Republican Dirty Tricks

This Labor Day, to say that it’s a difficult time for American workers would be an understatement. Those not lucky enough to be born with a trust fund are still suffering the brunt of the economic disaster they didn’t create – and with President Obama’s penchant to “welcome” the same “Republican ideas” that destroyed us to begin with, there’s little to to suggest that the situation will improve any time soon.

While our “betters” in Washington sip from $350 bottles of wine as they plot the further destruction of the American Middle class, we need to remember that the Republican assault on organized Labor is an assault on ALL workers. A major new study from Harvard suggests that the decline of unions is responsible for a full third of the growth in income inequality for male workers. “Our study underscores the role of unions as an equalizing force in the labor market,” says Harvard sociology professor Bruce Western. Source: Mother Jones

President Obama likes to spread the erroneous platitude that, “Wall Street and Main Street rise and fall as one nation” when the true entities unquestionably linked are Labor Unions and an economically-vibrant middle class.

graph from ThinkProgress

WATCH Rachel Maddow discuss the link between Labor Unions and the Middle Class with Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America:

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (See all Labor & Industrial Relations Books)

This Labor Day, as those fortunate enough to have a job are celebrating a well-deserved day off, and millions others are travailing the uncertainty of life during 30 years of the Reaganomics War against the middle class, let’s not forget the workers who fought, bled and died to create a better quality of life for themselves, their families and those yet to be born.

Sadly, Faux News propaganda works 24-7 to convince the willfully ignorant that we live and die under the benevolence of the American Oligarchs who pay less in taxes than they have in generations, yet cry they pay too much… deceptively citing their percentage of tax revenue, yet neglecting the fact that the top 1% now control near 50% of the wealth… while their corporations don’t even have the decency to pay any taxes at all. These are the TRUE PARASITES… living off labor of working Americans. Con think tanks distract from these corporate crimes by inciting workers to fight amongst each other… lest we remember that everything good about our standard of living came as a result of the organized labor movement.

WATCH: STOP THE LIES… Public Service Workers Under Attack:

Labor Is Superior To Capital

Despite Abraham Lincoln’s assertion, “Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration”… the modern Republican agenda can be boiled down to 2 words: CHEAP LABOR.

If Capitalists can no longer exploit slaves, they will seek to pay workers the least amount they can get away with for the sake of profit. The history of Capitalism is merciless. It enslaved nations, split up families and left generations in poverty suffering with broken backs and broken minds.
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The American Dream has been foreclosed upon, and the wealthy few are still riding the working class all the way to the bank.  World history, both recent and past, shows us that the trajectory we are on leads to revolution. Even the rich know this. So why aren’t the American People in the streets?

Brian Merchant wrote in The UTOPIANist, 

“There are a number of obvious reasons — the quality of life is on average higher here, our elected leaders enter and exit office (generally) according to the rules, and so on. But there are some not-so obvious reasons, too. For one, most Americans don’t realize how severe our income inequality has become — one study found that “Americans thought the richest 20 percent of our society controlled about 59 percent of the wealth, while the real number is closer to 84 percent.” Furthermore, that same study found that most Americans supported a Sweden-style wealth redistribution system — so as long as they didn’t recognize it as such by name.”

It is also due to the fact that the People don’t really know who their true oppressors are.   Tragically, as the tax burden shifts more and more to the middle class and poor to pay for tax giveaways to the rich, rather than turn their angst upwards where it belongs, it’s not uncommon to hear average working people bash, for example, “greedy” Union members for committing the sin of wanting to retire in dignity.

When President Obama went to speak to Wall Street executives at Cooper Union in April, 2010, he hawked a familiar patronizing platitude: “Ultimately there is no dividing line between Main Street and Wall Street. We rise or we fall together as one nation.” A lovely sentiment, but full of shite. Wall Street continues to thrive, collect outrageous bonuses, and have no accountability for their crimes while their Republican operatives sharpen their knives for 2012 – when they hope the abysmal state of the economy they’re purposefully cultivating will trick the average dupes into voting for the people who have their orders to turn the middle class into “cheap labor” serfs. To the big moneyed interests, this is simply the way of the world… as Rush Limbaugh so succinctly explained what every Conservative believes, “some people are just born to be slaves.”

But that’s not supposed to be America.

