Print this post.By Richard Girard | September 25, 2010
“We praise a man who feels angry on the right grounds and against the right persons and also in the right manner at the right moment and for the right length of time.”
Aristotle (384322 B.C.), Greek philosopher. The Nicomachean Ethics, chapter 4, section 5, subsection 3 (written c. 340 B.C.).
“Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.”
Bill Bixby, as Dr. David Banner, in almost every episode of CBS-TV’s The Incredible Hulk.
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[print_link] Every time I turn over a historical or political Re-publican rock, I discover enough creepy-crawlies to make an entomologist blanch.
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My recent exploration of the Taft-Hartley Labor Act of 1947 while writing “The Daft-Heartless Act” is a prime example of this phenomenon. It was, according to Congressman Fred A. Hartley (right), the first step in undoing FDR’s New Deal, and returning America to the quasi-feudalistic purgatory for the working class that it was before the Great Depression. It was designed (although Congressman Hartley did not say this) to help return the United States to a time when half of the nation lived in poverty; the elderly often died homeless; children died for lack of health care; employers could reduce a worker’s wages without cause; and if you became unemployed during an economic downturn, and there were no jobs to be had, you and your family starved or froze to death..
But it is not enough for these crypto-fascists to want to roll back our nation to the 1920s. They want to roll back the entire Twentieth Century, just as they have with the active enforcement of antitrust laws, and return to what Mark Twain called the “Gilded Age.” In fact, the reactionaries at Fox News are quite overt about this desire:
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We all know of the Re-publicans’ desire to “privatize” Social Security. What they want us to ignore is the simple fact that a downturn of the Stock Market (such as happened in 2007), or major bank failures (as nearly happened in 2008), would wipe out the money in these private retirement accounts. I am all for people saving up for their retirements, so that they can have a more comfortable time in their sunset years. However, Social Security is everyone’s fall back position: if you have your retirement money stolen or wiped out just before you retire, with Social Security you are not left living cold and hungry in the streets, or working until you are eighty. The way to fix Social Security is simple: remove the cap, so that everyone pays Social Security tax on all of their wages, salaries, and non-exempt (e.g., health care) compensation for the money they earn in a given year. If you have deferred income, e.g. stock options, you would still have to pay the Social Security tax on the current value of those options in that year.
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These are the same people who want to get rid of Medicare and Medicaid. The real–if unspoken–reasons are that these two programs are cutting into the earnings of the for profit insurance companies, and they are much more efficiently run than those for profit companies, with an overhead of one-quarter or less that of the insurance firms. Of course, Medicare and Medicaid aren’t paying their CEOs’ multi-million dollar annual salaries.
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Shifting to a not-for-profit, single payer healthcare system would save us at least $350 billion each year in administrative costs (see “I Will Fear No Evil, OpEdNews.com, August 23, 2010). But it would rob the Re-publicans and their plutocratic masters of a chance to run up medical costs with an overhead of 15 to 30 percent.
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And then there is the matter of the right of privacy, as is exemplified by the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. I heard Delaware’s Re-publican candidate for Senate, Christine O’Donnell, say about the Health Care Act that she wanted it repealed because it was wrong for the government to get between a doctor and his patient. This was the exact logic that Justice Harry Blackmun used to arrive at the need to legalize abortion in Roe v. Wade.
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According to the 1979 book The Brethren, by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong, Justice Blackmun–who had been the attorney for the Mayo Clinic for many years–felt that the laws against abortion, especially in the first trimester, were an unwarranted intrusion of government power upon the doctor and his patient. In the eyes of the doctors he had represented at the Mayo Clinic (and whom he had consulted in writing his decision), the only consideration for those three months should be the private relationship between the doctor and his patient, extending the right of privacy in matters of birth control and family planning first expounded by the Court in Griswold v. Connecticut.
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Justice Blackmun, in writing his decision, placed additional restrictions on physicians performing abortions in the second trimester, and even more restrictions on them in the third. The Reactionary Re-publicans, including the self-serving pygmy elephants at Faux News, have given the false impression that physicians have been given a carte blanche in performing abortions since Roe v. Wade. Nothing could be further from the truth.
