“Selfishness As Virtue”: The Narcissistic Politics Of Paul Ryan And The Servicing Of The Super-Rich Generation Of Termites
Often labeled a “reformer” for his determination to privatize Medicare and Social Security, Paul Ryan on closer inspection appears to be simply another Republican politician – like his new patron Mitt Romney – whose first priority is his own self-interest.
Both the ideology and the legislation he champions prove that he is utterly sincere in his admiration of Ayn Rand, the kooky libertarian author who elaborated her philosophy in a book candidly titled The Virtue of Selfishness. (The flavor of this 1964 essay collection can be gleaned from its original title, The Fascist New Frontier. Its first draft included a Rand screed that compared President John F. Kennedy with Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.)
Ryan is a millionaire – one of the most affluent members of Congress – chiefly owing to a series of inheritances from his own family and the family of his wife, an Oklahoma heiress. And like Romney, he would certainly benefit from the tax proposals in the “Ryan budget,” which provides even greater benefits for wealthy families like his own than the Bush budgets that he supported during the past decade. The Romney-Ryan ticket’s chief policy preoccupation, in fact, is cutting their own taxes yet again while gutting government functions that serve the middle class (while raising taxes on them).
But the self-serving short-sightedness epitomized by Ryan’s ideas extends well beyond cutting taxes for himself and people like him. Consider his voting record on energy and environmental issues, where he has been a faithful servant of Big Oil and “skeptic” of climate change caused by carbon emissions.
That record happens to coincide perfectly with the interests of his wife Janna and her father, a lawyer representing oil and gas interests. Ryan and his wife have already inherited millions of dollars from a trust established by her family; and they own shares in several companies leasing property in Oklahoma and Texas to energy firms that benefit from taxpayer subsidies protected in Ryan’s budget. Although Ryan occasionally complains about “corporate welfare,” he and Romney both oppose any reduction in the multi-billion-dollar tax breaks enjoyed by the oil and gas industry.
As for Ryan’s own inherited wealth, it is money that mostly came from the huge construction company established by his great-grandfather in the 19th century. Ryan Incorporated’s success grew from the construction of railroads, then highways, airports, bridges and other basic public infrastructure – in short, from government contracts. (Its website proudly outlines the company history and notes that today “the Company performs residential, commercial, industrial and power site work, landfill construction and capping and full-service golf course building/remodeling for both public and private customers.”
But while Ryan benefited personally from more than a century of construction that helped to create American society and a prosperous middle class, his budget serves only the super-rich generation of termites who would allow U.S. infrastructure to crumble, rather than provide sufficient resources to maintain and modernize it. Should the Ryan budget ever become law, very little or no federal money will remain available in future decades for such basic purposes of government. That is fine with him, evidently because Ryan’s own fortunes are no longer tied to the family construction business. (His cousins who still run the company would be wise to vote for anyone but him.)
Then there is Ryan’s longtime obsession with abolishing Social Security as a public insurance system, which first drew attention to him during the Bush administration in 2005. The Bush White House suffered political disaster by pursuing a privatization plan as he urged them to do. Strangely, while Ryan is decades away from retirement age, he has already collected Social Security in the form of survivor benefits. For two years he received a check every month, following the tragic early death of his father when the future Congressman was only 16 years old.
Thanks to Social Security, Ryan was able to save money for college – a story similar to that of Senator Al Franken’s wife Franni, who lost her father at an early age and attended college thanks to federal survivor benefits. But while Franni Franken’s experience ensured that she and her husband became staunch defenders of Social Security, Ryan is eager to deprive future orphans of the guaranteed support that he received.
If selfishness is truly a virtue, then Ryan is without peer. His ideas comprise a taxonomy of narcissistic public policy – from taxes to climate change, infrastructure, and social insurance — that would surely gratify his idol.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, August 15, 2012
“Erasing W”: Republications Want To Obliterate Any Trace Of The Administration That Created This Mess
As Bill Clinton is resurrected by the Democrats, George W. Bush is being erased by the GOP — as if an entire eight years of American history hadn’t happened.
