Tag Archives: republicans

Political Rants

Stuff and … more stuff.

Once again, a bit pressed for times. Projects, projects, projects – you know the tune. Here’s what’s chewing on my nerves this week:

In search of a problem. The G.O.P. is obsessed with the notion of voter fraud, a phenomenon so rare that it makes injuries from lightning strikes seem frequent by comparison. Can we just stop pretending, for five minutes, that this is a sincere concern about the integrity of our elections? It’s pretty obvious what they’re up to – they are fighting a rear-guard action against demographic trends, long acknowledged, that do not favor a virtually all-white party such as themselves. The only way to do that is through the usual methods they have employed over the years: voter suppression. Voter I.D. laws, in particular, are meant to place significant hurdles of time, expense, and logistics between individuals and the ballot. Let’s call it what it is – a direct attack on voting rights. Time to push back … hard.

Crime and punishment. As was clear when he was in the White House, leaking the name of a CIA agent and pressing Federal Attorneys to prosecute non-existent voter fraud (see above), Karl Rove is a very nasty piece of work. Now he’s a major force in our electoral process, thanks in part to the Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court. Rove’s 501(c)4 “social welfare organization” Crossroads GPS has been sluicing corporate money into campaigns by the millions of dollars. In 2010 his group was instrumental in swamping Syracuse area congressman Dan Maffei with negative ads in the last two weeks of the campaign, electing tea party challenger Ann Marie Buerkle by a handful of votes – one of many such interventions. He’s doing the same this year. With regard to Rove, I agree with George W. Bush: criminals should know there are consequences to their actions. Should have put him in jail when they had the chance.

Stop TPP. The Obama administration’s trade representative is in the midst of very quiet negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement – basically a global NAFTA on steroids. The reason it’s being discussed behind closed doors is that the moment the provisions of these investor rights agreements become public, public outrage brings them down. (See the Multilateral Agreement on Investment and other similar pacts.) I suggest you take a look at this and do what you can to make others aware of it before they slip it in under the radar. This agreement would be a disaster for labor, for environmental regulations, for trade policy, you name it.  Go to http://stoptpp.org/ to find out how.

Spread the word, friends. That is all.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Pay now, pay later.

What does the tea-party acronym stand for again? Taxed Enough Already, as some of you recall. That’s the credo for our age, whether or not there’s any truth to the sentiment. If people are paying higher taxes, they’re doing so on the local level; as county and municipal governments try to grapple with austerity policies from above, they resort to whatever means of revenue generation that may be available to them. Federal austerity starves state coffers; that in turn negatively impacts localities. Combine that with the fact that we are in the midst of a depression of sorts – i.e. a period when people need greater assistance from the government, not less – and that causes upward pressure on local taxes.

When that happens, people inevitably look for someone to blame. Lately that someone has been unionized public employees. Sad to say, my fellow Americans are all too quick to think the worst of them. That’s not surprising. A lot of editorial ink, political rhetoric, and advertising resources have been placed against vilifying the very notion of working for government. It’s a waste of money, they’re a bunch of lazy layabouts who can’t make it in the private sector, etc., etc.  For a long time that blanket criticism seemed confined to, say, the people down at the DMV, but in recent years it’s been expanded to teachers and even public safety employees.

Here’s what the critics – at least, the non-cynical critics – don’t appear to understand: When you lay off public workers, you create more problems than you solve. For one thing, you make whatever institution they worked for less effective; that means less value to the taxpayers. For another, those individuals are now out in the public sector workforce, competing for the same jobs that everyone else is trying to get. Thirdly, their lost income results in less consumer spending (yes, public workers buy groceries, clothes, and gasoline just like the rest of us), which means lower consumption tax revenues, which means – yep – budget gaps of the type we’re grappling with now.

What’s needed, as Jim Galbraith, Paul Krugman, and others have pointed out, is federal stimulus – aid to state and local governments so that they can stop shedding jobs and adding to the ranks of the unemployed, infrastructure spending that will build out the economy and create jobs at the same time, and other public investments.

Perhaps if the GOP could take a break from passing radical anti-abortion legislation for about five minutes, perhaps they’d consider doing something about this depression. Just saying.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Rights and wrongs.

G.O.P. congressional fiscal policy wunderkind (somehow) Paul Ryan was talking about rights on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos the other day, and he said this:

We [Republicans] disagree with the notion that our rights come from government; that the government can now grant us and define our rights. Those are ours. Those come from nature and god according to the Declaration of Independence.

I’ve heard similar stuff emanating from the heads of various conservatives over the years, of course. It just amazes me, though, that this creature they present as such an intellectual heavyweight in the area of legislative statecraft can seemingly lack the knowledge a pre-teenager might glean (between naps) from civics class. Rights are given to us by god and nature just as food and water are; which is to say, not really at all. Rights exist; we may (or may not) be aware of their existence. But they are not “given” to us in any respect.

Government is, at its best, an imperfect guarantor of rights; that is one of its primary functions. If people are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights, what of the African Americans owned by the very man who penned the Declaration of Independence? Were they not also handed the gift of freedom by the almighty at birth? I think not. They were chattel, for chrissake; uncounted millions were born into forced labor and indeed died therein. It took a civil war, fought for other purposes, to abolish institutionalized slavery, but the fight for freedom was far from won when the guns fell silent.

The civil rights struggles of the 20th Century carved out some basic rights of citizenship that were then encoded in federal law and implemented and enforced by federal authority. No miracles there. No, the government doesn’t hand you freedoms; neither does god, nor business. We scratch for every inch, and if we’re persistent (and fortunate), the government can assist us in holding on to our gains. Or it can throw us under the bus, with the wrong people at the helm. The only role any god might play is if s/he gives us enough brains and enough strength to fight.

All I can say is, if Ryan is the best thinker they have … they’ve got some thinking to do.

luv u,

jp