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Let us start by getting our terminology correct. A human egg, fertilized by a sperm, is not a fetus until it has passed the eighth week of gestation. Before this time it is a blastocyst, and then an embryo. Before the ninth week, it cannot be considered a human being in anything except perhaps potential, if everything goes right, and seventeen percent of all pregnancies in the United States end in miscarriages according to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, NATC_DCReport of 2006.
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Any fetus under twenty-two weeks (five-and-a-half months) is simply not viable outside of its mother’s womb at this time. To save the mother’s life, or in cases of rape or incest, I do not believe that there should be any hesitation about performing an abortion if the mother desires one. At other times, I believe that choice is best left to a woman and her physician. The spiritual morality of it is between the woman and her Deity, and if she is wrong, I leave that to a far higher and more competent Judgment than my own.
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Abortions have been around for at least 25 centuries: Aristotle wrote of them in his Politics. If a pregnant woman wishes to be rid of a child, she will rid herself of the child: whether before or after birth; with a coat hanger, infanticide, or other means. I agree with President Clinton: abortions should be safe, legal and rare. The way you do that is by providing real reproductive education in the schools, health care for all Americans, and a realistic alternative to abortions other than a broken foster care/adoption system, or poverty, shame and single motherhood. If you are unwilling to help pay for the education of single mothers and their children; if you are unwilling to provide for their health care both during and after the pregnancy; if you are not willing to help them with child care, shelter, food, and a decent job; then shut up about abortions. If you are, start by putting your money where your mouth is, and then maybe, just maybe, I’ll listen to you.
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No, the real reason behind the issue of abortion is simple: the Reactionary Re-publicans want to take away not only abortion, but our right to privacy in our homes in general, and specifically birth control and family planning in any form, from the American public. There are two reasons for this. They want to: 1) make women second class citizens; 2) prevent Caucasians, the non-Hispanic whites who have been the predominant race in our country since 1776, from becoming a minority in the United States in less than fifty years.
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These Reactionary Re-publicans also want to rid the United States of not only her labor unions, but of those workplace protections that the labor unions have gained for America’s workers over the last 100-plus years: a livable wage, child labor laws, the right to bargain collectively, the right to an eight hour work day, the right to due process in disputes with employers, the right to unemployment insurance; to name only a few.
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The Reactionary Re-publicans on Faux News are exceptionally negative in their view of unemployment insurance. In the first place it is insurance, not welfare, to protect workers during economic downturns, just as auto insurance protects drivers if they have an accident, or life insurance to help your family if you die. It is not welfare.
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They also paint a false picture of what unemployment was like before the New Deal. There was no “full employment,” in spite of the fact that four times as many people–as a percentage of the population–lived on farms and ranches than live there today and there was no automation. The best guess is (and a guess is all that it is, because they didn’t keep consistent statistics on the working class before the New Deal) that labor, particularly in the cities, had an unemployment rate that was about twice what we experience today. (State of the Union: A Century of American Labor, Nicholas Lichtenstein, 2002, p. 13.) That would correspond to an unemployment rate of 7-15 percent, 20 percent-plus during their frequent severe downturns. That is spelled d-e-p-r-e-s-s-i-o-n-s, by the way, which occurred once every seven to ten years after the Civil War, up until the start of the First World War in 1914.
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The First World War disrupted the boom-bust economic cycle. The ham-handed manner in which the Federal Reserve handled the Crash of 1929 ensured that the long delayed economic forces would vent their full fury on the U.S. economy and its workforce when released.
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Unspoken in this attack on both unions and unemployment insurance, is the desire of the Reactionary Re-publicans to rid their corporatist masters of Worker’s Compensation, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Why you ask? They cut into the corporations’ profit margins.
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It has long been the policy of American corporations to do everything in their power to privatize profit and socialize loss. This is the reason they look for the largest possible financial incentives they can get when they move a factory and will very likely move that factory elsewhere before the company has to pay a penny of taxes to its governmental benefactors.
