Tea Party as Shock Troops

In Naomi Kleins recent book Shock Doctrine she chronicles how economic fundamentalists take advantage of natural and economic disasters to privatize and cannibalize economies around the world. The result being windfall profits for connected multinational corporations while local control is eroded or even destroyed. Here in the US this fake Debt Ceiling crisis is starting shape up to be just such a disaster, this one instigated by these same economic fundamentalists. Their objective: to take over.

The GOP using the so called “Tea Party” as a combination anti-Obama ‘shock troops’ one moment and ‘economic terrorists’ the next, seem to be driving the entire already wobbly US economy off a cliff. First a disastrous stock market 512 point dive last week that followed the very disappointing eleventh hour agreement to avoid the artificially contrived possible US default on money it owes. Then low behold over the weekend a key conspirator in the original financial crisis, the rating agency Standards and Poors (what an appropriate name), dealt the US economy another body blow. By lowering the rating on US Gov bonds a notch, SP drove the stock market into another steep dive while feeding new energy into the politically instigated paranoia about the national debt.

Anyone who has taken even one intro course in college economics should be incensed, demoralized and depressed by this horrendous Kubuki theater by the ruling class we have just witnessed. From any point of view Obama, representing the moderate centrist wing of the ruling class, has been again taken to the cleaners by the far right, which now controls Republican Party. Obama, instead of a frontal assault on the GOP using their contrived Debt Ceiling crisis as a teaching moment for the American public (with lots of colorful graphs and charts), he accepted most if not all of his opponents politically motivated assertions – like Social Security being ‘in trouble.’ One basic fact that Obama could made known to the American public, as mind bending as a number like 14 trillion is, our national debt is being financed at a historically low interest rate. What better time to borrow to rejuvenate a flagging recovery? Yet we are going in the dead opposite direction!

And there was a very real threat of default. But it was not because the US was unable to afford to borrow. We are not like the PIGS in Europe (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) that due to market-determined high interest rates on their government issued bonds, who are in real trouble. No, it was because the Republicans decided to hold the country (maybe the whole world) ransom unless the Demos agreed to begin wholesale extirpation of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. This political theater exposed to the world the dysfunctional nature of American politics in which hostage taking is now fair game. It made us look like another near failed state. Confidence in the U.S. as a functional democracy must be falling all over the world.

Any objective person recognizes that our ongoing national debt must be addressed in an organized, thoughtful and rational manner. It should be approached as a practical input-output problem not a political football. Instead the solutions are being driven in the worst way by hard line ideologues and cynical power junkies who benefit whether their economic reasoning is correct or incorrect. In fact it is better if they are ‘wrong’ – and they know it.

Connecting the Dots

We seem to be watching some kind of horrific three-ring circus in which all the acts are interconnected but not acknowledged to be so…

Ring 1: Geological/Nuclear Disaster in Japan

On March 11^th a slippage of continental plates off the coast of Japan slammed that country with a massive 9.0 earthquake and a huge tsunami. As routine as quakes are in Japan and well prepared as the Japanese were for such, the scale of this one has totally overwhelmed them. The scenes of devastation and the total leveling that resulted from the a 30 foot wall water that washed in from the Pacific Ocean ironically reminds one of the 1945 photos of Hiroshima after being hit by an atom bomb. Twisted broken rubble stretches almost to the horizon with only a few stubborn hollowed-out concrete structures left standing, with dazed survivors wandering heartbroken hopelessly searching for lost relatives and friends. Cars upside down and crumpled share space with fishing boats washed into houses. The scale of loss and tragedy is immeasurable. And to add insult to injury the latest photos show a dusting of cold unwelcome snow hiding the rusty nails and laceration producing knife-sharp metallic edges under endless piles of once life sustaining property. All that remains are horizons of hideous trash still containing the remains of loved ones. Many thousands are unaccounted in for a country that leads the world in utilizing state-of-the-art electronics with almost a German-esque reputation for keeping track of things. But as dreadful as all this is, this is only the least of it. No, something potentially worse also has weighed in - a nuclear disaster.