While Bill Clinton stumps for Obama, Romney has gone out of his way not to mention the name of the president who came after Clinton and before Obama.
Clinton will have a starring role at the Democratic National Convention. George W. Bush won’t even be at the Republican one – the first time a national party has not given the stage at its convention to its most recent occupant of the Oval Office who successfully ran for reelection.
The GOP is counting on America’s notoriously short-term memory to blot out the last time the nation put a Republican into the Oval Office, on the reasonable assumption that such a memory might cause voters to avoid making the same mistake twice. As whoever-it-was once said, “fool me once …” (and then mangled the rest).
Republicans want to obliterate any trace of the administration that told America there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and led us into a devastating war; turned a $5 trillion projected budget surplus into a $6 trillion deficit; gave the largest tax cut in a generation to the richest Americans in history; handed out a mountain of corporate welfare to the oil and gas industry, pharmaceutical companies, and military contractors like Halliburton (uniquely benefiting the vice president); whose officials turned a blind eye to Wall Street shenanigans that led to the worst financial calamity since the Great Crash of 1929 and then persuaded Congress to bail out the Street with the largest taxpayer-funded giveaway of all time.
Besides, the resemblances between George W. Bush and Mitt Romney are too close for comfort. Both were born into wealth, sons of prominent politicians who themselves ran for president; both are closely tied to the nation’s corporate and financial elites, and eager to do their bidding; both are socially awkward and, as candidates, tightly scripted for fear of saying something they shouldn’t; and both presented themselves to the nation devoid of any consistent policies or principles that might give some clue as to what they actually believe.
They are both, in other words, unusually shallow, uncurious, two-dimensional men who ran or are running for the presidency for no clear reason other than to surpass their fathers or achieve the aims and ambitions of their wealthy patrons.
Small wonder the Republican Party wants us to forget our last Republican president and his administration. By contrast, the Democrats have every reason for America to recall and celebrate the Clinton years.
By: Robert Reich, Robert Reich Blog, August 10, 2012
“America’s Real Welfare Queen”: Romney Critical Of Government Aid That Helped Bain Capital Profit
Mitt Romney likes to say that “government does not create prosperity.”
His record in the private equity industry shows otherwise.
During Romney’s years as chief executive of Bain Capital LLC, companies owned by the firm received millions of dollars in benefits from a variety of state and local government economic development programs.
In California, taxpayer money built one Bain company a conveyor bridge between two of its buildings. New York City gave another Bain company tax breaks and lower energy bills to discourage it from moving to New Jersey. And in Indiana, a county government issued bonds to help buy new equipment for a Bain-owned steel plant — a business success featured in a Romney campaign ad touting his private sector prowess.
“From a national perspective, this makes no economic sense to allow cities and states to do this,” said Arthur Rolnick, former director of research for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. “In general, you want the market to be making these decisions — not the political system.”
The public-private agreements, which began in the first decade of Romney’s tenure as CEO, show that government played a supporting role in establishing Bain as among the nation’s most successful private equity firms and enabling him to accumulate a fortune his campaign says could reach $250 million.
Criticizing Government Involvement
On the campaign trail, the presumptive Republican nominee has hammered at President Barack Obama for favoring an unhealthy government role in the economy.
“When government, rather than the market, routinely selects winners or losers, or puts its hands on the scales of justice then enterprises and entrepreneurs can’t predict their prospects,” Romney said in a March 19 speech at the University of Chicago.
Asked about the disconnect between Romney’s free market rhetoric and Bain’s track record, Amanda Henneberg, a campaign spokeswoman, said: “It’s not at all uncommon for state and local governments to use competitive incentives and programs to create a favorable business climate.”
