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Time for change's Journal
The Republican Party (along with some corporate-controlled Democrats) gives us every excuse in the book for opposing meaningful health care reform. But beneath all the meaningless babbling rhetoric lies a very simple truth: The passage of meaningful health care reform could spell the end of the Republican Party.
To understand why this is true we need to consider the over-riding message of today’s Republican Party, which was summed up on January 20, 1981, in a simple phrase by Ronald Reagan in his first inaugural address, when he said “Government is not the solution to our problem”. With that simple minded idea, and the selling of it to the American people, President Reagan began the overturning of almost five decades of understanding between the American people and their government – an understanding in the form of a social compact, to the effect that the primary purpose of our government is to help us to solve our most pressing problems. Creation of the social compact between the American people and their government When President Roosevelt took office in January 1933, we were in the initial phase of the worst depression in our history. FDR commenced immediately to take active steps to bring us out of that depression, which were collectively known as the “New Deal”. Some of the most concrete results of FDR’s efforts were the Social Security Act of 1935, the creation of several agencies that produced greatly needed jobs, labor protection laws that created the right for workers to organize into unions and a federal minimum wage, antitrust policies, the GI bill of rights, and to help pay for some of those programs, record tax rates on wealthy corporations and individuals. But perhaps just as important as these concrete accomplishments was the creation of a social compact between the American people and their government known as the “Second Bill of Rights” FDR first began speaking about our country’s need for economic and social rights to compliment the political rights granted to us in our original Bill of Rights during his first campaign for President, in 1932. Though his whole twelve year Presidency and four presidential campaigns centered largely on advocating for and implementing those rights, it wasn’t until his January 11th, 1944, State of the Union address to Congress that he fully enumerated his conception of those rights in what he referred to as a Second Bill of Rights. The elements of that conception fall into two major categories – opportunity and security. Here is a partial introduction to FDR’s Second Bill of Rights, discussed in his 1944 State of the Union address: We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made. In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all – regardless of station, race, or creed. FDR then went on to enumerate those rights, which included the right to a good job, a good education, freedom from unfair competition (i.e. corporate monopolies), protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accidents, and unemployment, adequate medical care, decent housing, and adequate food, clothing and recreation. The economic and social results of FDR’s social compact and accompanying actions Results followed quickly. The steep slide in GDP was arrested in 1933, and began a steady rise in 1934, so that by 1940 it had nearly reached pre-Crash levels:  Unemployment rate closely paralleled GDP during this time period – inversely. Unemployment rate stood at nearly 25% when FDR took office. It declined steadily during his presidency, so that by 1939 it was below 18% – not good, but quite an improvement. Job creation during FDR’s first presidential term was 5.3% annually, the largest rate of job creation during any presidential term from the beginning of the Hoover presidency in 1929 to the end of George W. Bush’s presidency in 2009:  The New Deal didn’t just fade away after FDR’s death. Instead, due to its stunning success, most of its components lasted for decades. Largely as a result of this, we experienced for the next three decades what Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman calls “the greatest sustained economic boom in U.S. history”. As a result of the labor protection laws enacted during FDR’s presidency, the percent of non-agricultural U.S. workers who were members of labor unions rose from 10% to close to 30% during his presidency and remained at that level for many decades, until the anti-labor policies of the Reagan administration resulted in a precipitous decline in union membership. The labor protection laws and other New Deal innovations, such as Social Security and unemployment insurance, were instrumental in alleviating poverty in our country and producing a vibrant middle class. Median family income is one of the best indicators of the economic health of a people. This chart shows median family income levels, beginning in 1947, when accurate statistics on this issue first became available. Family income rose steadily (in 2005 dollars) from $22,499 in 1947 to more than double that, $47,173 in 1980. The political effects of FDR’s social compact and actions Today’s Republican Party doesn’t talk about the economic and social results of the New Deal – except to lie about it. Nor do they care about the several decades of benefits it brought to the