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The recent drive for outsourcing American manufacturing jobs overseas also finds its foundation in the same type of thinking. Without tariffs and tax penalties to protect American jobs, American corporations have been able to move their manufacturing plants out of the United States. Those plants are moved to nations without laws concerning pollution or worker safety and well-being, there by maximizing their profits on the backs of the people who live and work around their site, e.g., Bhopal, India.
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As long as profits for the few are placed ahead of the safety and well-being of the many, unions and Government programs like Unemployment Insurance, Worker’s Compensation, the EPA and OSHA will be needed in this country.
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The next target on the Reactionary Re-publican’s hit parade is the Federal Department of Education.
The Department of Education started its existence as part of LBJ’s Great Society, in the form of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). In 1979, President Carter split the HEW into the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services.
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The Reactionary Re-publicans compare our nation’s test scores to those of other countries, particularly in math and science, and pronounce our nation’s education system a failure.
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They choose to ignore one simple fact: the effect of the anti-tax reaction that started in the late 1970s with Proposition 13 in California; snowballed with the Reagan Administration’s reshuffling of the Federal tax system in the 1980s; crescendoed with Colorado’s TABOR Amendment and similar state propositions in the 1980s and 1990′; continuing today at a fevered pitch with Propositions 60, 61, and 101 here in Colorado.
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Add to this the continuing de-emphasis of science and engineering degrees in favor of business degrees as the only way to make a “real” living, i.e., get rich, together with the de-emphasis on critical thinking throughout our educational system, and you find a far more plausible explanation for our nation’s disparity in test scores. California in the early 1970s was consistently rated one of the nation’s top five state primary and secondary public school systems. After Proposition 13 passed in 1978, California began a steady decline until today it is in the bottom fifth.
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The first rule of every hierarchical organization is that the top of the hierarchy is cut last. Schools will be closed, teachers laid off, programs eliminated, class-size increased, books permitted to become outdated, teachers forced to buy classroom supplies out of their own pockets, janitorial staffs will be cut to the bone; but superintendents, school boards, and top management will remain as bloated as former Speaker of the House Denny Hastert after a nine course meal.
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The problem is not all a matter of school funding. With the growing need for the two income family just to stay even that began in the late 1970s; parents have less time to spend seeing to the needs of their children’s schools: PTA, after school programs, volunteer teacher assistance.
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Until we decide which is more important: yachts for billionaires, or a properly educated and motivated working and middle class for our nation’s future; we will continue to see the deterioration of our nation’s educational system. If we do not have a middle class that can support itself on a single income, if we do not replace the cult of consumerism in this country–and around the world–we must sooner or later either run out of things to buy or the means with which to buy them. There is no other rational choice: We must learn as a society to differentiate between those things which we need for our growth and well-being, and those we want for our egotistical aggrandizement.
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The next three protections of minority rights that stick in the craws of the Reactionary Re-publicans are The Civil Rights Act of 1964, The Voting Rights Act of 1965, and The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. John Stossel seems to be the crypto-fascist who makes the most of these issues on Faux News. There are many others who believe that if you can’t get to the polling place or voting machine in time to cast your ballot because of the color of your skin (The Civil Rights Act), if you have trouble reading the ballot because you are a Native American or a Puerto Rican who can’t read English (literacy requirements were removed by The Voting Rights Act), or you need special accommodation because you are blind or in a wheelchair (ADA), you shouldn’t vote anyway. The late Chief Justice William Rehnquist started his political career standing outside of polling places, challenging minorities’ right to vote. It is a practice that continues to this day.
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Then there is the question of nuclear arms control, Sean Hannity’s (rhymes with insanity) favorite bug-a-boo. The first part of this question is: How many warheads do we really need? How many times do we need to be able to destroy the world to be safe? How many ICBM’s, SLBMs, cruise missiles and long range bombers do we really need to ensure the ability to turn an attacking enemy into radioactive glass, even if we have suffered some initial losses? (I will not inquire about a first strike capability, as such a concept is a) abhorrent to my soul and, b) would require far fewer weapons than a second strike capability.) Fifteen hundred and fifty warheads–the number negotiated under the new START Treaty–should be more than sufficient for any need.
