Dear America,
The new congress--the 114th--has just begun, but the character of this two year session is already apparent. The first legislation to be considered by Mitch McConnell's new Senate and John Boehner's House was intended to abrogate President Obama's immigration initiatives by de-funding them, and to roll back the effects on our biggest banks of the Dodd-Frank Act, which was passed in the aftermath of the catastrophic near-failure of those banks in 2008-9. It is Mitch McBoehnell's dream: they can now undo everything accomplished by the Democrats and President Obama and bring us back to the state of affairs that existed when the financial failure began, but with the advantage of unlimited campaign funding courtesy of our newly conservative Supreme Court and its decision in Citizens United and an even wealthier plutocracy that capitalized on the financial crisis while the rest of us floundered. The now have impunity to utilize the lawmaking process to keep the Republicans, and hence conservatives, in office...and wealthy. At the same time, their judicial assault on the Affordable Care Act continues unabated with the justification that the American people "hate" the law, even though polls indicate that they want to keep it in place, but revise it where it needs revision. How the Republicans have convinced the American majority that putting them in charge was good for the average man and woman is a mystery to me. Our only hope is that President Obama grows a spine and uses the veto to prevent complete predation of the bottom 90% by the top 1%.
But I wonder; do the American people not know that among the lawsuits leveled at the Affordable Care Act--Obamacare if you prefer--one of them would serve no purpose but to take federal subsidies away from people who therefore will no longer be able to afford health insurance? Why would the American majority, which claims to be righteously Judeo-Christian, vote for that? And as to the repeal of the sections of the Dodd-Frank Act that require the big banks to divest themselves of the dangerous investments that got us into so much economic trouble and keep their operations for the banks' corporate profits separate from those undertaken on behalf of federally insured investors, who would vote for that? Yet, the Republicans have overtly vowed to do these things, and others, and they have now achieved hegemony in our entire legislature, having won majorities in both The House and The Senate. And they still insist that they seek compromise when all they do is assert their own conservative, trickle-down principles that have the effect of further stratifying our economy, and thus our society. In short, the conservative, Republican Party wishes to preside over a return to the "Gilded Age" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by conserving wealth at the expense of the working people who created it for their employers, and the working people keep voting for them.
To be somewhat specific as to Obamacare, the Republicans with their new majority in both houses propose to change the rule, which comes into effect this year, that the employer of anyone working 30 hours per week has to provide health insurance for that employee so that only workers working 40 hours or more have to be provided for if that employer employs 50 or more people. The rationale is that employers will reduce the hours of the already underpaid workers below 30 so they don't have to comply with the law, but why would that be to the advantage of the employer? The work still has to be done, so he'll only have to hire more workers to replace the hours of production he loses. According to Republican orthodoxy, hiring more workers, even if they earn less, is a good outcome. In the alternative, the Republicans argue, the employers of fifty or more would drop employees so that he no longer employed 50 people, but again, someone has to do the work, so does that mean that the remaining workers get more hours, and thus come closer to a living wage. Isn't that consistent with Republican dogma too? None of what the Republicans want to do is rational even under Republican, conservative models if you are a working person, yet our working people continue to vote sufficiently Republican that the party is ascending in terms of its power. It's all reminiscent of the lyric from that old sixties song: "something's happening here...what it is ain't exactly clear." You wanna know what I think?
It all goes back to that old Will Rogers line: "I'm not a member of any organized party. I'm a Democrat." It is the Democratic Party, from top to bottom that has failed, not that the Republicans have succeeded. All those things I discussed earlier were on the news, but the Democrats failed to attach them to the issues that comprise the partisan divide. Democrats--aligned primarily with progressive principles--are diametrically opposed to most of what the Republicans--aligned primarily with conservative principles--propose to do. And what the Republicans propose to do is not so good for the majority of us who don't happen to be well-off. The Republicans are waging a class war, but somehow, the Democrats seem to be unable to make that clear. They seem unable to explain how the Republican agenda is deleterious to the egalitarian principles on which this country was founded, and that the proof is in the fact that wages have not increased appreciably in terms of current dollars for the past 35 years...ever since Ronald Reagan first promoted supply-side, trickle-down economics...but business is enjoying record profits. So, I guess the bottom line is that we Democrats have to change our criteria when we look for candidates to run for national office on our ticket. We still need people with high-minded ideas, but what we need more is people who can explain them.
Your friend,
Mike
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