American people. But they certainly care about the political results. Let’s look at how the successes of the New Deal translated into several decades of political dominance of the Democratic Party. The presidency FDR was re-elected three consecutive times (four times total), and his Vice President, Harry Truman, was elected president in 1948, thus capping off 20 consecutive years of the U.S. presidency under Democratic control. It took a major war hero (who many believe was more responsible than any one person for our victory in World War II), Dwight Eisenhower, to finally wrest control of the presidency from the Democrats. In conducting his presidential campaigns in 1952 and 1956, Eisenhower had to keep in mind that The American people who lived during the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the “greatest sustained economic boom in U.S. history” knew what the New Deal did for them. He made this perfectly clear in a letter that he wrote to his brother on the subject: Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are…. a few Texas oil millionaires… Their number is negligible and they are stupid. Eisenhower’s presidency was followed by eight years of the Kennedy-Johnson presidencies (1961-69), in which valiant efforts were made to extend FDR’s social compact to minorities. President Kennedy brought the case to the American people in a speech just four months prior to his assassination in November 1963. Here is an excerpt: The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the nation in which he is born, has about one-half as much chance of completing high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day; one third as much chance of completing college; one third as much chance of becoming a professional man; twice as much chance of becoming unemployed; one-seventh as much chance of earning $10,000 a year; a life expectancy which is seven years shorter; and the prospects of earning only half as much. Kennedy’s efforts to pursue this social legislation were cut short by his untimely death. Lyndon Johnson then became President in November 1963 and continued to vigorously pursue the Kennedy-Johnson social agenda. Landmark social and civil rights legislation passed during the Kennedy-Johnson years included the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Social Security Amendments of 1965 which created Medicare and Medicaid (which many Republicans referred to as “socialized medicine” at the time), the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, Project Head Start, and much other legislation as part of President Johnson’s War on Poverty. These efforts were well under-way when Johnson won a landslide victory in the presidential election of 1964, defeating Barry Goldwater by a national popular vote margin of more than 22% and winning every state except for Goldwater’s home state of Arizona and five states in the Deep South, which were upset about Johnson’s civil rights legislation. It took the Vietnam quagmire to put an end to Democratic predominance in presidential elections, in 1968. Congress In discussing Democratic predominance in Congress I’ll focus on the House of Representatives, since changes in the Senate are slower to occur due to the fact that U.S. Senators serve 6-year terms. Nevertheless, changes in the Senate generally parallel changes in the House. The GOP held the House and Senate, mostly by wide margins, from 1919 to 1931. Their margin in the House stood at 267- 163 when Herbert Hoover won the presidential election of 1928. The Stock Market Crash of 1929 put an end to GOP Congressional dominance, as they held on to miniscule leads in the Senate and House (218- 216) in the midterm election of 1930. With a deepening depression and FDR’s landslide election victory in 1932, the Democrats firmly took over control of both the Senate and House (313- 117). With the onset of the New Deal and the brightening financial situation, Democrats then maintained control of both the Senate and the House during the remainder of FDR’s long presidential reign, mainly by huge margins. House margins during that time were as follows: 1934: 222- 103 1936: 339- 89 1938: 322- 103 1940: 262- 169 1942: 222- 209 1944: 243- 190 Over the next 50 years, from 1945 to 1995, the Democrats maintained control of the House in 22 of the 24 ensuing elections, by 70-seat or greater margins in 15 of those elections. The only two elections in which they failed to maintain control of the House took place in 1946 (when President Truman’s approval rating was a woeful 27%, and 1952, when Eisenhower won his first presidential election with a platform that included full support for continuation of the New Deal. The Democrats maintained control of the Senate in 19 of those 24 elections (They lost control of the Senate in the two elections in which they lost control of the House, plus three elections during the 1980s.) The Reagan Revolution – Dismantling the New Deal By 1980 the number of Americans who were old enough to remember how FDR’s social compact rescued our country from the Great Depression and set it on course for “the greatest sustained economic boom in U.S. history” was rapidly dwindling. So it is that Ronald Reagan won the Presidential election of 1980 with his claim that “government is not the solution to our problem” and his promise to “get government off the backs of the American