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Next comes one of the most absurd ideas by the Reactionary Re-publicans–or any other political faction–the United States has seen since the imposition of Prohibition nearly a century ago. This is the proposal by the most extreme elements on the Right to repeal the Seventeenth Amendment of the Constitution, which allows the direct election of Senators by the people of the individual States.
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Before the Seventeenth Amendment, the state legislatures appointed our states’ United States Senators. What this meant, especially after the Civil War, is that the two most powerful plutocratic interests in a state had their own private Senator at their beck and call. In Western states this was usually the railroads, mining interests, or the cattleman’s association. In the Southern states it was cotton, sugar, tobacco, textiles, or the railroads. In the Midwest it was mining and petroleum, food processing, manufacturing, or the railroads. Finally, in the Northeast, it was shipping, finance, manufacturing, textiles and the railroads.
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It was with these unholy combinations in mind that Senator John Sherman of Ohio–brother of the Civil War general–proposed and managed to have passed the antitrust legislation that bears his name. Part of this was due to populist and progressive pressure, but part of it was a shifting in the economic balance of power in the United States. Agriculture was losing its predominance in America’s economy, as our manufacturing capability grew. It was almost fifteen years before the first important antitrust action was launched against John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, and by that time the public saw that antitrust legislation alone was not sufficient to curb the corrupt abuses of the state legislatures when they appointed Senators under the monstrous influence of corporate cash. The Seventeenth Amendment saw one of the most rapid ratifications of any Constitutional Amendment ever: it was proposed by Congress on May 13, 1912, and ratified on April 8, 1913.
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All that repealing the Seventeenth Amendment is for America is fulfilling the plutocrats’ deepest, darkest desire of ending our representative democracy and re-establishing a de facto and de jure oligarchy. This should anger every freedom loving American as much as any attempt to disestablish the Bill of Rights would. This nonsense should inspire us to take to the streets, and threaten to boycott the sponsor of any commentator making such a despotic statement as un-American. Most of all, it should inspire us to turn off the channel that permits such crap to be broadcast.
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The final madness demonstrated by the “pundits” at Faux News involves our income tax system.
The Federal Income Tax system is cumbersome, confusing, dishonest, disparate, and in desperate need of improvement in virtually every category of its existence. It does not, however, need to be expunged from American life, or changed into a “simpler” but more regressive form, as the primary source of government funding.
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The ones who want to see the Sixteenth Amendment repealed, or some sort of flat tax imposed in place of our current theoretically progressive system, whether they realize it or not, are also in favor of the establishment of a permanent aristocracy of wealth, and the imposition of a two tier class system in this country, with a very small middle class of physicians, attorneys and other professionals. This is what we saw in the United States before the Great Depression and the New Deal; it is what we have seen in Latin American nations–including Mexico–for nearly two hundred years; it is what we saw in Fascist Italy and Falangist Spain in the 1920’s and 30’s.
Personally, I feel that we need to impose a much more aggressive, progressive tax system, similar to the one we had from 1940 to 1980, where the top one-tenth of one percent (those currently making more than $4,000,000.00 annually) pay a marginal tax rate of between 70 and 90 percent on their income over $4,000,000.00.
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I can feel the lynch mob gathering in the Faux News studios; ropes, torches, and pitchforks being prepared; with epithets of “Socialist,” “Marxist,” and “Communist,” among others rising to the lips of these millionaires; these angry exemplars of Bertrand Russell’s observation that “Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate;” getting ready for a necktie party, with myself as the guest of honor. I’ll see their anger, and raise them a completely pissed off.
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In that forty year span, we saw an unprecedented increase in the size and wealth of our nation’s middle class, while watching the rate of poverty decline from 50 percent just before the Great Depression, to 11.1 percent in 1973. Life expectancy increased almost twenty years, infant mortality dropped, and smallpox, tuberculosis, and poliomyelitis disappeared from the nation’s headlines, and the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) dropped as treatments became available. Literacy improved, racial segregation (officially) ended, and a dozen Americans walked on the moon.
