"Washington Doesn't Work," or "Washington Just Doesn't Work,"
or "Washington: the Gridlock has to be Broken," or some such. One hears it on
the media all the time, both reactionary and liberal: Fox"News"Channel, Joe
Scarborough, Ed Schultz, and certainly on CNN. "We've got to fix "Washington.' "
But is it really true that "Washington doesn't work" and that it "Has to be
fixed?" Well, it all depends. It all depends who you are and what your interests
are. There surely is gridlock in the Congress and between the Congress and the
President, most of the time, as demonstrated by what will have happened, or not
happened, by the time this column, written at around 6:00PM EST on Jan. 1 makes
its way onto the internet. But that doesn't mean "it doesn't work." It works
just fine for a variety of interested parties, taken here in no particular
order. (And the so-called cliff-hanger sure did for the most part benefit the
GOP and the wealthy, see, for example, the footnotes, below, from The
Huffington Post and the Citizens for Tax Justice.)
For
example, Washington works just fine for the gun industry, that is the gun and
ammunition manufacturers and the gun dealers. Nothing that can get in the way of
their continued sales of weapons and ammunition, the main interest of the NRA's
major funders, those very industries, gets through Congress. And
the same Congress makes sure that the Executive Branch can do nothing on its own
about the gun problem, even if it wanted to. A majority of the Congress is owned
by that dreadful alliance and no meaningful legislation will ever get through it
as long as that state of affairs is maintained, no matter how many Newtowns
there might be.
Just
consider how clever the NRA is, converting the debate in the aftermath of
Newtown from one over some minimal approaches to gun control to one over whether
there should be armed guards in every school (like there was at Columbine) and
whether teachers should be armed (think "Gunfight at the OK teachers' lounge).
As for the Executive Branch, they have left the position of Director of the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms unfilled for six years. That gap not
only affects the gunners but also affects the two even larger killers of US
citizens, the tobacco and alcohol industries, (440,000 and 65,000-100,000 deaths
per year, depending upon how one counts).
Washington works just fine if you are a major smoke polluter. Very
early in his first term, Obama dropped any pretence of going after cap-and-trade
legislation and it works just fine if the last thing you want is any set of
meaningful measures to deal with global warming and climate change.
Washington works just fine if you are a wealthy person, a la Mitt
Romney, who has stashed a good deal of wealth overseas, beyond the reach of the
IRS. For all the talk of "tax reform" and "fixing the tax code" that comes out
of both parties, if such initiatives were ever to get down to the nitty-gritty
in the House and Senate committees concerned with such matters you could bet
your bottom dollar that the lobbyists would tie those committees in knots and
any meaningful reform would become a dead letter.
Washington works just fine if you are Grover Norquist and your real
aim is not "no new taxes" but "shrinking the size of the Federal government to
the size of a bathtub and then drowning it in the bathtub" (1). Of course by
that phrase Grover means those sections of the Federal government he doesn't
like: the non-military/non-prison operational arms, the paid-for benefits
programs, and virtually any form of regulation. His game was in fact given away
when the final form of the "pulling-back-from-the-fiscal-cliff" "compromise" was
being negotiated. Grover said that an agreement that included certain tax
increases on the very wealthy was OK with him (2). Why? Because he was fairly
salivating over the unspecified spending cuts that would be part of any deal,
spending cuts to that tiny proportion of the Federal government beyond the
paid-for benefits programs, that provide real services (like say air traffic
control, infrastructure construction, and the National Weather Service) to real
people, that would be fully controlled by his beloved GOP-front Tea party in the
House.
Washington works just fine if you are one of the various
beneficiaries of the so-called "War on Drugs:" the prison industrial complex;
the drug cartels (whose business and enormous profits would go to zero were the
"war" to be ended); the tobacco and alcohol industries (which might see
attention turned to the real killer substances, the drug and drug carriers that
they produce and sell); the pharmaceutical industry (that might be called to
account for the epidemic of pain-killer addiction that has gained such a
prominent place in the real drug-use problem); the gun industry (which benefits
from the selling of illegal guns both here and abroad); and so on and so forth.
Even with marijuana legalization starting to take hold, there are few
politicians ready to risk it all for an all-out assault on this "war" that
originated as a complement to Nixon's racist "Southern Strategy."
Washington works just fine if you are the oil or factory farm
industries, with their huge subsidies that aren't going to end anytime
soon.
And of
course Washington works just fine if you are part of the military/industrial
complex. You may see a real drop in money spent, as part of the resolution of
the "fiscal cliff" crisis, but a) in percentage terms it isn't so great, and b)
apparently a significant chunk of the savings will be coming out of the hides,
literally, of service members and civilian employees, in one way or
another.