Yet in his Chicago speech, the former Massachusetts governor decried the “endless subsidies and credits intended to shape behavior in our economic society,” and assailed government “intrusion in the workings of the free marketplace itself.”
Exhibit A in Romney’s attack is the Obama administration’s investment in the failed solar power company Solyndra, which could cost taxpayers more than $500 million.
Massachusetts Investment Bankruptcy
Romney’s effort to capitalize on the administration’s stumbles was complicated this week by the June 1 failure of a Massachusetts clean energy company that received state financing while he was governor.
As a private equity investor, Romney showed no reluctance to accept help from government coffers — on one occasion even becoming partners with taxpayers.
In October 1994, a Connecticut state fund made a $500,000 equity investment in Environmental Data Resources of Milford, Connecticut, which Bain had helped start. The state’s Connecticut Innovations agency the previous year also had given the firm a separate $500,000 to be paid back with royalties from its software products.
The company used the money to hire several technologists and digitize old maps of industrial sites, according to Rob Barber, the company’s chief executive.
EDR Expansion
Beginning in 1991, Bain had invested $2.3 million in the company, which produced software for environmental site assessments, ultimately recording a 35.7 percent return, according to a Deutsche Bank prospectus that detailed the performance of Bain’s funds through 1999. Starting with just three employees, EDR grew to about 50 workers by the middle of the decade, Peter Cashman, the company’s founder, said in an interview.
Victor Budnick, who was then Connecticut Innovations’ director of investments, says the company obtained better terms for the public funds than it likely could have received from private investors. Private money would have been “disadvantageous from the perspective of ownership,” Budnick said.
The deal ultimately profited both the government and EDR. The state got back $3.8 million in return for its $500,000 equity stake plus an additional $1 million from its royalty- linked investment, according to Pamela Hartley, a spokeswoman for Connecticut Innovations.
Management-led Negotiations
There is no indication that Romney, who became CEO of Bain Capital in 1984, was directly involved in any of the individual companies’ negotiations with government officials. Such operational issues were typically left to the management of companies Bain acquired.
“I never heard of Bain Capital,” says Walter Sprouse, who was president of the Randolph County Economic Development Corporation in North Carolina when it ponied up $375,000 to help lure Sealy Inc.’s corporate headquarters.
Even so, Romney benefitted from the incentives, along with other Bain investors. When the Internet advertising company Double Click Inc. considered moving its Manhattan-based corporate headquarters, New York City’s Economic Development Corporation in 1999 provided a $4 million package of sales and energy tax breaks tied to the company’s payroll.
The company reported a loss of $56 million that year and was acquired by Google Inc. in 2008. Bain realized $88.6 million on its initial $8.5 million Double Click investment, made in 1997, according to the Deutsche Bank prospectus.
Bain Portfolio Returns
Bain’s investments in the companies that benefited from government actions were part of a portfolio that earned an 88 percent average annual return through the end of 1999, the prospectus said.
The two-time presidential candidate says his business experience qualifies him to turn around the troubled national economy. He accuses government of “standing in the way” of recovery.
Yet, government officials employed a variety of techniques to help Bain-owned companies. In Kansas City, city officials issued industrial revenue bonds as part of a financing arrangement that saved a Bain-owned steel company about $3 million in property taxes over five years, according to the Kansas City Business Journal.
Decaying Steel Plant
The GS Technologies facility, dating to the late 19th century, had employed around 4,500 workers at its peak. By the mid-1990s, the plant, which produced wire rods for the auto and furniture industries, cried out for modernization.
“Really, it was in bad, bad shape. It looked like something out of a Dickens novel,” said Mario Concha, who headed the company’s international division at the time.
To help fund a $70 million updating, the city in October 1993 authorized a $45 million industrial revenue bond, which GS Technologies was to purchase. Kansas City issued the first $5 million the following year and used the proceeds to buy steel- making equipment and lease it back to the company. That arrangement was designed so that the city could cut the mill’s property tax bill by 50 percent, according to the Kansas City Business Journal.