people”. Following several decades of phenomenal economic growth, median income came to a virtual standstill in the 1980s. For the next 25 years, except for some moderate growth during the Clinton years, there was almost no growth in median income at all, which rose only from $47,173 in 1980 to $56,194 by 2005 (85% of that growth was accounted for during the Clinton years). William Kleinknecht writes about the Reagan Presidency and legacy in his book, “The Man Who Sold the World – Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America”. From the book jacket: The myth of Ronald Reagan’s greatness has reached epic proportions in recent years. The public rates him as one of the most popular presidents, and Republicans everywhere seek to cast themselves in his image. But award winning journalist William Kleinknecht shows in this penetrating analysis of his presidency that the Reagan legacy has been devastating for the country – especially for the ordinary Americans he claimed to represent. So how did one of the worst presidents in our history come to be seen in such a glamorous light? Some call Reagan the “teflon president” because none of his many scandals would “stick” to him in the public mind. But there was a very good reason for that. Kleinknecht explains in his introduction: It cannot be disputed that there are legions of Reagan critics across the country. But why are they never seen on television or quoted in the media? Why is this dissenting view of Reagan’s “heroism” never in the public eye? … When it comes to media assessments of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the usual standards seem not to apply. Let’s just say that our corporate controlled media wish to maintain his image. Kleinknecht sums up Reagan’s philosophy of government with respect to the New Deal: Reagan stood against everything that had been achieved in this remarkable age of reform. His constant attacks on the inefficiency of government, a rallying cry taken up by legions of conservative politicians across the country, became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more money that was taken away from government programs, the more ineffective they became, and the more ineffective they became, the more ridiculous government bureaucrats came to be seen in the public eye. Gradually government, and the broader realm of public service, has come to seem disreputable… Politicians, imbued with the same exaltation of self-interest that is the essence of Reaganism, increasingly treat public office as a vehicle for their own enrichment. To the present – Why the GOP will fight meaningful health care reform to the bitter end Democrats finally began to reassert their political dominance in the national elections of 2006 and 2008, as the American public tired of more than two decades of Republican misrule. With less than 30% of Americans considering themselves Republicans it looked like the Republican Party could be on the verge of extinction. As our country now stands mired in its worst depression since the Great Depression of the 1930s, one thing seems certain: If the Obama presidency, in conjunction with a heavily Democratic Congress, duplicates the brilliant successes of the FDR presidency, the political prospects of the Republican Party are bound to be dismal for many decades to come – just as they were for several decades following FDR’s presidency. Health care now stands in the limelight. It is absolutely symbolic of the great divide between FDR Democrats and the do-nothing Republican Party of Ronald Reagan. A successful health care bill, following years of vitriolic Republican attacks, will show the Republican Party for the dismal failure that it is. It will show the no-nothing philosophy of Reagan Republicans to be the fraud that it is and always has been. In short, it will be impossible to maintain the myth that the American people are better off with a government that believes it has nothing to offer them except moral platitudes, military spending, and war. The Republican Party with their empty platitudes and promises will be shown for what they are. They will be politically dead. Paul Krugman, in his book, “The Conscience of a Liberal”, sums up the current health care situation as well as anyone: The principal reason to reform American health care is simply that it would improve the quality of life for most Americans… There is, however, another important reason for health care reform. It’s the same reasons movement conservatives were so anxious to kill Clinton’s plan. That plan’s success, said William Kristol, “would signal the rebirth of centralized welfare-state policy” – by which he really meant that universal health care would give new life to the New Deal idea that society should help its less fortunate members. Indeed it would – and that’s a big argument in its favor… Getting universal care should be the key domestic priority for modern liberals. Once they succeed there, they can turn to the broader, more difficult task of reining in American inequality. But unfortunately, the current outlook for health care reform in our country is in deep trouble. It may or may not pass. And if it does pass it may be so watered down that it provides few benefits for the American people. The Republican Party cannot afford to let health care reform succeed. Democrats who care about their Party, their country, and the American people cannot allow it to fail. |
