When Worlds Collide: Hillary and the Anti-Cosmos

On October 9, The Daily Show featured an interview with Republican strategist Noelle Nikpour who argued that Obamacare is really unconstitutional except for the fact that the Supreme Court has declared it constitutional. 

That Ms. Nikpour could regard the Affordable Care Act (i.e., Obamacare) constitutional and unconstitutional at the same time may seem irrational, but perhaps if we can understand this pattern of thinking – a pattern that seems to embody two parallel and incompatible universes - it may throw light not just Ms. Nikpour's mentality, but on the right wing of the GOP in general.

For example, conservative Republicans have described Obamacare as BOTH an unprecedented disaster that threatens to lead us into a Nazi-like slave society AND as something voters will like so much that they will never want to see it repealed.

Two parallel, yet contradictory, universes.

In one universe - let’s call it “the Real World” - Supreme Court decisions routinely render laws constitutional, and popular programs like Social Security and Medicare tend to improve people’s lives.

But, in “the Anti-Cosmos,” the parallel universe where Ms. Nikpour spends much of her time, the Supreme Court needs to butt out of constitutionality issues.  And in the Anti-Cosmos, giving people access to affordable health care is equivalent to dragging them into hellish concentration camps.

A fascinating study by Democracy Corps, based on interviews with members of the Republican Party, helps explain why so many in that party seem to hold on to impossibly contradictory ideas.  The study reveals that Republicans, when asked what words they associate with Barack Obama, overwhelmingly replied, “Liar.”  The following were also prominently mentioned: Lies, Lie, Crook, Worst, Overrated, Liberal, and President. 

“Communist/socialist” and “hypocrite” also made the list.

Naturally, if Republicans automatically assume that President Obama is a lying, liberal, socialist crook, they need not pay any attention to what he says.   I’m guessing that other prominent Democrats, like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, get no more of a hearing from these people than Obama does. 

So, when the president says he’s concerned about millions of Americans lacking insurance and he therefore wants to help them with his Affordable Care Act, non-Republicans may say, “Great, let’s do it.”  But right-wing Republicans are more likely to disregard the president's rationale and say, “What is that lying crook up to now?  He probably wants to take away our guns and mind-control us with electronic implants.”  And nothing that Obama or any other Democrat can say will alter their thinking, because dark, distrustful ideas dominate the Anti-Cosmos where they spend much of their lives.
 

We should note that since 9-11 our government has set up a vast security system that is gathering oceans of data about us, much of it without our knowledge or approval, and this does not help Obama where issues of trust are concerned.  Of course, this surveillance is not merely an Obama undertaking, but for people who start from the premise that he’s a lying socialist bent on enslaving us, blaming him for it just feels right.

It turns out that many conservative Republicans distrust the American public education system almost as much as they distrust Democrats.  They also reject some of the findings of science.  As the report says, “Evangelicals and Tea Party Republicans [the two main conservative GOP factions -- editor's note] share and are consumed by skepticism about climate science—to the point where they mistrust scientists before they begin to speak.”

So, if scientists talk about evidence that human activities are causing global warming, right-wing Republicans can simply disregard this input.  The scientists, they believe, are part of the Obama conspiracy.

Who do the right-wing Republicans trust?  Fox News, for one.  Astonishingly, many of them do not regard Fox as conservative, but see it as a middle-of-the-road news source.  According to one respondent, it’s the only network “in the middle.”  Another claimed that it is about the only source that gives you both sides.  [Holy Shit!! – editor’s note]

The survey distinguishes between the motivations of the Evangelicals and the Tea Party conservatives.  The former believe that their world, which is white, traditional and Christian, is under assault and losing ground.  They do not accept gay marriage or abortion rights and don’t want to offer undocumented aliens a path to citizenship.

Tea Party Republicans, on the other hand, don’t care so much about abortion or gay marriage.  For them, Obama’s ultimate scheme is to make government so big that our freedom will be lost forever.  Oddly, though they see government as the Evil Enemy of Freedom, they regard the Constitution, the very document that breathes life into government, as Sacred and Good.  I think they must have a Real World understanding of the Constitution and an Anti-Cosmos attitude toward government.