Japan, like most of the industrialized world, fell for the siren song of the “Peaceful Nuke” even as they suffered horrendously as the only country to ever have had nuclear weapons used against them. Now the Japanese are experiencing the downside of a reliance on peaceful nuclear energy as their Fukashima Dassii nuclear power threatens to totally meltdown. Already there has a partial meltdown of at least two reactors, and even worse the exposure of 125 tons of fuel rods from a holding pond that is reported to now be totally dry.

The hubris of the nuclear power industry and the energy industry in general in assuming that they could design out all probable dire geologic events brings to mind our own tragic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But it also brings to mind the 'boys of Wall Street' who believed they had designed out all probable dire financial events with their fancy oblique tranched mortgage bonds, collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps resulting in a global credit meltdown and a nasty deep recession that we have still not recovered from.

Ring 2: Middle East in Turmoil

This geological news from Japan rightly has pushed the geopolitical news from the Middle East rudely aside. The Middle East is experiencing an earthquake of another kind. Suddenly starting in the backwater North African country of Tunisia and spreading like a string of Chinese firecrackers, rebellion and potential revolution has erupted in one despot-ridden Arab nation after another. The Egyptians inspired by Tunisia have successfully jettisoned their dictator through a brave, relentless and essentially peaceful struggle. Their success has emboldened people all across the region to join resistance movements and wage protests.

Brutal repression and now a full civil war has erupted in Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’ 's private fiefdom, Libya. The US and its European allies have now militarily intervened on the side of the rebels essentially declaring war on the Libyan government in what may become another expensive, protracted quagmire. 'The Qaddafi approach' already has triggered similar harsh and desperate reactions from what goes governments in Yemen, Bahrain and now Syria. Where does intervention end? Most of these “republics” were considered stable “friendly” dictatorships and were not exactly on the US State Department's shit list with the exception of the dried up hellhole (and Al Qaeda stronghold) known as Yemen. Where and how this will all end is anybody's guess. One of thing is clear the Uncle Sam needs to be stuck in another war like he needs another hole in his head.

Ring 3: Demos and Repubs Locking Horns

With Japan on the ropes with an unimaginably bad triple whammy set of disasters and the oil rich Middle East unraveling in unprecedented ways, the US also finds itself in another kind of crisis, one of a classic political nature. The US recovering from a deep recession is also saddles with a record national debt. Yet care needs to be taken not to suffocate the baby of economic recovery in its proverbial crib. Continued if not increased government deficit spending seems counter-intuitive in the midst of a period of deep red ink. But that is is exactly what is prescribed by most economists. Yet suddenly the Dreaded Deficit is front and center (which must be remembered was run up by mainly the Reagan and Bush II administrations.) The right is using The Deficit and their control of the purse strings to 'go postal.' An unholy alliance of shady billionaires, crazed libertarian anti-tax hardliners, reactionary poorly educated evangelical Christians, left wing conspiracy believing gun freaks and bought-and-paid-for Republican Party hacks are lined up against a young inexperience president (prone to preemptive surrender on key negotiating points) supported by a divided Democratic Party that has long since lost its moorings with its real base – the middle, working and under classes.

With the US oil addiction as the linchpin for supporting unpopular, despotic and kleptocratic regimes in the Middle East coupled with the oil industry's untoward influence on US energy policy, it's possible to see the connections between these three events as interlocking. The ultra energy industry-friendly Republican Party is tactically and strategically angling for a re-accession to power through whatever means necessary. So oil dependency and nuclear industry rehabilitation (despite Japan's plight) will continue irrespective of the consequences if the Repubs have their way. The nuclear industry, long since a basket case without government support, is also solidly supported by laissez-faire Republicans. Oil as a major CO2 producing and climate damaging fossil fuel, and nuclear energy both are associated with long-term deleterious effects to the environment (with Japan now getting a first hand experience.) The most obstreperous and deluded defenders or oil and nuclear power can be found in the Republican Party. And these very same deniers of the deleterious long term harm of oil and nukes are the very ones threatening to paralyze the entire US government (and economy?) if they don't get their way on a whole host of stupid, ill advised budget cuts/social agenda initiatives that will have zip effect on the looming deficit (that they have suddenly rediscovered.)