U.S. Democracy in Crisis
Time for change  The Democratic Underground was born on one of the worst days in U.S history – The day that the worst President in U.S. history took office. Now, here we are 8 years later, and we’ve managed to remove that cancer from our nation and replace it with something much better. Notwithstanding my many ambivalent feelings towards President Obama, I have no doubt that he will be infinitely better for our country than his predecessor. Yet despite that, our country has been terribly scarred from the events of the past eight years, and it continues to suffer from all of the root problems that brought us the worst President in our history in 2000 and 2004. Therefore, it is worth taking a look at the root problems that brought us to this sorry state of affairs. MAJOR IMPEDIMENTS TO DEMOCRACY IN THE UNITED STATES One thing that we must keep in mind when considering our current problems is that they are not new. They were greatly exacerbated by eight years of Bush administration misrule, but they did not start with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Money in politics All but the most naïve of the American citizenry know that the wealthy and powerful in our country routinely influence our local and national elections through huge campaign contributions. And they also know that they are generally well rewarded for their “contributions”. And they also know that bribery is presumably against the law in our country. Yet, on the rare occasion that our politicians are actually accused of bribery, our news media makes a great big deal over it, as if bribery is actually a rare event in American politics. The end result is that a great many of our politicians do everything they can to make their wealthiest constituents happy with them, at the expense of everyone else. They do that with the knowledge that the voters they lose in doing so will be more than compensated for by the disinformation that will be paid for by their wealthiest constituents. I discuss this situation in more detail here, here, and here. There are a few dots to connect here, but any reasonable assessment of American politics tells us that bribery is routinely used to buy and sell elections in our country. So routine is it that it is actually built into our system and legalized. But that fact is never overtly spoken of. To do so would imply that our system of government is as much or more an aristocracy than it is a democracy. Bill Moyers, in his book “Moyers on Democracy”, explains the situation bluntly: We have lost the ability to call the most basic transaction by its right name. If a baseball player stepping up to home plate were to lean over and hand the umpire a wad of bills before he called the pitch, we’d call that a bribe. But when a real estate developer buys his way into the White House and gets a favorable government ruling that wouldn’t be available to you or me, what do we call that? A “campaign contribution”. Let’s call it what it is: a bribe. The legality of contributing money to political candidates, with the implicit (though not explicit) understanding that that money will buy political favoritism, has been defended by both our courts and our Congress by sanctimoniously pointing to the free speech provisions in the First Amendment to our Constitution and claiming that money is speech. But the absurdity of that contention should be obvious to anyone with some primary school education. Speech is of value from a political standpoint (or any other standpoint) only when it is heard. But if one billionaire has one thousand times as much opportunity to speak through a medium which reaches millions than several thousand other people added together, the speech of that one billionaire will drown out the speech of most other people, thereby interfering with their right to free speech. Election fraud Electronic vote switching with DRE (direct-recording electronic) machines poses a great danger to the integrity of our election system – by virtue of its ability to switch a voter’s vote without being noticed by the voter. In other words, someone tries to vote for John Kerry, and the machine registers a vote for George Bush instead. What makes matters worse is that many or most of these machines don’t even produce a piece of paper with the vote on it, which can then later be used for a recount. So, if fraud is suspected there is no recourse. And worse yet is the fact that most of these machines use proprietary (secret) code to determine who the voter voted for. We know for a fact that vote-switching occurred in the 2004 election. One study, based on voter reports to the national Electronic Incident Reporting System (EIRS), showed that vote switching incidents favored Bush over Kerry by a ratio of 12 to 1 nationally. A similar study showed that these vote switching incidents that favored Bush were 9 times as common in the heavily contested “swing states” than in non-swing states. To make the point that the EIRS reports represent only a small fraction of actual Election Day problems, an investigation by the Washington Post identified about 25 electronic voting machines in Youngstown, Mahoning County, Ohio, that were said to have been switching votes all day long. Yet only eight incidents of this nature from Mahoning County (all in favor of