New equipment didn’t solve all the company’s problems. Foreign competition and a two-month strike in 1997 fueled a downward spiral, which led to bankruptcy in 2001. The Obama campaign has featured GS Technologies in a political ad that includes one former mill worker accusing Bain of “vampire” capitalism.
Industrial Revenue Bonds
Industrial revenue bonds, typically repaid with money generated from the project they fund, act as a subsidy for private business, reducing either their financing costs or their tax bill, said Timothy Bartik, senior economist of the W.E. Upjohn Institute in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
One of Bain’s companies drew government benefits on two coasts. In 1993, when Leiner Health Products of Torrance, California, was looking for a new home, officials in nearby Carson, California, agreed to construct a $500,000 conveyor bridge linking two buildings the maker of vitamins and nutritional supplements was eyeing.
“Our construction guys were in awe of how fast the turnaround time was for permits,” Giffen Ott, the former Bain executive who was the company’s vice president of manufacturing, told The Los Angeles Times.
Ott didn’t respond to e-mail and telephone requests for comment.
Upgrading Public Roads
Five years later, Leiner decided to move a portion of its manufacturing operation from Ohio to a new site in York County, South Carolina. State and local officials provided a package of benefits that included worker training, upgrades to public roads, water and sewer facilities, and tax breaks. Officials with the state’s Employment Security Commission even handled inquiries from would-be job applicants, according to a July 21, 1998 article in The Herald of Rock Hill, South Carolina.
The county cut Leiner’s property tax assessment by 43 percent, saving the company “millions of dollars,” according to Mark Farris, York County economic development director.
Leiner has since been acquired by NBTY Inc., which itself was acquired by the Carlyle Group in 2010. Michael Collins, NBTY’s chief financial officer, didn’t respond to e-mail and telephone requests for comment.
Free market purists object to such government aid to business, saying profitable companies don’t need it and unprofitable ones should be allowed to fail.
A Corporate Gift
“It is a gift to the corporation,” says James Bennett, eminent scholar at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. “The American welfare queen is the American corporation. All they’re doing is grabbing for taxpayer benefits and taxpayer dollars.”
The attractiveness of such deals can be glimpsed in cases where the marriage of public and private resources pays off for both sides. In 1998, state and local officials in Indiana assembled a package of incentives to convince Steel Dynamics Inc. (STLD) to locate a $341 million steel plant in Whitley County, in the state’s northeast corner.
Whitley County issued a $13 million taxable industrial revenue bond to buy the giant caster at the heart of the steel- making operation along with a separate $10 million bond for sewer and water improvements. State officials kicked in workforce training aid.
Company Expansion
In the intervening years, the company has expanded its Whitley County facility twice and now employs 596 workers. Last year, it produced 876,000 tons of structural steel beams for the construction industry and rails for the nation’s railroads, according to the company’s filings with Securities and Exchange Commission.
“It was a fabulous opportunity. Jobs have developed beyond our expectations,” said Jeff Gage, who was the county attorney at the time.
In an ad entitled “American Dream,” the Romney campaign boasts of the role his “private sector leadership team” played in Steel Dynamics’ success.
Some of his allies acknowledge that a savvy public sector deserves some of the credit.
“The government was trying to help out,” real estate developer Donald Trump, a Romney supporter, said during a May 14 appearance on Fox News, “and sometimes, that’s not the worst thing in the world.”
By: David J. Lynch, Bloomberg, June 5, 2012
An “Entangled Legacy”: The Sordid K Street Past Of Rick Santorum
Rick Santorum has received, and courted, plenty of comparisons with Mike Huckabee since his near-victory in the Iowa Caucuses, but not all of them have been earned. Yes, like Huckabee in 2008, Santorum has been heavily dependent on grassroots campaigning, with direct appeals to evangelical voters, and a veneer of folksy, blue-collar economic populism. But the comparison ought to stop there. What Santorum cannot match is Huckabee’s status as a genuine Washington outsider, someone untainted by the corrupt dealings inside the beltway. Indeed, Santorum’s record shows him to be deeply connected to the ethically unsavory and legally dubious world of DC influence-peddling.