One of the most interesting points to come out of the Democracy Corps study is that moderate Republicans, who make up about 25% of the GOP, feel isolated from their own party.  This is mainly because the Tea Party and Evangelicals make up more than 50% of the GOP and have been leading the party into a series of disasters including the recent government shutdown. 

The moderates believe in small government but they are not uniformly hostile to Obamacare and they respect science even to the point where some of them have concerns about global warming.  They sometimes refer to the conservative wing of the party with such unflattering terms as close-minded, wacky, full of crap, and unelectable.

The moderates prefer politicians who work for compromise and many of them reject Fox News, seeing it as not really a news source at all.  According to one moderate respondent, “It tells about as much truth as like Jerry Springer does now.”  In sum, the moderate Republicans disagree with Democrats on a number of points, but they don’t seem to be taking any of their cues from an unreal Anti-Cosmos.  They are ready to disagree and compromise with Democrats where this will help solve Real World problems.

This entire report is fascinating, at least to us political junkies, but perhaps the most interesting point of all is this: many moderate Republican women look with favor on the possibility of a Hillary Clinton run for the presidency.  According to the report, “Weighing the option of voting for Hillary Clinton versus a Republican male, the moderate Republican women in Raleigh chose Clinton, on balance.”

Hillary 2016?  How would the Anti-Cosmos deal with that?

Tea Party - 1 America - 0

Saturday morning I was sitting at a sidewalk table at The Sandspur Cafe enjoying a morning that, though somewhat globally warmed, was otherwise quite pleasant. But suddenly I saw standing beside me my neighbor, Liberty Valiant. Liberty (who changed his name last year – he used to be Howard Snud), was wearing a tri-corner hat festooned with dangling teabags, which is the way he’s been decking himself out lately. He quickly joined me and, ordering a pot of tea began to exhort me to join the teabag revolution.
















“Washington has failed to keep a balanced budget,” he argued, “we need to go back to the values of Ronald Reagan!”

“Reagan?” I responded, “You know Reagan actually plunged the country into heavy debt. And by the way, he also resorted to raising taxes in order to improve the situation.”

“That’s not true!” Liberty exclaimed, “The Ronald Reagan I know would never have done anything like that.”

“But it’s in the history books.”

“History books written by liberal professors,” he replied. Then, noticing my expression, he added, “No offense.”

“None taken, I guess. So what do the Tea Party’s alternate history books say about the Reagan presidency?”

“That Ronald Reagan defeated the Soviet Union, saved the POWs being kept in bamboo cages by the Viet Cong, invented the Internet, balanced the budget without raising any taxes, and when he died, took his place at the left hand of God.”

“Wow. No wonder you guys like to mention him all the time. And what do your Alternate History books say about Barack Obama?”

“Well, obviously he’s an African Communist who wants to kill our grandparents with death panels and replace our constitution with Muslim Shariah law.”













“Liberty, don’t you think we’re going to have trouble agreeing on anything if we can’t even agree on things like, ‘The president is a Christian,’ and ‘Reasonable governance depends on compromise?’”

“Compromise is a word the gutless use when they mean surrender. Real Americans never compromise! Never! Never! Never!” His face began to turn bright red and a series of strangled choking sounds forced themselves from his throat, so I rushed to pat him gently on the back.

“Hey, cool down, Brother Liberty, there must be a way for us to find some common ground here. I mean, for one thing we all want to prevent the United States from defaulting on its debts, right?”

Recovering from his fit, he looked me in the eye and asked, “Why?”

“Why?? Well, for one thing defaulting would force us to pay higher interest rates which would stifle our already weak economic growth. Unemployment would get worse and we’d very likely head into a double dip recession. That’s for starters.”

“Well maybe that’s what your liberal economic textbooks say, but that’s not the whole story.”

“Well, what does the Tea Party say the whole story is?”

“Sure, America would surrender its traditional position as the bedrock of the world economy. The dollar would collapse in value. The economy would plunge into deeper recession. Joblessness would get worse. But you have to look on the bright side.”