Bush) were reported to EIRS that day. Clint Curtis, a computer programmer working in Florida prior to the 2004 election, testified before the Democratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee that he was requested in 2000 by his boss (at the request of a high level Republican operative, Tom Feeney) to “develop a prototype of a voting program that could alter the vote tabulation in an election and be undetectable”. Curtis’ testimony was followed by the death of Raymond Lemme, who while investigating Curtis’ allegations was found dead in a Georgia hotel room, just a couple weeks after telling Curtis that he had traced the corruption “all the way to the top”, Another type of election fraud is the illegal purging of registered voters from the voter rolls. Like vote switching, the increasing computerization of voter registration is no doubt making it much easier to perpetrate this type of fraud on a mass basis. This article describes a great deal of evidence that voter registration fraud played a major role in the 2004 presidential election, and in fact was probably the deciding factor in Ohio, which gave George Bush his electoral victory. Similarly, although the 2000 presidential election was stolen by a variety of means, voter registration fraud was quantitatively the most important method used. In 2000, the Florida Governor’s office used a computer program to purge tens of thousands of mostly black and Democratic voters. There are many other means of election fraud that have been used in our country to destabilize our democracy. I discuss this issue in more detail, along with means for preventing election fraud, in this post. Our corporate news media If cash donated to their political campaigns is not enough to carry them through to victory, and if election fraud doesn’t happen to play a significant role, the corporate news media serves as another valuable tool for those seeking to sabotage our democracy. This problem overlaps with the role of money in politics, since those who own and control the corporate media are uniformly wealthy, and since it was their money that led to the acts that enabled our corporate media to become what it is today – Ronald Reagan’s veto of Democratic legislation to enforce the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, and the Telecommunications Act of 1996. This legislation allowed the monopoly consolidation of our news media to the point where today it is controlled by a very small number of extremely wealthy individuals. Several excellent books have been written about the extent to which wealthy corporate interests control our news media today. I would highly recommend “Lapdogs – How the Press rolled Over for Bush”, by Eric Boehlert, “What Liberal Media – The Truth About BIAS and the News”, by Eric Alterman, and “Into the Buzzsaw – The Myth of a Free Press”, edited by Kristina Borjesson. And I have ranted about pseudo-journalists such as Tim Russert, who have made a largely successful, but hypocritical effort to appear unbiased to their viewers. The bottom line, as Bill Moyers points out, is that the protection offered us by our First Amendment is based on the assumption of a separation of our government and a free press, which is supposed to protect us from government abuses. Moyers wrote this during the Bush administration: What would happen, however, if the contending giants of big government and big publishing and broadcasting ever joined hands, ever saw eye to eye in putting the public's need for news second to free-market economics? That's exactly what's happening now under the ideological banner of "deregulation". Giant media conglomerates that our founders could not possibly have envisioned are finding common cause with an imperial state in a betrothal certain to produce not the sons and daughters of liberty but the very kind of bastards that issued from the old arranged marriage of church and state. Consider the situation. Never has there been an administration so disciplined in secrecy, so precisely in lockstep in keeping information from the people at large and -- in defiance of the Constitution -- from their representatives in Congress. Never has the powerful media oligopoly ... been so unabashed in reaching like Caesar for still more wealth and power. Never have hand and glove fitted together so comfortably to manipulate free political debate, sow contempt for the idea of government itself, and trivialize the peoples' need to know. Secrecy in government Democracy suffers terribly when a nation’s citizens are uninformed – especially when they are uninformed with respect to the actions and motivations of their own government. If we don’t know what our government is doing, then how can we be expected to vote them out when they do something that we would consider deeply immoral had we known about it? Consider war for example. If Americans understood the real motivations for its nation’s wars, they would probably be much more likely to strenuously object to those wars. That would make war much less politically feasible, and our country would therefore be led into war much less frequently than it has been in the past. That is why I so hate the “national security” excuse for withholding information from us, the American people – which has become so routine that it is willingly or passively accepted by the good majority of Americans. I very