Since losing his Pennsylvania Senate seat in 2006, Santorum has used his connections to land a series of highly-paid jobs. Consol Energy, a natural gas company specializing in “hydrofracking” and the fifth-largest donor to his 2006 campaign, paid him $142,000 for consulting work. He also earned $395,000 sitting on the board of United Health Services (UHS), a for-profit hospital chain whose CEO made contributions to his Senate campaigns and which stood to benefit from a big hike in Medicare payments Santorum proposed in 2003. (Incidentally, the Department of Justice sued UHS for Medicare and Medicaid fraud during Santorum’s four-year tenure on its board.) Santorum also earned paychecks from a religious advocacy group, a lobbying firm, and a think tank. For pushing legislation benefitting UHS and several other companies, one ethics group named Santorum to its “most corrupt Senators” list.
Santorum has made his post-Senate career doing the sort of quasi-lobbying that helped sink Newt Gingrich’s campaign in Iowa. But in fact, while still in office, he was a central actor in an even more sordid venture: The K Street Project. Started in 1989 by GOP strategist Grover Norquist and brought to prominence by former House majority leader Tom DeLay in 1995, the K Street Project was a highly organized effort to funnel Republican Congressional staffers into jobs at lobbying firms, trade organizations, and corporations, while attempting to block Democrats from those same posts. From 2001 until 2006, Santorum was the Project’s point man for the Senate, while House Majority Whip Roy Blunt manned the House side.
In 2006, the K Street Project was effectively forced to shut down amid public outcry; the following year, an ethics reform law made such outfits illegal. But in its heyday, it helped create an unprecedented revolving door between the White House, Congress and K Street, blurring distinctions between Republican policy and corporate welfare. As Elizabeth Drew put it in a 2005 New York Review of Books piece, “Democratic lobbyists have been pushed out of their jobs as a result; business associations who hire Democrats for prominent positions have been subject to retribution. They are told that they won’t be able to see the people on Capitol Hill they want to see.” Nicholas Confessore, in a groundbreaking 2003 Washington Monthly expose of the Project, detailed the goal bluntly: “First, move the party to K Street. Then move the government there, too.”
At the center of all this was Santorum. According to Confessore, Santorum conducted weekly breakfasts with lobbyists, and occasionally Congressmen and White House staff, during which he attempted to match Republican Hill staffers with K Street job openings. As Confessore put it, “Every week, the lobbyists present pass around a list of the jobs available and discuss whom to support. Santorum’s responsibility is to make sure each one is filled by a loyal Republican—a Senator’s chief of staff, for instance, or a top White House aide, or another lobbyist whose reliability has been demonstrated.” The group refused to meet with Democrats, and threatened sanctions against lobbies that did.
Revolving door tactics, until then de facto lobbying policy, were formalized and transformed into a “pay to play” system by the K Street Project. In 2003, after the top post at The Motion Picture Association of America went to a Democrat instead of a Republican, House Republicans reneged on an impending tax break, hitting the movie industry with a $1.5 billion bill. After the Democrat was chosen, Roll Call reported that “Santorum has begun discussing what the consequences are for the movie industry.” (Santorum, though he often denies his involvement in the K Street Project, more or less confirmed his involvement in the MPAA flap.) Later that year, the Washington Post revealed that the House Financial Services Committee pressured a consortium of mutual funds to oust a top lobbyist who was a Democrat in exchange for relaxing a pending investigation. After the smoke cleared, she was replaced by a Republican.