“Bright side??? What bright side?”

“Well, if all that were to happen, Obama probably wouldn’t get re-elected.”




Hey - You Forgot NPR!

Big Government and Big Tea

Tea Partiers would like us to see them as implacable foes of Big Government. But this they are not, as the ongoing showdown in Madison, Wisconsin, makes clear. This showdown pits Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and the Tea Party against teachers and other ordinary citizens. The governor’s aim is to strip these citizens of their right to defend themselves through collective bargaining. He is so fanatically devoted to this goal that offers by the teachers and other public employees to yield to him on key budgetary issues have not softened his attack on collective bargaining.

The Tea Party backed Governor Scott during his campaign, as did the Koch Brothers who pumped all the cash the law allows into his coffers. In a sense the Tea Party and the Koch Brothers are the same thing, given that these Kansas billionaires have poured millions into the Tea Party and have worked to make its actions helpful to their own corporate bottom line. On this point, refer to the revealing article by Jane Mayer in last August’s New Yorker.

This "governor & fat cats vs. teachers" showdown calls to mind a similar clash: the Colorado coalminers’ strike of 1913-14. The Colorado struggle was triggered by the murder of a labor organizer in September 1913. The miners immediately went on strike for higher pay and safer working conditions, but were promptly kicked out of their homes by the company they worked for: the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company or CF&I.

CF&I belonged to the Rockefellers, and the shacks that were the miners' homes belonged to CF&I. Suddenly made homeless by the Rockefellers, the workers responded by setting up tent cities in the vicinity of the mines and continued their strike, despite the oncoming Colorado winter and the aggressive moves made against them.

The Rockefellers hired professional gunmen (the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency) to subdue them, but the miners fought back, suffering casualties as they did so. Finally Colorado Governor Elias Ammons called up the National Guard and, with the Guards’ pay covered by the Rockefellers, the Guardsmen continued the harassment of the miners’ tent camps. This harassment came to a horrifying climax in April of 1914 when the Guard assaulted the main tent city in Ludlow, Colorado, and burned it to the ground. This assault, known to history as the Ludlow Massacre, resulted in the deaths of two of the miners’ wives and eleven of their children.

The coalminers’ strike ultimately failed to attain its goals, but it did bring to national attention the feudalistic conditions under which some Americans were forced to live. The incident was also memorialized by a monument constructed by the United Mineworkers of America which still stands today. Woody Guthrie composed a song about the massacre which is now on youtube.












Monument Commemorating the Ludlow Massacre of April 1914



At this point, I think it’s appropriate to pause and thank Governor Walker and the Koch Brothers for their restraint. Though many of their actions are reminiscent of those surrounding the Ludlow Massacre, they have not, at least, hired gunmen or called up the National Guard to physically assault the teachers and other Wisconsin employees. So far, they have merely threatened to deprive these citizens of their livelihood.

We might also pause to consider the essential role that organized labor has played as a bulwark of democracy here and around the world. For example, when the American occupiers of Japan attempted to construct a democratic society there following World War II, they insisted on a law guaranteeing the right of employees to unionize and forbidding Japanese corporations to refuse collective bargaining with said unions.

It is particularly important, given the steady erosion of our public elections by private corporate money, to remember that votes alone do not a democracy make. The capacity of people to organize and resist exploitation by the rich and powerful is also an elemental democratic right, though it is one that Governor Walker seems determined to suppress. Notice, that as he does so, he portrays himself as an advocate of small government. But the only thing "small" about Wisconsin’s government today is its regard for the democratic rights and well-being of its public employees.




(My account of the Ludlow Massacre comes from a variety of sources, including a visit I made to the site when I lived in Colorado some 30 years ago. A good, compact published account appears in Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States.)

Smaller Government! Less Democracy!

The Tea Partiers and other conservatives keep telling us that our government should be "smaller." By this, I gather they mean weaker and less able to tend to its core business: looking after the interests of the people who elect its leaders.