much doubt that the “national security” excuse for withholding information from the American people has anything to do with national security more than 5% of the time. Rather, the reason for withholding such information from us is almost always something totally different. It is to blind us to the real reasons for war or other nefarious acts, so that we will accept them and willingly support or even risk our lives in their cause. Rampant U.S. nationalism and the GAME Two months ago I wrote a DU post that I titled “The GAME”, which I began by discussing “Unmentionable things in U.S. politics” – including such things as the stealing of a U.S. presidential election, calling American military or covert actions immoral rather than merely “misguided”, and imputing bad intentions rather than mere incompetence to a U.S. president. I find this to be terribly repressive, not because I personally can’t mention these things, but because our elected representatives are under tremendous pressure not to discuss them. We elect them to represent us and our nation, and except for some rare courageous exceptions such as Dennis Kucinich, Cynthia McKinney, and Robert Wexler, they refuse to even talk about some of our very most important issues. It has occurred to me that this provides the backdrop for a huge GAME that has been foisted upon us. A prerequisite of the GAME is to create an alternate reality that must be believed by a critical mass of people in order for the GAME to proceed. Why is that necessary? I believe it’s necessary because the reality is so terrible that if enough people consciously recognized it they would rise up and simply refuse to play the GAME. Although the GAME’s masters set the rules, there are two related character traits of many Americans that cause them to play along: Rampant nationalism and a propensity for denial. Rampant nationalism is the attitude that our country is inherently better than any other country – so much so that it can do no wrong. This attitude is drummed into the American people from the time that most of us learn how to talk. We are made to feel that to believe or speak otherwise demonstrates a dangerous lack of “patriotism”, which makes us deserving of being shunned – or worse. The other character trait that persuades too many Americans to play the GAME is denial. Believing terrible things about one’s country can be very painful. Accepting reality as it is, rather than as one would like it to be, can be very painful. To make this point, in a recent post titled “12 Things that Never Happened in American History”, I discuss the following official stories that we have been told (or not told): The U.S. is not an imperialist country; FDR’s New Deal was not instrumental in ending the Great Depression; the Cold War was just about fighting totalitarian Communism; JFK was assassinated by a lone gunman; bribery is infrequent in American politics; Iran-Contra was not a criminal abuse of presidential power; U.S. presidential elections cannot be stolen; Bush and Cheney did everything they could to protect us against the 9/11 attacks; the Bush administration’s crimes are not serious enough to warrant impeachment or prosecution; and, we’re barely told about our nation’s killing of more than a million Iraqi civilians, the October Surprise, or Operation Northwoods. CONSEQUENCES These impediments to democracy work together to surrender great amounts of power into the hands of a small number of elites, who use that power in the cause of increasing their wealth and power at the expense of everyone else. It is a vicious cycle that is very difficult to break. Here are some of the major tragic consequences. Rampant militarism and illegal aggression against sovereign nations We are so often told how good and pure our nation and its people are that only a minority of Americans are aware of the extent of our many illegal and immoral activities. Many or most who aren’t aware of these activities would be shocked to learn about them and quite resistant to accepting that information as the truth. In myriad instances we have overthrown or assisted in the overthrow of sovereign nations. In the good majority of these instances we have substituted a repressive right wing government for one that was much more responsive to the needs and desires of the nation’s citizenry. Sometimes genocide was used to accomplish our goals. The purpose of these activities has most often been to create a government that is friendlier to the desires of American businesses or corporations – though we always have some sort of rationalization for our actions. In “Excuses for War” I discuss many of the phony excuses that the United States government has used to lead us into war, including its Indian wars, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, and the Vietnam War. In “The Roots and Consequences of U.S. Overseas Imperialism” I note or discuss our covert and overt illegal and immoral overthrowing of the sovereign nations of Hawaii (1893), Cuba (1898), Puerto Rico (1898), the Philippines (1899-1902), Nicaragua (1910), Honduras (1911-1912), Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), South Vietnam (1963), Chile (1973), Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), Afghanistan (2001), and Iraq (2003). In “The Meaning of U.S. Imperialism, Genocide and Militarism” I note U.S. perpetrated genocides, as