So, no. It doesn’t matter how much empirical evidence points to the fact that Trickle Down economics is a failure that turned America into the LEAST upwardly mobile with the widest gap between rich and poor of all industrialized nations – THAT IS THE POINT! The only thing left for Conservatives to do in the wake of their destruction is to push more of the same policies to further empower the powerful, and convince the working class to forget the days of the New Deal created “Great Compression” and accept the NEW definition of the American Dream… namely, “maybe one day YOU TOO will be a billionaire.”

WATCH Paul Krugman explain how the middle class was the DIRECT RESULT of New Deal government policy:

From the assault on unions (whose decline is linked directly to the decline of the middle class), gutting OSHA Safety regulations, attacking the EPA, labeling anything that protects the earth and the People who upon it as “job killing” (while they REWARD companies that outsource jobs) and yes… even working to end child labor laws, the Republican vision for America as a society of Serfs and Lords is evident in all of their policies.

Reagan’s own Budget Director admitted the Republicans destroyed the economy, and that despite the lingering Great Recession CEO compensation is rising and top executive pay levels are all the way back from their pre-recession levels. Yet the further ingratiation of the wealthiest Americans and dismantling regulation is STILL presented as the only key to let the mythical “Confidence Fairy” out of her big government-created cage… because the GOAL of Republican policies has ALWAYS BEEN to concentrate wealth in the hands of their benefactors and weaken the only institution large enough to force the big-moneyed interests to play nice with the Plebs – our government – thus, purposefully creating a society of haves and have nots.

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Ahhh… Republicans…   It’s hard to keep up with all their dirty tricks – as well as their hypocrisy.   And Rick Perry is the gift that keeps giving.  In addition to being a some-time secessionist, a climate change denier, a creationist, and a proud member of America’s own Taliban – the Christian movement known as “The New Apostolic Reformation”… he felt called by the Lord to invest thousands of dollars in “Movie Gallery corporation” – the largest porn distributor in the United States.

The DallasVoice.com reported: “In 1995, Rick Perry purchased between $5,000 and $10,000 worth of stock in Movie Gallery, a huge distributor of pornography that later became the target of a boycott by the American Family Association, which of course funded Perry’s recent day of prayer.”
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Despite what Faux News would like you to believe, a recent study by Michael Norton and Dan Ariely on how Americans think about income inequality concluded “given a choice, Americans would prefer to live in a society more equal than even highly egalitarian Sweden.”

Never ones to pay mind to the people’s desire to enjoy a decent standard of living, the Republican remedy for the bad economy they created is to push for more of the same exact policies that turned America from a creditor to a debtor nation, with the widest income disparity and the LEAST upwardly mobile of all industrialized nations… namely MORE trickle down, tax-cut terrorism.

By disingenuously labeling any attempt to put a Band-Aid on the severed artery of the once-vibrant middle class as “job-killing” , the 24-7 GOP media protection rackets convince their rank-in-file to cheer their own demise.  Sadly, here in Reality World, the only “killing” is literally visited on the workers as the result of the Republican penchant to deregulate and throw to the whims of the greed-centered market anything that poisons our air, Earth, food, water supply, causes our sick and old to freeze and starve while the current generation of workers are forced into the same unsafe working conditions their ancestors fought and died to prevent.

Just a 100 years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, Republicans are on an unholy mission to roll back all government regulation - including child labor laws -  meant to end the abuses of the Gilded Age  – another time of appalling income disparity, government deregulation and corporate greed that not-so-coincidentally looks familiarly like the America in which we currently reside.

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It’s become common to call the Freshman Teabagger Reps in the House “hostage takers” for their willingness to squeeze the life out of vital programs which aim to improve the lot of those on the wrong side of Reaganomics, but these Teabaggers should more accurately be labeled what they are – Terrorists – willing to inflict massive harm on innocent victims to achieve political goals – even if it means the nation’s and the world’s economy crashes into Depression.

Unfortunately, rather than a leader with a backbone and stomach to fight these terrorists, we have Obama… someone who has confused bipartisan “compromise” with “surrender” and whose willingness to offer Social Security and Medicare to those who want them destroyed has done more damage to what was left of the Democratic Party’s core principles of giving voice to the working class in the halls of power than any Teabag terrorist could ever have dreamed during a Republican administration.