The annual US budget negotiation process is always ugly. This is where the Democrats Party and the Republican Party perennially wrangle over their supposed ideological differences. A lot of it is show. Most of the budget is locked in, and only a small sliver (12%) is ever in play. Neither side can really touch the big chunks without major legislation – commitments to the elderly and incapacitated (Medicare and Social Security entitlements) and the sacrosanct military side. And increasing taxes even in good times is always off the table thanks to 30 years of relentless right wing propaganda. This time it is really bad. Due to nearly a decade of breathtakingly irresponsible policy from a Republican president (off-budget wars, taxes cuts and refusal to reform Medicare) and now a kings hell of a recession (which wipes out revenues,) the deficit is indeed looming large in both absolute and relative terms.

To make matters worse the Repubs have interpreted their victory in the mid term election as carte blance to take declare war on all fronts: environmental regulation, public sector unions, teachers, abortion rights, publicly supported media, you name it all in the name balancing the budget. At both the state and federal level they are on the move with draconian agenda that would even make their saint, the late Ronald Reagan, queasy. The American population is just waking up to the true dimensions of their agenda. These madmen have no real idea of the implications of their actions. But if they stall the recovery and make the joblessness worse ( the number one concern in polls), all the better. It can be blamed on the Obama presidency. The GOP just wants to crush the opposition and enact their half-baked ideas and the fully-baked bidding of their corporate overlords. This has all happened because the American voters are easily bamboozled and often vote for tin-hatted charlatans, or else are they become easily discouraged and don't vote at all. So a veritable fleet of of ships of fools have commandeered the US House Representatives and many statehouses and governorships. This is a serious state of affairs to say the least. Let's just hope people wake up pretty fucking soon!

Strange Days

It is strange time we live in. In what is supposed to be a democracy, a coalition of rich greedy cold-hearted bastards (i.e. the Koch brothers) aligned with an interlocking network of bureaucratic money machines known as corporations have now commandeered the legislative and executive branches of many States and a 1/2 of the Federal legislative branch. And, of course, have significant influence on the judicial branch at both the State and Federal levels.

In short Americans through a mix of ignorance, fear, cynicism and apathy have allowed a batch of charlatans and fools to be elected all across the country, most recently to the US House of Representatives. These are craven pols who have not a clue as to how to get the engine of US capitalism fired back up again - if it is indeed possible. These are people who believe only what is convenient to believe. This is well beyond mere intellectual chicanery, which implies one knows the truth but is using one’s wits to refashion it, such as the legal machinations of a mob lawyer or the verbal maneuvers of a clever college rhetorician. This not just a convenient tweaking of the truth being injected into an argument, but whole new realities being conjured up and fervently believed in. For instance now the GOP appears to believe the modest under whelming but necessary health care reforms enacted by the Democrats last year will actually increase unemployment.

Remember this mauling of reality has been going on for awhile now, having been pioneered and refined during the George W. Bush presidency. In the Bush years claims that were overwhelming proved to be false, and somehow retained legitimacy in the minds of the ultra-right. These ‘zombie facts’ supported the horribly unnecessary, budget-busting invasion of Iraq. Some of these include:

• Sadam Hussien had weapons of mass destruction but were just never found.
• Sadam Hussien was directly involved in the 9/11 terrorist act against the US.
• The US invasion of Iraq actually benefited the people of Iraq.
• Waterboarding is not torture.

This is the realm of what once called the Big Lie and was once associated with totalitarian governments likes those of the Nazis and the Stalinists. Repeat something that is false, a big fat lie, with enough volume and frequency (read: right wing radio and Fox “news”) and it becomes believable at least to some (and unfortunately enough to swing elections.)

Difference of opinion is usually based on difference of interpretation of the same data. But what if each side uses it's own data? What if the established arbiter of the legitimacy of the data is accused of being in league with one of the sides? Then you have no touchstone of fact-based objective reality. That is what we have come to. The party now taking control of one half of one the three branches of government has arbitrarily decided to eliminate the referee, the independent bi-partisan body, the Congressional Budget Office, from involvement in projecting results of proposed budgetary bills. Apparently they make up their own numbers and any CBOs analysis will be castigated as simply biased in support of their opponents. This is very wrong and will create another fictitious reality, another boldfaced pack of lies in the guise of objective truth. It’s sick. It’s duplicity. It’s the GOP in action!

