http://www.juancole.com/2008/09/nation-of-masochists.html">A Nation of MasochistsBy Juan Cole
September 22, 2008
I have concluded that Americans, who pretend in public to be straitlaced, are in fact rabid masochists addicted to whips, black leather and the application of fists. ..... The diagnosis of national masochism is the only thing that can satisfactorily explain the poll numbers in the presidential race.
Let's get this straight.
The Republican Party came to Washington, DC, in 2000 with a solid majority in both houses of Congress and on the Supreme Court, allowing them to steal the presidency, as well. If you wanted to know what a pure Republican-Party government unhindered by the Democrats, Libertarians, Greens or Socialists might look like, this was the moment.
So they came to power when there was a budget surplus bequeathed by a Democratic president.
They immediately ran up a big deficit every year since, doubling the national debt from $5 trillion to $10 trillion. You don't run big deficits of $300 and $400 billion a year in good times according to Keynes. You save the the deficit spending for a recession, when the economy needs a jolt. If you're already racking up a big deficit every year in a good economy, you have no way of making a difference during a significant downturn except by then going for a truly mega-deficit, which risks destroying the value of your currency abroad. In a service economy like that of the US, a dollar with a declining value might not even help the economy via exports very much, since the manufactured goods are being made down in Mexico now, anyway.
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With the government encumbered with $5 trillion in new debt before September, and now with another trillion and a half (probably when it is all said and done with), how exactly will social security be fixed?
(Hint: Republican leaders such as Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich hated social security, because the people are grateful to the Democrats for it. Bush tried to privatize it and McCain would have helped him; you wonder if they are trying deliberately to destroy it. Social security is the main reason for which the elderly are not now, as they were in the 1930s, the poorest and most miserable section of society.)
Then many of the Republicans came to Washington with a crooked plan to use fraudulent methods to ensure that campaign financing went almost exclusively to them through super-lobbyists like Jack Abramoff. Grover Norquist's K-Street Project aimed at guaranteeing big corporate dollars for the Republicans in exchange for their granting the corporations the right to write the legislation affecting their industry. Thus, laws governing pharmaceuticals were written by the pharmaceutical industry lobbyists and just signed off on by the Republicans.
.....The K-Street crowd just let the business classes run the legislature directly, themselves, having the regulatory laws written to suit them.
So Abramoff, Delay, the K-Street crowd are busted. Once upon a time such a thing would have been a huge political scandal and would have haunted the party that produced it. But because US Big Media is mostly Republican-owned, it just quietly subsided as a story.
It is not just that the rap sheet against the Class of 2000, 2002, and 2004 among the Republican politicians is longer than a trans-Atlantic cable, it is that so much of the corruption took the form of a conspiracy.
All parties have people in them looking to get rich on the side. But the K Street Project and various other such scams weren't just about individual aggrandizement. They were about fixing the whole American system permanently to kow-tow to the super-rich without so much as a whimper, and to positively punish the middle classes.
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More in the next post.