described in “State of Darkness” by David Model, including our atomic bombing of Japan (1945), those perpetrated against Guatemala (1954), Vietnam (1954-73), Indonesia (1965), Cambodia (1970-75), Laos (1969-74), and East Timor (1975), and our two wars against Iraq. Other atrocities include our invasion of Cuba in 1961; U.S. Marine invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 to put down a rebellion against their repressive right wing government; U.S. military support of Haitian tyrant and mass murderer, Francois Duvalier; and numerous brutal interventions in several Latin American and African nations. Massive Income and wealth inequality Inequality of wealth in the United States is truly astounding – and it is increasing at a fast rate. In the United States in 2001, 1% of the population controlled 38% of the wealth, whereas the bottom 40% owned just 1%. That means that, on average, individuals in the top 1% owned about 1,500 times more wealth than individuals in the bottom 40%. The rising level of income inequality in our country recently exceeded the point where it stood just prior to the stock market crash of 1929, which led to the worst depression in U.S. history. There are many who see a connection between the income inequality preceding that depression and our current situation. This graph, which plots income inequality measured as the ratio between the average income of the top 0.01% of U.S. families compared to the bottom 90%, over time, makes that point. I discuss the subject of income and wealth inequality here, here, and here. The loss of the rule of law During the Bush Presidency I often argued that he should be impeached for his many crimes. Now that he can no longer be impeached, I have argued that our Justice Department should prosecute him for those crimes, and if it fails to do so then the International Criminal Court (ICC) should step in. While Bush was still President, President Obama weighed in against impeachment, saying that impeachment should be reserved for only the most serious crimes. Now that he is President he has thus far given little or no indication that he intends to have his Justice Department prosecute George Bush or any other high level Bush administration official for their crimes. But if widespread torture, an illegal war of aggression, spying on American citizens, suspending of the right of habeas corpus, and numerous other violations of our Constitution don’t constitute serious crimes, then what does? What would people say if a prosecuting attorney failed to prosecute a rapist and murderer simply because he had high level political connections? Who would accept that? Then why when far more serious crimes are committed by a President of the United States are there so many people who seem to think that it is ok to sit passively by and make no attempt to hold the perpetrators accountable for their crimes? I’ll tell you why. It’s like I said earlier in this post. Saying that a former U.S. President might be guilty of prosecutable crimes is simply against the rules of the GAME. Given that and the failure to hold the Reagan administration accountable for its Iran-Contra crimes, George Bush and Dick Cheney connected the dots and thought that they might be able to get away with just about anything. Testing that assumption by moving ahead with prosecutions might be politically risky for the Obama administration. The Republican Party would no doubt raise holy hell if there was an attempt to prosecute high level Bush administration officials. Consequently, we live in country in which, protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, certain people are indeed above the law. That fact, taken together with all of the impediments to democracy discussed in the first part of this post, means that democracy and the rule of law in our country are in grave danger. Indeed, some believe that we narrowly averted a military coup perpetrated by the Bush administration. The American people and their leaders need to reassess what our country stands for. Is our democracy important enough to take steps to remove the role of money in politics, reform our election system, break up the corporate monopoly on our news media, require government actions to be much more transparent than they now are, and dare to look more objectively at who we are and what we do? Can we give up imperialism and warfare for the sake a world in which nations live and work together to further the cause of peace and justice? Can we make our nation one in which all of its citizens truly have the opportunity for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? And do our laws apply to all people, not just to those who lack the political influence to avoid them? If we think that these things are important we have a great deal of work to do, lest our country sinks into a tyranny from which it may never recover. Profile Information Time for change
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the Democratic Underground Discussion Forums. Curious: Is any Republican expected to vote Yea? By Commie Pinko Dirtbag Pelosi walks with 1965 Medicare gavel By babylonsister Lyndeborough New Hampshire bans computerized voting By WillYourVoteBCounted Lyndeborough New Hampshire bans computerized voting By WillYourVoteBCounted CLUW Honors 11 Union Women for ‘Extraordinary Achievements’ By Omaha Steve |
