So after seriously wounding Obamacare (which does help many people despite its shortcomings), killing off Net Neutrality (an FCC rule that virtually the entire IT industry vehemently supported), opening the floodgates to corporate maleficence at all levels, and officially halting all Federal efforts to confront the gravest world historical crisis yet - global warming, we now have this rewrite of the tax code, that almost no economist or tax expert supports, ramrodded through to just say "he got something done legislatively".
Let's not give credit for all this
carnage to the Orange One. Let's not give this born-on-third base
opportunistic con man any more credit than he deserves. It is really
the Republican Party to blame. They inadvertently prepared the smelly
nest for this vulture. They set the stage with their negation of
everything Obama (even if it came from their own think tank like health care reform), with their abuse of Senate tradition like the
filibuster, with their own lie promulgating alternate reality news network.
This recent repulsive photo of all of
them with The Great Leader, all bunched up on the podium yucking it
up in their day of infamy as they the pass most regressive tax bill
in US history says it all. History will not be kind to this pack of
greedy fools. Memories of corruption have a half-life longer than
uranium 234. Who can forget the political cartoons from your high
school American history text books of Tammany Hall or Teapot Dome or the
19th Century bearded porcine Gilded Age pols frolicking
in Congress as they stuff their pockets with bribes. The parties
change; sometimes it's the Democrats who are the culprits and it's
earnest Republicans who are trying to forestall a wave of evil
avarice. But make no mistake now its a GOP that has gone rogue.
This recent round of corruption hatched
out of the reptilian egg of the Reagan (Counter)revolution in which
the hard right took over the formerly merely pro-business mostly
moderate post war GOP (Ike, etc) . The hard right Reaganians came after the so-called
'welfare state' with machetes (but only wounded it. Clinton would do
more). The did it by successfully shifting blame for the petering
out of the post war economic boom on taxes not the flat lining
of wages. As the so called "taxpayers revolt" set in across the country taxes were
reduced at all government levels. On the federal level it was
beginning of the end for policies that had successfully contained
capitalism from its worse features. What a masterful propaganda coup it was - blaming
the government and its need for revenue for everything amiss. Governments
which are often bureaucratic and inefficient (because they are imperfect by nature as we all are as humans) made a
perfect fall guy. Of course no one likes to pay taxes (the Beatles
even wrote a song about it, "The Taxman"). But taxes are, alas, a
necessary evil. When not abused by kings and dictators they are the
dues we pay for everything we need collectively, everything that is
not a marketable commodity: roads, bridges, armies, cops, fireman,
libraries - and support for orphans and the old or disabled. But
Reagan's trick was aiming tax resentment at the “welfare
recipients”, those who had been left out of the game – the Black underclass. Even though most people “on welfare” were white, the
fact that many were black conveniently played into the white working
class's deep seated but unacknowledged racism. This public support
for reduction of federal and state revenue government paved the way
for decades of rollback of social services, decay of the
infrastructure and educational facilities as well as a ballooning
federal deficit. But that was only Step 1.
The doleful Reagan years ended in 1988
but the blood was in the water. Smaller govern-ment and less taxes were
the answer. The discredited 19th Century ideology of lassiez faire government, that is
let capitalism run with no restraints, was exhumed. Pure unfettered
capitalism was the ideal to pursue. The idea that there was
a direct relationship between economic efficiency and constraints on 'the
market' gained widespread credibility.
Stage 2 began when the Democrat Party
under Bill Clinton (1992-2000) and the UK Labor Party under Tony Blaire. Instead of boldly putting a stake in the ground and defending the
policies that their respective party's had traditional represented,
they essentially pursued the very same agenda that Reagan and Thatcher had pioneered
but in a moderated version. In short the commandeered the moderate wing of their respective center-right parties driving said parties into full off the deep in into reactionary-land especially the Republican Party. This initiated the era of
'neoliberalism' and put a patina of respectability to the whole
reactionary project initiated by Reagan/Thatcher.
Now we are at Stage 3 of
this malignancy with US Republican Party using the blunt (and
dangerous) tool (and not their preferred one), one Donald Trump, a
kind of world-historical politically accident, to drag the USA back
into the darkest ages of capitalism. Trump is into it only for his
own personal megalomania, while the GOP have a darker agenda. Everything ever done
at the federal level that is environmentally protective, socially
beneficial, globally humane or progressively rational must be destroyed.
One can only hope that the working class, not just the old industrial proletariat types who will never have have the kind of pay and benefits the once they had 30 years ago from the manufacturing sector, but a redefined working class of all who do not rely on financial speculation for their livelihood. There is a vicious class war underway and it must be acknowledged. A newly defined working class must join together and resist this awful juggernaut.
One can only hope that the working class, not just the old industrial proletariat types who will never have have the kind of pay and benefits the once they had 30 years ago from the manufacturing sector, but a redefined working class of all who do not rely on financial speculation for their livelihood. There is a vicious class war underway and it must be acknowledged. A newly defined working class must join together and resist this awful juggernaut.