Whether the K Street Project was truly successful is up for debate. Confessore and Drew’s reports portray intimidated and marginalized Democratic lobbyists. According to a 2003 Washington Post story, a Republican National Committee official boasted that 33 of 36 top lobbying jobs had recently gone to Republicans. Former lobbyist Patrick Griffin, now an adjunct professorial lecturer at American University, told me that the project embodied the brazen crudeness of “DeLayism,” but also suggested that most lobbying firms and corporations were not “stupid” enough to purge Democratic staff and risk alienating much of the Hill.
What is clear is how much Santorum’s legacy is entangled with the two most corrupt political figures of the last decade: DeLay, and Jack Abramoff, who was said to have been involved in the Project. (Abramoff reportedly attended Santorum’s very first meeting, though Abramoff denied involvement and Santorum said in 2001 he couldn’t remember if he had.) Abramoff’s recent assertion that he “owned” politicians by dangling the promise of highly-paid lobbying gigs in front of powerful Hill staffers, though hyperbolic, is a fairly apt description of the K Street Project’s goals.
Yet, despite all this, Santorum’s communications director recently told the Washington Post that “Rick Santorum fought to destroy the good old boy network in Washington.” As an electoral strategy, of course, it makes sense for the former Senator to present himself as a Washington outsider and a paragon of personal ethics. But such claims of moral rectitude strain credulity. Santorum made a career polishing DC’s corrupt revolving door—only to walk through it himself at the first opportunity.
By: Simon van Zuylen-Wood, The New Republic, January 6, 2012
GOP Passes Up Generational Conservative Victory In Order To Protect The Wealthy
Oh, the irony.
After generations of conservative dogma based solidly in the belief that fundamental changes to America’s entitlement programs are essential to the economic survival and betterment of the nation, that goal is now, finally, within the reach of the true believers.
Yet, remarkably, this dramatic change in national direction is being permitted to slip right through conservative fingers by the very people whom those ensconced on the right should be counting upon to bring home this great philosophical victory.
The fulfillment of the conservative dream is not vanishing from sight because Nancy Pelosi and the forces of progressivism are prepared to defend entitlements to the death. Nor is it happening because the President of the United States has counted up the votes and decided that messing with entitlements will cost him re-election.
It is not even the result of “bleeding hearts” like me rising nobly in defense of the needy and downtrodden.
Significant entitlement reform, long the goal of the fathers of modern day conservatism, is being flushed down the drain by the very Republican Party that has long battled to bring that goal to reality.
Somewhere in Connecticut, William F. Buckley Jr. is turning over in his grave.
On Saturday, Speaker of the House John Boehner announced that the ‘grand bargain’ – rumored to bring $4 trillion in debt reduction over the next ten years through a mixture of entitlement reform, defense cuts and a measure of revenue increases resulting from cleaning up the tax code to get rid of some of the corporate entitlement programs that result in lower taxes and higher subsidies – is now off the table.
Apparently, Boehner could not sell the GOP Congressional Caucus on a deal that involved anything in the way of revenue increases- not even in exchange for accomplishing reforms for which his party has fought since the days of FDR and his “New Deal”.
True conservatives should not blame Boehner for this heresy as it appears that he is no happier with the position he is being forced to take than the President is with his proposal being rejected by House Republicans who don’t grasp the whole compromise thing.
What Boehner likely understands – better than those who he is supposed to be leading – is that the GOP is permitting the fundamental change, long at the heart of the conservative cause, to vanish into thin air and that it is happening in the name of protecting corporate subsidies that are the very antitheses of a free market economy – another of the inviolate tenets of conservative policy.
Subsidies that provide government incentives to industry are as anti-free market as government subsidies and controls that conservatives argue have skewed the costs of health care in America and led to our current crisis.
According to American conservative scripture, a truly free market requires that players compete on level ground – not with the edge that comes from government handouts and special tax breaks, whether they be for the benefit of a corporation or an individual.
Thus, the GOP is rejecting the opportunity to accomplish a landmark, philosophical milestone by protecting a policy that is, in and of itself, a violation of that same conservative philosophy.