The American Middle Class are Chumps

How does the Republican Party so effectively bamboozle the middle class? As a political party they are not their friend. The Republicans do everything possible to reduce the numbers of their own supporters. But the chumps keep coming back for more. Republicans hate unions which bring middle class wages to blue-collar workers. They despise safety nets such as unemployment insurance or especially European-type income floors that keeps people falling into the abyss of full homelessness. They are fully supportive of off-shoring jobs ( as well as corporate profits to avoid taxes.) First it was manufacturing and now we see technical/clerical jobs going to low wage countries. Yet millions every election buy the same bogus line of bullshit hook line and sinker - to whit everything that is wrong with the US is somehow the fault of “The Liberals” and “Big Government.” In fact some of the more militant members of the hard core Republican loyalist middle class recently went on the war path bringing their guns and wearing silly colonial outfit to town hall meetings, some even threatening invocation of “Second Amendment rights”, armed insurrection, when a the Democrats were merely trying to repair a badly broken, budget busting health care system. What in the hell is going on? Is it in the water?

We are at a strange juncture. The so-call “free market” economy, that many of us especially the Republicans hold so dear, is not delivering. Instead we are entangled in a king’s hell of a perpetual recession. Even though technically “it is over” (small GDP growth is occurring), millions are still out of work. The initial crash was so severe it verged on becoming another 1930s scale Great Depression. And it happened under again a Republican administration. Yet again the hapless Democrats inherited it and are now being blamed for it. So it now behooves the Republicans to keep it going as long as it takes to retake Congress and the White House. The fall guy Democrats were voted back in en mass in a wave of messiah-desiring fervor. The knee-deep-in-shit situation that the new administration stepped into almost guaranteed disappointment from the left and malicious second-guessing from the right, then the growing realization by the right that is was to their advantage to make things worse.

The Demos under Obama inherited quite a mess - not one but two ongoing wars, a financial system in paralysis, housings prices in free fall leading to a wave of foreclosures not seen since the 1930s, and unemployment nearing 10%. And to make matters supremely worse due to the abject failure of Republican driven “supply side” econ theory, government debt was already before the recession at astronomical levels. Recall the notion behind Reaganian ‘SS Economics’ is that if we lower taxes, there will be adequate new investment and thus new tax revenues generated that it will actually compensate for the lost revenue from the lowered taxes. This especially presumably applied if the taxes are lowered for the investor class: the upper income tiers, millionaires and billionaires. The cake and eat, too plan didn’t fucking work! Ask David Stockman, Reagan’s head of OMB. The deficit skyrocketed in the Reagan years. The other net result was a massive retribution of wealth upwards.

So as we know the Democrats under Bill Clinton, ever embattled by fake scandals like Whitewater and Troopergate and finally nearly impeached, managed like a good 1950s’ moderate Republican get the budget in order, and we had few good years relative to the national debt. After particularly close election and with the help of the Republican majority on the Supreme Court, enter one George W. Bush. This is the same person whose own father, George H.W. Bush, as a presidential candidate and one time moderate Republican accurately coined the term “Voodoo Economics” for this bogus and dangerous idea of cutting taxes to the wealthy to create jobs. Well “W” being his own man returned again to voodoo economics full force engaging and not one two wars (both off-budget,) a poorly designed increase in Medicare benefits and another very generous irresponsible but popular time limited tax cut for all but especially for the so called job creating upper income tiers. Supply Side was back! Result: another huge spike in the Deficit. All this is widely known.

Now here are in 2010 and Bush tax cuts are due to expire automatically. But we are still in the toilet relative to a real recovery. So expiration of the Bush tax cuts would amount to a sudden tax increase. But suddenly also again The Deficit now at is front and center, with a august presidential commissions and pundits right and left agonizing over “under funded entitlements” and other future shortfalls. Draconian changes are being proposed like cuts in middle class tax deductions, Social Security and Medicare eligibility. All aimed at the middle class. And this unbelievably still with 9.8% of the population are officially unemployed (with more not counted or working only part time.) Astonishingly the right wing of the Democratic Party and the Republicans in mass are suddenly simultaneously concerned with the dreaded Deficit but are also all or retaining a budget busting, deficit exploding, irresponsible retention of a "temporarily " lowered income taxe for all including inexplicably the very wealthy who have shown they don't fucking invest it US jobs. How do they get away with it?

