Losing It
By Richard Girard
I went to bed disgusted Tuesday night.
The American people had voted a bunch of Tea Party Charlatans into various Congressional, Senatorial, and Gubernatorial seats in this year's election, dominating the whole Washington and state governmental milieu.
If the Democrats want to know why they lost there are two reasons:
1. A lack of guts.
2. A lack of ideas to differentiate them from the f*cking Republicans.
I hold President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid responsible for this electoral loss. There was enough money being spent by various campaigns, if money would have made the difference for people like Mark Udall to have won. Both President Obama and Majority Leader Reid played it safe this year, doing nothing that might upset the electoral apple cart, and hoping the electorate would blame the GOP for the inertia.
It didn't work.
The Democrats needed to risk upsetting a few people, and try to get a lot of bills that this nation needed introduced and passed. When they failed, then they could blame the GOP for opposing their passage. Immigration, infrastructure, employment, removal of the Social Security income cap, stopping outsourcing, and amending the Affordable Care Act's to fix its problems; these were bills that Democrats should have introduced in the House and Senate every two weeks, and then raised holy hell when the Republicans blocked them. People do not always expect you to succeed in politics, but they at least expect you to try.
Every Democrat should run on a platform that is pro-little guy, and anti-One Percenters: Full employment; a livable wage; amending the Affordable Care Act to protect consumers from the predations of BigPharma, the Health Insurance Industry, and greedy health care providers; protection for American workers and American businesses of every size and description from unfair business practices at home and abroad, so that they can successfully compete in the national and global markets; protection of family farmers and ranchers from monopolistic agribusinesses around the world, so they may raise and sell what their lands produce at a return which will provide themselves and their families with a living comparable to the work that they put into their agricultural enterprises; a good, affordable, quality education, sufficient for the needs of our modern society, one that is ongoing if needed or desired; protection from the fears attendant old age, illness, accident, unemployment and other financial catastrophes.
Wait, that's right, FDR proposed this basic program, a Second Economic Bill of Rights, on January 11, 1944.
"Go along to get along," was House Speaker Sam Rayburn's poisonous advice to Lyndon Johnson as a young Congressman in the late 1930's. Like too many of today's Democrats, LBJ followed that advice until he became the individual you had to "go along" with, meaning either immense favors in return for LBJ or his friends, monetary payoffs, or both. If JFK had not been killed in Dallas, state and Federal grand juries, investigating Johnson's dealings with Senate Secretary Bobby Baker, and swindler Billy Sol Estes, would have indicted LBJ. As President, LBJ was able to cover-up his corruption one last time, and avoid prison for the remaining nine years of his life.
The corruption we saw with Lyndon Johnson and his political maneuvering is being rewritten on a larger scale, as Tea-Party Republicans and Republican-Lite Democrats line up at the trough for plutocratic payoffs made possible by the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. FEC. What should have sent LBJ to prison is now legally permissible: the best government money can buy.
In 1957, the year after I was born, Fortune magazine published a list of the wealthiest Americans. Of the 76 individuals and family trusts listed, 47 had fortunes in excess of $100 million dollars. When one adjusts the numbers for inflation, those are the individuals and trusts who had the equivalent of $1 billion dollars or more in 2014 money. Only one of those 47 individuals had a personal fortune of more than $1 billion 1957 dollars: oil man J. Paul Getty. With inflation and the doubling of our population, if the distribution of wealth had continued as it had in the 1950's, the United States should have a little over 100 billionaires today.
According to last year's Forbes magazine, we have 492.
The 400 richest people in America have more wealth than the 150 million poorest people combined. The top one percent of our population has almost 24 percent of the nation's income, and 40 percent of its wealth, compared to less than 9 percent of the income, and 20 percent of its wealth 40 years ago. (See Robert Reich's book Aftershock.)
The Democratic Party must return to its progressive roots, invoking the never completed Second Economic Bill of Rights of President Franklin Roosevelt as their plan to make things better. They need to tell everyone how they'll pay for it: by raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans, the rentier class who provide nothing material or constructive to our economy. We must rebuild our failing infrastructure, and that includes the human infrastructure of our education system by making it truly affordable and public once again. They must run on saying no to the National Security State's surveillance excesses, make the rule of law once again co-equal with the maintaining of order for our law enforcement organizations, and return penalties to the government at every level, not private prisons who demand a minimum number of prisoners to stay open. The number of people imprisoned is not a measure of our safety; it's primarily a measure of the failure of our educational and mental health systems.
People don't really object to too much government, but to needless government. Everyone not in favor of an autocratic state wants limited government, as Robert Parry wrote in 2012. The Democratic Party needs to become the courageous party of needed government, and lead the way against the oligarchic take-over of this nation, or they won't win another election.