The utopia the "small government" advocates talk about resembles Mayberry but, like the Mayberry of TV-land, it does not and cannot exist. As soon as governmental power, that is, the power of our democratically elected representatives, is hobbled, corporate power moves in to take its place.

If BP angered us with its callous contempt for safety standards and dishonest response to the oil-spill disaster last spring, imagine how it would have behaved had government been "smaller," that is less able to enforce safety standards or demand restitution for the damage its mad grab for profits caused.

Actually, you may not have to imagine it if the small government conservatives have their way; you may actually find yourself living it. Instead of a public-dependent, one-person/one-vote democracy, our lives will be dominated by a profit-oriented, one-dollar/one-vote corporatacracy. Good luck getting a sympathetic, public-spirited response from the likes of BP, Halliburton or Citigroup once we live in ConglomoCorp-World.

New York Times columnist, Frank Rich, with his usual insight, has highlighted in his column today some of the trends that have pushed us more and more under the domination of the super-rich in recent decades, i.e., since the current conservative revival began.

Here are a couple of the highlights from his piece:

"The wealthy Americans we should worry about instead are the ones who implicitly won the election — those who take far more from America than they give back. They...are all but certain to cash in on the Nov. 2 results. There’s no one in Washington in either party with the fortitude to try to stop them from grabbing anything that’s not nailed down."

"The Americans I’m talking about are not just those shadowy anonymous corporate campaign contributors who flooded this campaign. No less triumphant were those individuals at the apex of the economic pyramid — the superrich who have gotten spectacularly richer over the last four decades while their fellow citizens either treaded water or lost ground. The top 1 percent of American earners took in 23.5 percent of the nation’s pretax income in 2007 — up from less than 9 percent in 1976."

"The bigger issue is whether the country can afford the systemic damage being done by the ever-growing income inequality between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else, whether poor, middle class or even rich. That burden is inflicted not just on the debt but on the very idea of America — our Horatio Alger faith in social mobility over plutocracy, our belief that our brand of can-do capitalism brings about innovation and growth, and our fundamental sense of fairness. Incredibly, the top 1 percent of Americans now have tax rates a third lower than the same top percentile had in 1970."

Well said.

Rich cites a source that says the process of super-rich domination began when Carter was president, which surprised me, since I always saw the beginning of the trend with Reagan's rise. Of course one of the primary culprits in this trend is the expense of presidential and congressional campaigns; this expense means elected leaders must defer to the super-rich in order to get into office. It may well be that Carter's era saw its beginning even before Reagan took office.

In any case, it would be nice if those who keep demanding "small government," would acknowledge that the government we have is already too small and too beholden to corporate wealth to adequately serve and protect us. And let's thank Mr. Rich for pointing out that shrinking our democratic institutions is not the road to utopia.







Frank Rich of the New York Times

A Reliable Source

Tea and Koch

Get ready, my fellow Americans, to see a bit more of your freedom slip away. Corporate money, which already dominates our political and economic landscapes, is preparing to dominate it further, and to do so with the help of the Tea Party.

Tea Party activists tell us that the democracy established by the founding fathers and strengthened by presidents like Lincoln and FDR, is the enemy of freedom. But our democratic government is not our enemy (at least not when it is relatively free of corporate influence).

The real threat to our freedom comes from the concentrated wealth of big corporations, those elitist bastions that are governed by the principle of “one dollar, one vote.” And the Tea Party is an extension of these bastions.

The leaders of the TP, of course, claim to be ordinary Americans, representative of grass roots anger aimed at unresponsive politicians in Washington. But the fiction of the TP’s grass roots has been thoroughly debunked, not once, but over and over.

Jane Mayer’s August 30 New Yorker article, for example, revealed the influence of the billionaire Koch (sounds like Coke) brothers on the TP movement, a measure of influence that they tried to keep concealed. Mayer writes that "By giving money to 'educate,' fund and organize Tea Party protesters, [the Koch brothers] have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement."