In this context we have another sad spectacle of the Obama caving in on another core principle. He promised to let the budget busting counter-cyclical dysfunctional upper income tax cuts expire. But the Repubs naturally want it to all stay intact so they and their rich friends will continue to wallow in money. And they will filibuster any proposed change to the end. If the thing expires as designed everybody’s taxes go up come the come Jan 1. In the middle of a recession it would be another kick in the balls to the economy. But only for middle classes who will spend most of it, the wealthy really don’t need the money and will only speculate with it. If they were going to use it fruitfully in as trickle down supply side investment way, they would have already done it. This is class war - blatant, redistribution of income upwards. They were already rich when the tax cut hit under Bush. They had managed to accrue great wealth under the old tax code. Bush just made his friends richer! These people are motherfuckers of the first magnitude. They have driven the country into penury and then have the audacity to call Obama a “socialist” when he tries to enact minor but necessary minor rational reforms.

Obama could hold out and let the damn thing expire and take it to the people exposing on prime time the supreme hypocrisy of the Repubs. But, alas, also the federal extension on unemployment is also due to run out. And the Repubs will filibuster this one too. Both would have to be ought in the trenches with Obama using his bully pulpit to rally the masses. He would need to be a fighter not a conciliator. Even the Repubs would respect him. On both of these issues he has the majority on his side. It would be a two front war and real political gamble to let two both of these hits occur in the same time frame. But it would it could turn things around like a game-changing pass that was caught but not a “Hail Mary.” He would have reenergized the same masses that came out in 2008 and voted him in and other Demos in a near landslide. But that is not the Obama we have. We have a different guy.

Let them eat oil

Let’s see if we can list all the stuff that is happening, most of it awful, and maybe see how it is all connected:

• The Gulf of Mexico is being turned into a giant oils sump due to BPs breathtaking irresponsibility and the Minerals Management Service’s ineptitude and corruption.

• The European Union (EU) is in economic disarray as the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) sink further into the muck - especially Greece.

• Unemployment in the US is back up again.
  

• The US Senate has passed some kind of financial reform – hope it has teeth.

• A new bear market is reflecting pessimism and fear.

• Thailand is near revolution (or would like to be.)

• North and South Korea are near war with a recent sinking by N. Korea of a S. Korean warship.

• The climate bill in Congress according to most environmental organizations is a dud of the first magnitude (and maybe DOA, anyway.)

Does anyone now doubt this fully industrialized phase of late monopoly capitalism is not lethal to the planet and its inhabitants? As I write this thick black crude oil is gushing into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate equivalent to an Exxon Valez oil spill every three days. They have no fucking idea how to stop it other than drill into it the reservoir from some other location – which will take weeks more! It is a horror show of the first order as the oils seeps into the biggest remaining wetland in the US, the Mississippi Delta, and gets into to a current that will take it to the Keys and on around encircling the entire state of Florida.


Moving right along. The European Union is in trouble. Its poorer members like Greece rode high while the whole global economy was living off of an inflated US housing marker, are now is hitting the skids. The bubble popped and trillions of euros, dollars, rubles, shekels, yens whatever vanished into cyberspace (just like your long winded email note does when your email word-processor acts up.) After all it was really never was any more than bits and bites in bank leased 'server farms.' No doubt the banks that financed Greece and the other major debtor states during the gravy years also invested in heavily in lots of BP common and preferred stock. After all BP was/is making billions in profit in 2009. The irresponsible financing of runaway expansion in the PIGS is all a part of the financial complex’s lust for easy money led by what we fondly call “Wall Street.” The banks European and worldwide are understandably in cahoots with the carbon extraction energy giants (like BP and Exxon-Mobil, Massey Coal) because they are so profitable. It is very profitable to kill a planet. When the oil corporations lobby Congress for regulatory leniency and (appallingly) subsidies they are only fronting for their real owners, the banks and investment houses.


