrilling those whom it aims to kill.
Who Asked You?
On Monday, the bond-rating agency Standard & Poor’s put its big, fat, supposedly apolitical thumb on the GOP’s side of the scale, proclaiming that the outlook for U.S. debt had deteriorated from “stable” to “negative.” This caused an immediate stock market hiccup and put certain cable outlets into a high-speed wobble.
Standard & Poor’s, a financial services corporation with annual receipts upwards of $2 billion, is best known to most ordinary Americans for having accepted millions in fees for giving rosy ratings to hundreds of billions of dollars in tulip bulb futures mortgage-backed derivatives.
The derivatives which S&P held in such high regard proved later to be as worthless as a televangelists’s promise. The company retained its fees, though.
It also seems to have retained its reputation, despite the devastation its ratings wrought on the economy at large. In that way, S&P resembles a certain Republican president.
St. Ronald
Republicans worship Ronald Reagan, and rightly so. When he came along, Richard Nixon had been driven from the White House in well-deserved disgrace. Jerry Ford had been beaten by a toothy, born-again peanut-farmer from Georgia. The Republican brand should have been as defunct as DeSoto, but Blessed Saint Ronnie brought them back from the dead.
Reagan achieved his miracle by luring conservative Democrats into the fold. Naturally, in return, they were fleeced. They ended up with three decades of union-busting, flat-lined wages, and exportated jobs.
Reagan Republicanism — fascism with a smiley-face and a patriotic flag pin — was able to succeed while beating up its own supporters because the GOP understands that there is one industry that matters more than all the others put together: your own propaganda mill.
Look what it has done: despite thirty years of evidence to the contrary, Republicans can still claim that lowering taxes on the wealthy will result in job growth, without being laughed off the stage or pelted with rotten fruit.
Astrology vs. PR
Reagan sometimes made decisions based on advice from an astrologer. When you consider that he had access to nuclear weapons, that’s pretty frightening.
It’s also frightening that much of today’s electorate makes its decisions based on propaganda generated by an army of PR hacks working for the GOP. That creates a feedback loop because it reinforces the GOP’s power, enabling it to hire more hacks.
The most insidious problem, though, may be that the GOP’s leaders have succumbed to their own echo chamber, and now make policy decisions based on their own PR. It’s like when a drug dealer becoming his own customer. All sense of practicality is lost, the military-industrial complex’s budget becomes sacrosanct, and all expenditures on mere humans must go. And the mere mention of increased tax revenue is blasphemy.
Anatomy of a Monster
The Republican Party is divided into three parts. First and foremost are those whom G.W. Bush once referred to as his base, “the haves and the have-mores,” who reap the benefits of the party’s policies and keep its coffers filled. There could be as many as a couple of hundred thousand of them, but they’re not particularly conspicuous. With the exception of a few freaks like Donald Trump, they prefer not to be noticed by the unwashed masses.
Far more obvious are the elected frontmen and women of the enterprise, from the occasional President to the Senators, Congressmen, and Governors, down to the state, city and town officials from coast to coast. Certainly numbering in the thousands, if not more, these Party loyalists enjoy the perks of office and the fawning of the media, but they also suffer the indignities of fund-raising and campaigning — not to mention the possible agony of defeat. Whatever their rank they must all remember that they are, in essence, replaceable parts.
Then there are the true princes of the realm: the mechanics who keep things running without being subject to the burdens and uncertainties of office. In this broad category there are many specialties.
These include unelected strategic-planning goons like the late unlamented Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, Richard Viguerie, Frank Luntz, Roger Stone and Grover Norquist, who operate like modern-day barons, creating and ruling their own fiefdoms.
Propagandists are an indispensible part of this cabal — thousands and thousands of them, from Roger Ailes, at the very apex of the profession, to lowly ink-stained wretches interpreting the party line for readers of obscure weekly papers all across the nation.
Corporate lobbyists are a specialty unto themselves. Working as they do where the rubber meets the road — more accurately, where the campaign contribution reaches the Congressman — this effort demands the utmost in etiquette and discretion.
Corporate CEOs also serve, though for them party service is more like a religion or a part-time job, since they have to keep the factories in China cranking out the widgets.
The work is equally disgraceful in each of these categories, but the jobs are quite plentiful and the pay can be very good.
Lastly — in every sense of the word — comes the largest part: voters who support the Party but are not supported by it. These non-elite Republican voters have been analyzed to the molecular level by the evil genius Frank Luntz, who knows them like Yo-Yo Ma knows his cello. Luntz feeds his data to the propagandists, talking points are generated and repeated, and the system rolls forward, crushing the lowly who vote for it.
Mencken said that “democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” The Republican platform committee will never acknowledge this as their policy, but they will always live up to it.
Oops
In November of 2010, the Republican system worked like crazy — literally. Incensed because the Democrats had failed to fix in two years the damage that it took Republicans thirty years to inflict, the voters elected the wreckers.
By helping deliver such a mandate Tea Partiers, the GOP’s most dysfunctional element, gained the upper hand in an already dysfunctional party.
Now that decades of voodoo economics have brought the economy to the brink of disaster, that discredited theory is being espoused more vociferously than ever.
The GOP’s system would be perfect if not for one flaw: serfs voters expect to eat on a semi-regular basis and prefer to sleep under a roof, while Republican policies are making those goals ever harder to achieve.
Eventually, if we continue on this path, the day will come when the vast bulk of GOP voters will be cold, wet, and hungry, and Republicans control all three branches of government. Perhaps, at that point, people will begin to question their allegiance.
The Feckless Opposition
Speaking of dysfunctional, it seems as if today’s Democrats would find it difficult to give away ice cream on the Fourth of July.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), among others to whom no one will listen, has pointed out that the current dreaded budget deficit would vanish if the Reagan tax cuts were rescinded. But just bringing up the topic seems to give 98 percent of Democrats the vapors. And it’s not because it’s a bad idea, it’s because they’re afraid those mean Republicans will give them a wedgie. If Harry Truman were alive today, their timidity would kill him.
On Tuesday, McClatchy reported that voters want higher taxes raised on people making more than $250,000. Sixty-four percent of all registered voters questioned approved, while only 33 percent disapproved. Most surprisingly, even 43 percent of Republicans support taxing the rich, while 54 percent opposed. That’s a pretty weak margin for the GOP’s core principle.
McClatchy also found that 80 percent of voters oppose cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, while only 18 percent support such cuts. Even among conservatives only 29 percent supported cuts, and 68 percent opposed them. All in all, that’s a pretty good base of support for a policy that has been without a public defender since disco was in vogue.
President Obama finally broached the possibility of raising taxes on the rich on April 13th, but once again he was too cautious, saying that he would settle for rolling back the Bush tax cuts, and that he would accept $3 in spending cuts for every $1 in added tax revenue.