I imagine that most of the ordinary Tea Party foot soldiers are not aware that corporate money is behind their activities or that this money is designed to serve its own particular economic interests. They seem to have simply bought the right-wing ideology that portrays democratic government as the enemy of freedom, and so they march against "Washington" unaware of the moneyed interests that fund and help organize their activities while scheming to -- literally -- profit from them.

More evidence for the Tea Party's special interest funding comes from Frank Rich’s telling October 3 article in the New York Times, where he writes, “Big money rains down on the ‘bottom up’ Tea Party insurgency through phantom front organizations (Americans for Prosperity, Americans for Job Security) that exploit legal loopholes to keep their sugar daddies’ names secret.”

Rich points out that most of these wealthy donors have succeeded in hiding their identities, but he then goes on to list those whose names have been recently uncovered by reporters. He also notes that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, in addition to directly funding the TP with $2 million, provides it with what amount to free advertisements on the Fox Network and in the Wall Street Journal.

Fox News is to the Tea Party what Pravda was to the Soviet Communist Party: a public relations operation pretending to be a news source. If it weren’t for Fox News and the billions of special interest money that fuels the TP, it would most likely amount to no more than a scattering of conservative voters upset that they lost the last election.

In fact the TP follows the conservative Republican (and Fox News) line slavishly even when this line contradicts itself. Start with the initial TP complaint about the deficit. If the deficit were the real motivation of TP leaders, they would have vilified Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush (whose economic policies created the bulk of our current national debt) and then heaped praise on Bill Clinton for balancing the budget and creating a surplus.

Why don’t they? Apparently because Fox News and the other corporate interests behind the TP have other interests.

Currently the Bush tax cuts that helped create our huge deficits are scheduled to expire. The Tea Party and conservative GOP line says that we must not let any of them expire, but keep all of them in place, even those for the very wealthiest Americans. These tax cuts for the wealthy -- who do not face the stresses of unemployment and foreclosure -- would increase the national debt by more than a trillion dollars in the coming decade. But no matter, the TP wants to hand this money over to America’s corporate elite even though it will fall on the rest of us -- and our children -- to cover the debt these tax cuts create.

So, is the TP really concerned about the deficit? Or is it simply a well-organized and funded front for the same Wall Street tycoons and corporate millionaires who have dominated American politics since the 1980s? And who, by the way, through their domination of American politics over the past thirty years, have managed to siphon most of America’s accumulated wealth into their own coffers while holding middle class incomes down.

When conservatives say they favor “small government,” what they are really saying is that they favor a government so weak that corporate and Wall Street money can continue to have their way in screwing the American middle class. And the Tea Party is here to help them, while hiding the debt this movement owes to its behind-the-scenes benefactors.

We have seen what the domination of moneyed interests does to us all as recently as 2007 and 2008 when our inadequately regulated economy took a nosedive that we only pulled out of through the effects of the 2009 stimulus. Well, brace yourselves, amigos, and get ready for more of the same, as the pro-corporate special interests lick their chops in anticipation of a November takeover of a big chunk of Congress. Those of us who trust George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and FDR more than we do Charles and David Koch will do what we can to hold off the attack, but if I had to choose a word to describe our prospects, I don't think it would be "optimistic."

Sarah, Plain and White

My British friends (two of them, at least) assure me that a character like Sarah Palin could never gain traction in English politics. Here’s my theory as to why this should be so: In the UK there is more respect for informed opinion than there is here. I think this explains a lot about American politics.

I have often heard that Americans are just plain dumb, but I don’t buy this explanation. At least not exactly. If being smart means being able to figure out your situation and responding to it appropriately, Americans do as well as anyone else. We do have certain emblems of achievement: the largest economy in the world; the best equipped and trained military in the world; the best record of achievement in Nobel Prizes; the best university system in the world -- to name a few.

So I’m not quite satisfied with the “Americans are just plain dumb” explanation. And yet choosing Sarah Palin as a leader is a festering symptom of some kind of mental lapse. So how do we explain her popularity with the Tea Partiers?

Back to the “respect for informed opinion” factor. Sarah Palin is well liked because she promotes the Tea Party narrative of America. According to this narrative, Americans have always been hard-working white individualists who don’t need the government and who give their children names like George and Jennifer -- not names like Consuelo, Enrique, Latifah or Shaquille.