No one really knows what the US banks are now worth. Since all of the high tech financial instruments, derivatives and various collateralized packages containing 'underwater 'mortgages are still owned by the banks and are still part of their reserves, their value is what the banks claim their value is. The big bailout that everyone resents so much merely put the US government in as co-signer on all this bad debt. Once confidence was restored between the banks, they could again return to making business as usual. With credit restored they can borrow from the Federal Reserve at nearly zero interest and buy US bonds essentially loaning money back to the government at interest. Kind of a good deal, huh? Obviously the EU is left out of this subterfuge to some extent and must support their poor sisters, like Greece, all by themselves. The EU, which mainly means Germany, is the most prosperous of the EU members but is hardly happy about the prospect. Economists say the EU crisis calls into question the whole concept of a unified Europe economy with one currency for rich and poor countries alike. Exacerbating the situation are currency speculators who make big money by ‘shorting’ (betting on the euros decline) thus making a bad situation worse by creating inflation forcing up interest rates.

The instability in Europe has had deleterious effects on the US stock market with the Dow Jones falling over a thousands points since late April – remember all the financial giants are hooked together is various ways. Also adding to the pessimism of the investor class is the fact that the Republicans have been unable to beat back the Democrat-led financial reforms since even the GOP’s own Tea Party base also wants the Wall Streets boys’ heads on poles. Also unemployment numbers went back up after months of improvement possibly indicating the 2009 stimulus may be petering out. A southward bound stock market leads to a consumer reluctance to spend, this fear of layoffs in turn actually creates said layoffs, which loops back as increased unemployment and feeds additional sell offs in the stock market. Paradoxically they in aggregate could create the dreaded ‘double dip’ they so fear. Such a self-perpetuating recessionary loop can only to be arrested by another deficit-increasing stimulus which is becoming ever more unlikely as comparisons of the US to Greece abound by both Republican and Democratic party 'deficit hawks' (see Paul Krugman and his commentators in the 5/21/10 NY Times.)

How does poor Thailand fit into all of this? Thailand is part of the global economy so times are hard there, too. Apparently the ‘Red Shirts” causing all of the turmoil are angry to the point of insurrection as a reaction to a 2006 military coup. In 2006 a putsch ousted then-premier Thaksin Shinawatra, a folk hero among the urban poor, a new-money business class and millions of Thais in northeastern farming country. They’re angry and want an election. - not unreasonable. It’s a typical class struggle situation.

And then there is North and South Korea and their lingering cold war. It was temporarily alleviated by a liberal government in the South making overtures to the North. But now that the conservatives are back in power in the South, the hostility is again making a comeback. The conservatives probably got back in because of dissatisfaction with their economy's performance. North Korea, a pariah state that is the best argument against police state socialism that ever existed, is by all accounts a basket case in every respect. Whatever could be done with them as far as integration into the world order never is done and they stay outside looking in. No doubt N Korea would love to emulate “Red China’s” economic takeoff. They hate being ignored and neglected so they cause some ugly incident every so often. My guess is that it is tacit and unstated in US foreign policy circles, Demo and Repub alike, to keep them permanently out in the cold and unhappy so we will have an on-going ‘serious threat’ as an additional justification for our massive military machine which props up to some our much or our economy.


Finally, climate legislation seems to be on everybody’s back burner. But this mother of all problems is not going away because 40% Americans don’t think it’s a problem; or that the carbon based energy complex (BP et al) has more money than God to buy off Congress; or that the Senate’s Kerry Lieberman bill sucks (”Kerry Lieberman”! doesn’t that say it all?); or that the Markey Waxman bill passed by the House strips the EPA of the authority to regulate greenhouse gases. The beltway boys are predicting the Gulf spill will undermine passage of Climate legislation. Maybe that’s good since doing a half-assed job (like they did with the Health Care bill) might cause more harm than good. At least with health care the problem can’t be ignored and if it fails to perform it can be fixed. With climate legislation our program is as much a signal to the world as it is an effective policy. If we set up something that looks inadequate, it will take on a life of its own for better or worse.