Is the irony of this enough to make even the most ardent conservative believer question what in the world is going on here?
It certainly should be.
Could the explanation for this odd behavior be that the Congressional Republican Caucus has decided to turn its back on what is supposed to be their most fundamental beliefs because their constituents are demanding that they do so?
Apparently not.
According to the Christian Science Monitor, the GOP Caucus does not appear to have any interest whatsoever in listening to its base.
“Two-thirds (67 percent) approve of making more of high earners’ income subject to Social Security tax, and nearly as many approve of raising taxes on incomes of over $250,000 (66 percent), reducing military commitments overseas (65 percent) and limiting tax deductions for large corporations (62 percent),” the Pew Research Center reported last month.
“Notably,” Pew found, “Republicans are as likely as Democrats to approve of limiting corporate tax deductions.”
Still, any kind of tax increases – whether it be a greater tax bite on the wealthy or on corporations seen as “job creators” – is off the table as far as large numbers of Republican House members are concerned. Via The Christian Science Monitor
So, the GOP rejection of the debt deal is neither based in the free market philosophy nor the fundamental belief in entitlement reform. It is also not based on meeting their obligations to their constituents.
So, what is driving their rather remarkable position?
It must be jobs and the economy.
Surely, the Republicans in Congress are convinced that removing tax subsidies to the oil industry and cleaning up the tax code to get rid of corporate welfare that is no longer of any discernable value to the nation will make what is already a very bad jobs situation even worse.
Except that it turns out that you have to search long and wide to find an economist who supports this notion.
The other argument that advocates of tax cuts for the rich make is that many small-business owners would be see their taxes go up and thus would be discouraged from hiring workers. The facts do not support this. “Only 3 percent of small-business owners are in the top bracket,” notes Roberton Williams, a senior fellow with the Tax Policy Center, which is sponsored by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute. And, he adds, “They are not all what we think of as job-creating small businesses. A lot of them are hedge-fund managers and law-firm partners.” So other than perhaps a few restaurateurs on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the workforce is unlikely to be affected. Via Newsweek
So, while Eric Cantor continues to try and sell his base on this argument, it’s pretty hard to find anyone who knows anything about economics who actually is buying the pitch.
If it’s not philosophical dogma or fulfilling their obligation to those who elected them and it’s not the economy and/or jobs, what exactly is their problem?
I don’t know about you, but I can only think of one other explanation – fealty to the wealthy corporations and wealthy individuals who keep your Republican leadership rolling in the campaign cash so they can remain in their powerful jobs.
Now, if you believe this is a good enough reason to risk the financial stability of the nation – and possibly the world – then it’s all good.
Personally, I’m a little concerned.
I fear we are witnessing one of the most perverse and dangerous games our leaders have ever embarked upon. I’m stunned by the sheer audacity of these elected officials so ready to play chicken with the financial lives of so many simply to benefit a very few.
But what really amazes are the millions of middle class Americans who continue to believe that these officials are somehow acting in their best interest.
As curious as I am to see what will ultimately come of this game, my curiosity is far more piqued by the possibility that these middle class Americans might finally understand that the Republicans they sent to Congress work for the big corporations and care little for their needs and problems.
Should that light bulb (incandescent or otherwise) finally turn on, these folks should be assured that nobody is expecting them to run into the waiting arms of the Democratic Party. They can still quietly send their Congressional representatives a message indicating that they would prefer not to be abandoned so that Exxon might keep the government checks flowing in while maintaining their standing as upright, committed conservatives.
If these folks could – just this once – grasp what is being done in their name and communicate their rejection of the behavior of their leaders, the rest of us would genuinely appreciate it.
A true conservative should be as disgusted with what the Congressional Republican Caucus is doing as the rest of us and probably a great deal more so.
By: Rick Ungar, The Policy Page, Forbes, July 10, 2011
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 