On Saturday, Obama negotiated a debt deal in private with Mitch McConnell, the man who said his greatest political objective was not to create jobs for the unemployed, but to make Obama a one-term President.  Given that Obama pines for Republican love like a battered spouse pining for an abuser, it’s not surprising Obama met with his turtle-looking closet-case nemesis without any of his supposed Democratic allies – who just can’t understand their star-crossed love.
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Among the many confirmations of government’s corrupt collusion with powerful interests, the News Corp hacking scandal and Murdoch denial reminds us that the Republican Party is not only a nest of scientifically-proven inherent cowards who lack the desire, much less the ability, to govern an evolving society populated with citizens who strive to live a decent life, rather than toil thanklessly for a handful of aristocratic overlords, it is a collection of greed-centered ghouls, ultimately motivated by a desire to save their own ass – all while deflecting blame so their privilege can continue.

As Canadian/American Keynesian economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, famously explained,

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

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For all their flag waving, Republicans hate America.  Don’t get me wrong… They like the LAND that comprises America for whatever natural resources can wrested from the ground, profited from, and discarded without care. The unfortunate rubes born on that land are merely tolerated – for the time being. Due to the system of government our Founding Fathers entrusted to us, Republicans have no choice but pretend they are working for these useful idiots – until they can actually permanently eliminate the “problem” altogether by somehow denying them the right to vote – and they’re working on it.

It doesn’t matter that in the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed,”  in over 40 states, Republicans are trying to make it much more difficult for poor people, the elderly, students and minorities to vote – because those are people who typically vote Democratic.

Under the guise of tamping down on the mythical “voter fraud,” Republicans are purposefully attacking consistently Democratic-leaning constituencies.

Watch Rachel Maddow lay out the Republican Voter Suppression Strategy for 2012 in her must-see report:

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In the waning days of the Bush administration, 8 years after the Supreme Court interjected itself into a state vote count to usurp the will of the people and install the losing candidate into the Presidency, many could never have imagined that Barack Obama – the person we knocked on doors for, donated parts of our dwindling paychecks to, and voted for with the hopeful assurance that he would work to restore the balance of power between working people and their well-heeled “betters” – would be offering Social Security and Medicaid to the people who have wanted to destroy it for generations.

We rested assuredly that the election of Barack Obama would prove that our system of government worked and the crimes and abuses that inevitably accompany power, greed and financial influence could be rectified through our electoral process for the sake of the General Welfare – without the pain of bloody revolution.

But we were warned. Ralph Nader, who famously called Obama an “Uncle Tom” for corporate interests, and Cynthia McKinney were widely chastised for throwing cold water on the “hope” that the system of government passed down would be enough to remedy the tyrannies our founders knew all too well – one tyranny being the subjugation of the working class by the rich who use their wealth to corrupt government into an appendage to their own affairs.

After Obama’s win, Cynthia McKinney wondered what was the “change we could believe in,”

“What kind of change are we really going to have? I wish we could assume a break from the special-interest orthodoxy that seems to have a grip on Washington, D.C. It is this special-interest orthodoxy that has led to war and occupation, civil liberties attacks, social injustice, unemployment, poor yet very costly education and healthcare.”

The tragedy and shame is that America’s inequality between rich and poor is worse than Cameroon, Ivory Coast and revolutionary Egypt and hopes for Obama to champion actual “change” don’t seem to be coming to fruition.
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The Reich-Wing corporate media protection racket is outraged, I tell you, outraged that President Obama challenged Congress to eliminate tax breaks on corporate jets in order to help stave off a default crisis – accusing Obama of waging “class warfare.”

Any half-awake person with a brain knows that Republicans always accuse the other side of engaging in the very dirty tricks that they, themselves, have honed to an art. Their tactic of projection and deflection goes like this – reproach the other side for doing what you are flagrantly guilty of before the other side can accuse you of it. The preemptive accusation disarms the opposition, leaving them looking petty, unoriginal and unable to bring it up in their own defense.

Despite the fact that progressive taxation is essential to maintaining a free society, the accusation of “class warfare” is an old standby that Republicans charge whenever anyone dare suggest that the rich should actually pay their fair share to maintain the civilization that has benefited and profited them.

Tax The Rich – For The Sake of a Free Society

Class Warfare is as old as recorded history. Our Founding Fathers – students of the Liberal Age of Enlightenment – were aware of the corrosive influence of money in government.

Thomas Jefferson said, “another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometric progression as they rise.”