Let’s hope this unfolding world historical disaster in the Gulf of Mexico will be the catalyst for bold, robust, effective, visionary climate and energy legislation. The energy behemoths like BP now appear to the public as do the financial behemoths of Wall Street like Goldman Sachs as big, evil and greedy. Will Obama and the Demo controlled Congress respond or will they disappoint us again?

Halfbaked

As some people like their eggs 'sunny side up' with the attendant risk of slimy mucus-like egg white to contend with, so too some people like their politics ‘right side up’ with undercooked, half baked slime to contend with. They are called Republicans. The lower the standards the better they like it. As pigs enjoy wallowing in the muck so do Republicans revel at the opportunity to get ‘down and dirty.’ Truth, respect, civility, intellectual honesty, peer reviewed science - all of are little concern. It is all about effective propaganda.

As we all know the GOP (Grand Old Party), as the Republicans like to call themselves, was once the party of Lincoln. But I doubt if Abraham Lincoln were he alive today would touch the Republicans with a ten-foot pole. The party has mutated into something ugly and evil. It has become chock full of proudly ignorant and the easily manipulated ditto heads - essentially demagogue fodder. Add to this a solid component of wild-eyed Libertarian “pure capitalism” absolutists, a very generous helping of Second Amendment obsessed ‘happiness-is-warm-gun’ nuts and finally a noisy hoard of self-righteous fundamentalist Christians whose primary concern over all other issues is the absolute right of all fetuses intended or unintended to be born upon the earth (once you’re born, however, you’re on your own, Kiddo! ) Yet most of these folks, good intentioned as they may be, are from the very social classes in which Republican economic policies hurt the most.

Behind the curtain of this Republican ‘down home populism’ is a sort of Wizard of Oz, a tight network of smart, amoral corporatists with an extensive and effective lobbying apparatus, ideologically linked is a shadowy network of tax-loathing, secretive independent billionaires. This ‘lose confederation of millionaires and billionaires’ (to borrow from a Paul Simon song) quietly serves as a brain trust, as puppet masters and paymasters for the Grand Old Party. They work, often hand in hand with many like-minded Democrats, to keep in place (and upgrade when possible) a fervently pro-corporate, globalized (read outsourcing of jobs), staunchly anti-union, under-regulated, social sector-minimalized, full strength-warfare state (as opposed to welfare state) rolling ever forward.

In recent times and especially since the Southerners departed (thanks to LBJ’s signing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965), the two parties have successfully staked out different territories with respect to pro-capitalism economic ideology specifically regarding the role of the government. While the Democrats appeal to their base, which includes underprivileged minorities, by supporting programs that might help them, the Republicans traditionally oppose any such programs and consider such support anathematic to the character of said recipients. Also Republicans steadfastly oppose any restriction on business (even if it’s to make their beloved capitalism work better – i.e. antitrust legislation.) They also have in recent years become rabidly anti-environmental to the core.

Republicans like to call themselves “conservatives”, although it’s never clear exactly what they want to conserve. But the word resonates well with the poorly educated lower and middle class whites who feel like they are ‘doing OK, thank you’ and don’t need any help from Big Brother - that is until it all falls apart. Republicans always equate any government program other that military, prisons or police as being a slippery slope toward “socialism.” Socialism to them involves some admixture of European social democratic welfare state style socialism and the old hammer and sickle, police state, Soviet Union socialism/communism. The two are illogically but conveniently merged for emotive effect. In fact many a Republican’s political careers has been launched by accusing an opponent of a being “a Red” or a “Pinko”.

A weakened Democratic Party coming out of the Viet Nam war era (which they were rightly blamed for) relied mainly on the misdeeds and downfall Republican Richard Nixon (who we now realize was actually a moderate in terms of economic policy, anyway) rather than formulating a bold new program. The result was good-hearted conservative Southern Democrat Jimmy Carter’s inept and unlucky presidency. In the 1970s the Democrats floundered under a Cold War foreign policy fiasco (as former puppet state Iran became revolutionary Iran broke and away from the US orbit in an ugly hostage crisis) and a faltering economy as joblessness increased while inflation and interest rates ran rampant, and oil supplies choked up. This paved the way for the right wing of a formerly “center right” party to redefine the entire political landscape as the Republicans found their own FDR in reverse – Ronald Reagan. Reagan was the consummate politician – actor by trade and a sly charming demagogue by nature. He singled handedly wrenched the entire US political spectrum as far to the right as it has ever been - and things have never the same since. And Reagan unveiled something new under the sun ’supply side economics’, to whit: simply lower taxes (on mainly the wealthy) and the extra income will be re-invested and create sufficient economic growth to recoup the lost revenues. It was a cruel hoax. Reagan left office with a monumental national debt (remember balancing the budget was an article of faith in pre-Reagan Republican circles.) Of course Reagan’s real enemy was the dreaded welfare state, which would now could be deemed politically impossible (for subsequent Democratic administrations) to maintain because of the horrendous overhead just to pay the interest on the now gargantuan national debt.