According to the Tea Party version of history, America has been “taken away” by the wrong people, people who use the government to ruin the lives of hard-working white people by siphoning off unearned cash into their own pockets.

I know something about this because I received a number of angry responses to an article I wrote for the Ledger a couple weeks ago. Angry email responses provoked by my article alluded to the unfairness of government programs for poor people, and some of the responses specified the non-whiteness of those they imagined to be the main beneficiaries of these programs. When I replied to these angry writers pointing out that a lot of government programs have historically favored white people (the GI Bill as it was originally administered, the big tax breaks given to homeowners, tax-supported public universities, and so on) my critics wrote back – should I say spewed back – that these government programs only served deserving Americans.

The overt racial element in these angry emails parallels the verbal bigotry that Democratic legislators faced from the Tea Partiers during the Health Care vote. I really believe their shouts of “We want our country back!” really mean “We white people want our country back.” It is racism, not government spending per se, that motivates an awful lot of them.

As I’ve said before, if it was really government debt they were worried about, they would have denounced Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush who first plunged us into serious debt. If it were government handouts in general that they hated, they would be demanding an end to tax write-offs for homeowners, and the closing of public universities. But they aren’t. They are angry at welfare recipients and those who will benefit from the new health care bill, and, according to their distorted perceptions, these beneficiaries are mainly Black or Hispanic and may even be undocumented Hispanic.

Sarah Palin suits them because she is a relatively attractive white woman who massages their prejudices. Would it be possible for a Black woman or a Wise Latina Woman to play her role? In a word, no. First, because only people who have enjoyed the privileges of whiteness could spout the nonsense that Palin peddles, and secondly, because the racist factor means that for many Tea Partiers only white people fit the image of true Americans.

Yes, there is racism in Britain, but what seems special about Tea Party racism is its elaborate self delusion about government handouts constructed on a foundation of anti-intellectualism. And anti-intellectualism is one of those things that we Americans still do better than most.

Lleno de Caca

People are selfish. At the same time, people are generous. When an actor wins an Oscar, as Jeff Bridges and Sandra Bullock did last Sunday, you can see that they are thrilled about their win. Bridges in particular didn’t make the slightest effort to hide his excitement and why should he? He is a great actor and, from what I can tell, a good guy who Academy voters genuinely like.

But, while I see nothing wrong in being overtly thrilled at winning an Oscar, I don’t think there’s any way to deny that being thrilled is selfish. Having won means you are well regarded (narcissistic high!), you will be more famous than ever for a little while (ditto!), your name will be inscribed in Hollywood history (ditto again), and you can charge more for your future roles (cf. the Bible on “the root of all evil”).

But while selfishness is a design feature of human nature, so is generosity. Or maybe a better way to put this is to say mutual dependence is so basic to us that it is like the air we breathe. We could not survive were we all simply selfish. Without this mutual dependence we would be facing the “war of all against all” imagined by Thomas Hobbes, and our lives truly would be, as he predicted, “nasty, brutish and short.” There are people who can themselves be described as “nasty, brutish and short,” but since I myself am not at all tall, I will have little more to say about this. Anyway, Hobbes was referring to our lives, not our former vice president or any other specific individuals, when he conjured up that famous phrase.

What I’m getting at is that our lives are so completely bound up with each other that a Hobbesian war of “all against all” is simply an impossibility. Yes, we do often and in some ways compete against each other, but we cooperate with each other much more routinely.

Even the Oscars are a ritual of cooperation. The organization of the Academy Awards ceremony depends on thousands of cooperating participants. Even when the “all against all” aspect is emphasized – as when the competing candidates are listed just before the winner is announced – group-oriented rituals are followed. I suppose it would add to the drama if, just before the envelope was opened, a fiercely competitive candidate were to bolt for the stage, grab the envelope and declare himself winner. But nobody has ever done this, not even Harvey Weinstein.

I’m just saying that our lives are completely enveloped in cooperativeness, and yet we talk as though America is an arena of endless competition.