Teddy Roosevelt observed that American democracy could easily be destroyed by the rich through subversion of our political institutions from within. After the bank panic of 1907, he said the “malefactors of great wealth” were “responsible for something of the trouble; at least to the extent of having caused these men to combine to bring about as much financial stress as possible, in order to discredit the policy of the government and thereby secure a reversal of that policy, so that they may enjoy the fruits of their own evil-doing. . . . I regard this contest as one to determine who shall rule this free country—the people through their governmental agents, or a few ruthless and domineering men whose wealth makes them peculiarly formidable because they hide behind the breastworks of corporate organization.”

President Dwight Eisenhower cautioned Americans about the great dangers of “the military-industrial complex.”

Franklin Roosevelt warned, “the liberty of democracy is not safe if people tolerate growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger that their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism” and Abraham Lincoln warned, “I have the Confederacy in front of me, I have the bankers behind me, and for my country I fear the bankers more.”

Still, Republicans champion policies that serve to destroy the economic security of the working class.

Philip Slater wrote in the Huffington Post,

“Republicans, who have always hated democracy, wanted to create the caste system that exists in the most wretched Third World nations — a system in which a tiny minority of wealthy individuals live off the labor of the deeply impoverished 98%, and maintain their stranglehold through a corrupt military dictatorship. This pattern, which prevailed in most of Latin America throughout the 20th Century, with strong support from corporate America, is one for which Republicans have always secretly yearned. Hence Republican policies have consistently pushed us toward it — bolstering the military, concentrating wealth into fewer and fewer hands, shifting taxes from the rich onto the poor, and seeking, with considerable success, to make education a privilege of the wealthy rather than a right for all Americans.”

Despite the fact that Republican policies turned the surplus they were handed into a deficit, the US into the LEAST upwardly mobile with the widest income disparity of all industrialized nations, and crashed the economy 2x in a century, they are promising MORE OF THE SAME. While working people suffer, the RICH have never had it so good. Why promote these policies? Because a desperate workforce is an obedient workforce – and the Republican ideology can be broken down to 2 words – CHEAP LABOR.

Lately, Republicans have their class war cards plainly on the table. Republicans blatantly promise to end every policy that made the American middle class possible in the first place. This means they promise to end the minimum wage, end child labor laws, destroy unions, end Medicare, turn Social Security over to their Wall Street benefactors AND permanently slash taxes for the wealthy while upping them for the rest of us.

All the while, their transnational corporate media protection rackets blare on about the poor, put upon, rich… and the selfish working people who dare attempt to retire in dignity after a lifetime of work.
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As the great recession continues, failed “trickle down” theories are being recycled under a different name – “kick start.”

When politicians – Republicans and DINO Consevatdems alike  - promise to enact policies that will “kick start” the economy, they are not referring to proactive, job-creating, initiatives reminiscent of FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corp, but the same, tried and failed class warfare “trickle down” policies that collapsed the American Working Class to begin with.

Economist and Professor Richard Wolff was interviewed for the public affairs program called “Making Contact.”  He said, “Capitalism has a built in tendency to collapse,” and “we are in the middle… or to be more honest… in the early stages of a really big one.”

He explained, “In a Capitalist system, the economic crisis we are in today was entirely predictable.”

In other words, one does not have to be a “Psychic Friend” to predict that rampant deregulation and low marginal tax rates similar to the atmosphere that plunged us into the FIRST Republican Great Depression in the 1930’s, would have a similar result when implemented a second time.

On the back of the most recent Conservative-policy-induced collapse, Republicans are pushing for even more tax cuts for the wealthy, despite the fact that today’s tax rates are low by historical standards-and even lower for the rich.   In fact, the economy we are in today is STILL the Bush economy…  you remember… the economy that Republicans held unemployed Americans hostage to continue.

The budget shortfalls are allowing Republicans in local governments to cry “we’re broke” as they make up the gap by enacting heavy cuts to state worker pay, community colleges, state health care programs, childcare programs and other programs vital to the populace they economically hobbled.

Listen to Richard Wolff explain how we got into this economic mess, who’s to blame, and how, if we get organized, the flow of resources might be reversed, here:

It doesn’t matter that the Congressional Budget Office confirmed that tax cuts have the LEAST simulative effect on the economy.  It doesn’t matter that even their own Bill Kristol admitted that corporations have plenty of money and corporate tax rates aren’t hurting anyone. Businesses invest when there is an unmet demand. As the Billings Gazette reported, “The Clinton era slogan of “it’s the economy, stupid” should now be “it’s demand, stupid.” To stimulate the economy and create jobs, good policy gets the money to the folks with the highest propensity to spend. That’s not the wealthy, who will spend very little if any of their tax savings.”
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