But the Republican heir to the throne, George H.W. Bush (AKA Bush the Elder,) could not keep industrial-strength, contradiction embedded Reaganism going on forever and suffered a humiliating one-term presidency being defeated in 1992 election by one William (Bill) Clinton of Arkansas.

Again the Democrats had offered up a Southern Democrat (one of the few that their were left by the 1990s.) Clinton found traction once he began behaving like a true moderate Republican (also an endangered species by then.) The Republicans hated Clinton not because of his program, it was straight out of their traditional party-line pre-Reagan rulebook, but because he did it so well. In the end with the Religious Right and moralistic Republican hypocrisy at full high tide, Clinton was nearly impeached for lying about something as personal as his extramarital sex life!

But somehow Clinton’s successful “Republican Presidency” (welfare reform and a balanced annual budget) was not enough to keep the Democrats in power. Enter one George W. Bush, who eventually materialized as a self-styled ersatz Ronald Reagan sans Reagan’s charisma, luck or intellectual curiosity. As we know the Bush presidency was handed its defining moment and opportunity in a basket when the blowback from US geopolitical maneuvers in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Israel/Palestine resulted a crazed jihadist attack of the World Trade Center. Eight years later suffice to say whatever good will and nostalgia for Reagan still lingered with the masses of apolitical types, Georgie Boy blew it all away big time with two wars, a dogged adherence to Reagan’s discredited ‘supply side’ nonsense (tax cutting coupled with major spending in which Reagan’s astronomical annual deficits were actually dwarfed,) a blithely mismanaged major natural disaster and finally on the eve of departure, the mother of all recessions.


But the GOP survived Richard Nixon being driven from office for indictable criminality and it has survived a presidency of breathtaking incompetence (and also possible indictable) Yet what a cranky, creaking piece of work the Grand Old Party has morphed into! With an idealistic, cautious to a fault, centrist, intellectual Democrat in as President who is stuck with a Pandora’s box of inherited problems, the Republicans have mutated into a well-oiled machine of a denial, dishonesty and rabid demagoguery. Their sole purpose has become a unified mission to undermine, discredit and mock the sitting president’s every action and every attribute. And add to their hate mongering the Democratic president just so happens to be of mixed-race lineage (he’s black!) This provides a target rich environment for their full arsenal of veiled racist innuendos and flanking maneuver racism.

Republicans are now counting on the Bushian-generated quagmire of misery to prove to be inescapable, and the electorate will turn away from Obama and the Democrats and turn back in disappointment to their only other choice – them! To make matters worse a new media landscape has emerged as daily newspapers fall like bowling pins replaced by shallow, banal, context-free cable news ‘infotainment’ (one outlet even becoming simply megaphone for the Republican Party and its even crazier right wing.) Couple that with a nationwide network of intellectually dishonest, demagogic radio and TV jabberwockies and a loose confederation of fanatic right wing Internet bloggers dedicated to assiduously resisting any idea left of Genghis Khan and you have the present media landscape.

The fight over the final version of this unfolding omnibus bill to confront the raging, resource hemorrhaging mess our health care system is in will be telling. But it is mere prelude to the even more critical world-historical struggle before us – global climate change. Because whether or not the US can reign in its runaway health care costs, as important as it is, it is only incidental compared to our leadership in reigning in global warming in which the US is a major contributor and important hegemonic role model. The same dark forces of denial, dishonest argumentation, ignorance and pigheadedness will be at play - but more of them and even more in earnest.