The Hits Keep Coming

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 19^th 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.