Part of the reason for all this “competition” talk is political. Conservatives often preach that competition (sometimes described as “the magic of the marketplace”) can solve all our problems. So competition is talked up in the corporate-controlled press. And in America virtually all of our news is corporate-controlled, so it is talked up a lot.

The right wing has its reasons for making us think life is all about competition. One reason is that those who control wealth can claim that since, in competitive arenas, the strong and smart get rich, it would be wrong to ask people with wealth to pay a relatively large proportion of their income to support society – hence Steve Forbes’ touting of “the flat tax” and George W. Bush claiming (dishonestly) that rich people are rich because “they earned” their wealth.

Any introductory sociology course worth its tuition will reveal that most of the wealth held by the super-rich in the U.S. is not earned but inherited. Bush’s certainly was. Steve Forbes was also born to wealth. Neither of them got rich by “earning” wealth, and neither did the great majority of those who are rich.

What conservatives like Bush and Forbes seem to imagine is that had they been born the children of, say, impoverished Mexican-American migrant workers, they would nevertheless, because of their outstanding personal qualities, have undoubtedly grown up to be multimillionaires. They are, in other words, full of caca.

Actually they may not be that stupid. They may simply be monstrously greedy. But I choose to give them the benefit of the doubt here by judging them to be idiots.

The Tea Partiers are (consciously or unconsciously) in league with these guys. The big message that the TPers keep promoting (other than that Obama is a socialist) is that our government is accumulating too much debt and we citizens shouldn’t have to pay the taxes we pay.

OK, just as an aside, I would have a lot more confidence in the TPers had they taken to the streets in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan began piling up unprecedented and shockingly humongous debts. Also, they might have taken to the streets to cheer Bill Clinton for undoing the deficit damage Reagan had done and balancing the budget in the 1990s. And, again, they might have raised a ruckus when George W. Bush, with his reckless, pro-rich-people tax cuts ran up the debt again in the past decade. But they didn’t. Only now, when Barack Obama, for absolutely necessary reasons, increases the debt, do the TPers decide to protest the red ink. It obviously isn’t the debt that concerns them, so I have to wonder what they are really up to.

Anyway, the “lower our taxes” part of their protest is exactly what Forbes, Bush and other born millionaires like to see. If the government has its hands tied this will help the super-rich (who are mainly corporate fat cats) get richer. This is because there are really only two major sources of power in America today: One is the political power that depends on the voting process (aka democracy or “government”) and the other is corporate power that serves the interests of people like Bush and Forbes. If the government’s power is reduced (i.e., if democracy is somewhat weakened), then corporations can have their way with us more freely than ever.

There is no third way. We can depend on the power of elected officials (hoping that those officials have not been totally bought off by corporate money), or we can put our fates in the hands of Wall Street bankers and companies like A.I.G., Halliburton, ExxonMobil, etc.

The conservatives and their Tea Party supporters are fighting to increase corporate power. And part of the justification for this goal is the idea (the dream, really) that says open competition will bring everything into balance, ensuring that only deserving souls will be rewarded. So deregulate everything, cut everyone’s taxes and just let all that competitive energy loose. But what would happen if we did this? In fact we actually did this once before – in the 1920s when conservative Republican president Calvin Coolidge said “the business of America is business.” To find out what happens when government regulations are whittled away and competition goes wild, just take a look at the 1930s that followed directly from Coolidge’s policies. Or, don’t go that far back; just take a look at what happened on Wall Street in 2008 as a consequence of banking deregulation.

I agree that competition has its place, but only after a basic system of social cooperation has been tended to. Right now this means sticking it to those Wall Street bankers who keep rewarding themselves with billions because they are sure (like Bush and Forbes are) that their superior natures entitle them to all that loot. Let’s hope that our representatives in Congress have not been so completely bought off by Wall Street money that they are capable of doing the necessary sticking. If they aren’t, it’s time to rewrite our campaign financing laws so that at least some of our elected officials can find a way to do right by us voters instead of always catering to that noxious swarm of greedy, self-deluded financial backers.