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In the thirty years since, we have seen a shrinking of our middle class in both size and wealth, while the poverty rate is once again rising. Life expectancy has stagnated, infant mortality is rising, and drug resistant tuberculosis and STDs are rearing their ugly heads. Literacy is dropping, unofficial racial segregation and discrimination is showing a resurgence and we are seriously considering ending our part in manned space exploration. And the richest one percent has doubled its share of the nation’s wealth.
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Sean Hannity complains about all the people who do not pay Federal Income tax. As I explained two years ago in my article “The Forty Percent Solution,” in 1969 84% of all wage earners paid Federal Income tax (the poverty rate for that year was 12.1 percent according to the Census). We are now pushing 50% who do not pay any Federal Income tax.
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Mr. Hannity has no one to blame but his wealthy friends, who have seen to a stagnation of the average American’s wage since 1973. And by the way Mr. Hannity, the average American’s Social Security and Medicare Tax has doubled in the last thirty years, while the richest Americans only pay that tax on the first $110,000.00 or so of their wages and salary.
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The tax laws enacted under the Reagan and later Administrations have shifted much of the real tax burden to the middle and upper middle class, in the form of fees and use taxes. So the real “lucky duckies,” to use the Wall Street Journal’s pejorative description of those who don’t have to pay income tax from their 2003 article, are the top one percent; who pay two percent or less of their salary and wages to the FICA flat tax (which includes Social Security and Medicare), but receive full Social Security and Medicare benefits.
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The problem is not with the income tax, or having a progressive income tax. The problem is that for thirty years it has been used to make the wealthiest Americans–and their corporate surrogates–richer.
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As I have pointed out before, France’s greatest thinker, Voltaire, noted that the primary if unspoken purpose of government was the redistribution of wealth. That the only choice left to us was whether the wealth would be redistributed from the poor to the rich, or the rich to the poor.
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For the last thirty years, we have seen a rarely equaled redistribution of wealth from the poor, working, and middle classes of this country to the richest Americans. This has led to increasing poverty, as well as fewer programs to help the poor find their way out of their predicament. The middle class is becoming increasingly more frustrated and apathetic, as their futures–and those of their children–appear increasingly bleak.
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Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent, and tens of millions of words have been written and broadcast, trying to convince the American people that the good times that arose from high taxes and government spending in the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties was some sort of illusion or a fluke. It was neither. The recession of the late Fifties is directly attributable to the Korean Conflict; the inflation and recessions that plagued the Seventies to Vietnam. Unnecessary, unresolved wars have the inevitable result of throwing money that is needed elsewhere down a rat hole.
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I will finish with quotes from two prominent Americans of the early Twentieth Century.
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The first is Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. “Taxes are the price that we pay for civilization.”
The second is a shortened paraphrase of President Theodore Roosevelt. “Those who are best able to pay taxes should pay the most.”
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The Koch Brothers and other plutocrats who are behind the Tea Party, the anti-tax movement, and all of the other ideas discussed by their sycophantic talking heads at Faux News and elsewhere–which I have catalogued in this article–do not deserve your support or approval. They deserve every patriotic American’s anger and disdain.
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Most of all, they need to be reminded not to make us angry. They wouldn’t like us when we’re angry.
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Author’s Bio: Richard Girard is an increasingly radical representative of the disabled and disenfranchised members of America’s downtrodden, who suffers from bipolar disorder (type II or type III, the professionals do not agree). He has put together a team to prosecute Bush, Cheney, et al., but has given up waiting for his credentials, and fully expects either the United Nations or Spain to beat him to it. An autodidact, he has read more than 3000 books over the last 35 years, on subjects including history, mathematics, political science, economics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, women’s studies, physics, martial arts, science fiction, and art. He is still editing Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trying to make it comprehensible to someone who is not a Rhodes Scholar. It surprisingly calms the worst effects of his bipolar disorder, acting both as a sleep aid, and helping to keep him out of the funny farm.