And so
on and so forth. The primary point here is that the State, that is the
legislative, executive and judicial branches (see Citizens United) of government
works in the interest not of the "We the People of the United States" which
supposedly are the underpinning of the Constitution (see that least-read part of
it, the Preamble), but in the interests of the economic ruling class of the
United States. As that great socialist (sic) Teddy Roosevelt said
in an August, 1912, speech when he was running for President under the banner of
the Bull Moose Party (3): " Behind the
ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance
and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible
government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt
politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day." In
this, the great TR was actually several years ahead of a now obscure Russian
political scientist named VI Ulyanov who in 1917 published a whole book on the
subject, entitled The State and Revolution.
When the political commentators cited at the beginning of this column talk about "Washington not working" they are referring to either some abstract concept of "working" or to legislation, judicial decisions, and regulatory policies that would actually benefit the majority of "We the People of the United States." But as long as the ruling class, and you know who they are, remains in control of the state, that ain't going to happen.
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1.
Jonas, S., "Grover Norquist's Wet Dream," http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/12601 . April 20, 2011.
2. " Norquist
Throws His Support Behind Biden-McConnell Plan," Newsmax, http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/Norquist-Biden-McConnell-support/2012/12/31/id/469608?s=al&promo_code=11598-1.
3. Nader, R., " Compare the 1912 Elections with the 2012 Elections," http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33492.htm
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Steven Jonas, MD, MPH is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY) and author/co-author/editor/co-editor of over 30 books. In addition to being a columnist for BuzzFlash@Truthout he is the Managing Editor of and a Contributing Author to The Political Junkies for Progressive Democracy.
Footnotes :
Fiscal Cliff Deal Sneaks In Wall Street Gifts, NASCAR Perk
Posted: 01/02/2013 8:38 pm EST | Updated: 01/03/2013 10:17 am EST (Huff Post)
The 11th-hour deal to avert the so-called fiscal cliff preserved billions of dollars in corporate tax giveaways even as it slashed take-home pay for millions of American workers.
Tucked inside the last-minute fiscal cliff package were more than a dozen tax loopholes, many of which will benefit Wall Street financial firms and some of the nation's biggest corporations. These breaks will cost billions of dollars in the coming year, underscoring the lobbying power of corporate interests.
The deal was less kind to the middle class. Congress permitted a cut in the payroll tax to expire, meaning that the tax burden for the average worker will increase about $1,000 in 2013.
"This shows that the lobbyists are able to get what they want even when everyone else is starving," said Phineas Baxandall, senior analyst for tax and budget policy at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. "It also shows they are best able to get what they want when no one else is paying attention."
The corporate loopholes were part of a package of so-called tax extenders tacked onto the main bill. The extenders package, first approved by the Senate in early August, mixes popular benefits, like a deduction for teachers who buy classroom supplies, with corporate-friendly carve-outs, such as the "active financing" exception that permits businesses earning interest on overseas lending to defer U.S. taxes on that income indefinitely. There is even a tax break for construction of new racetracks.
The tax extenders were passed for only one year, and they still need to clear another potential hurdle: upcoming negotiations over mandated spending cuts and the debt ceiling. President Barack Obama and congressional leaders have indicated they'd like to see a "grand bargain" on taxes, which would feature lower overall rates but close a slew of loopholes.
The financial services industry, whose leaders had earlier joined a group of other corporate executives pushing for a "fair" solution to the fiscal crisis, is one of the primary beneficiaries of special-interest tax breaks. The active-financing exception, for example, permits banks like Morgan Stanley to avoid the 35 percent U.S. corporate tax rate on interest income from money lent overseas. A handful of other U.S.-based multinational companies with financing arms, such as Ford Motor Co. and General Electric, also use that exemption to lower their tax bills. The two-year cost to taxpayers is an estimated $11.2 billion, according to the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CTJ's
Tax Justice Digest ( http://ctj.org )
New CTJ Report:
Revenue Impacts of the Fiscal Cliff Deal ( http://ctj.org/ctjreports/ 2013/01/revenue_impacts_of_ the_fiscal_cliff_deal.php )
While the White House and members
of Congress have described the fiscal cliff deal as raising $620 billion in
revenue, the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), the official revenue estimator
for Congress, has projected that it will actually reduce revenue by $3.9
trillion over a decade. The widely-used $620 billion figure is calculated by
comparing the bill's provisions making permanent most of the Bush-era tax cuts
to a proposal for making permanent all the Bush-era tax cuts. As this report
explains, the revenue "savings" is likely to be offset by the business tax cuts
that are also included in the bill and which are now likely to be extended over
and over throughout the decade and beyond...
Read More
New CTJ Report:
Poorest Three-Fifths of Americans Get Just 18% of the Tax Cuts in the Fiscal
Cliff Deal
The
fiscal cliff deal approved by the Senate and House on New Year's Day cuts taxes
substantially compared to the tax policies that would be in effect if Congress
had allowed all temporary tax cuts to expire. The deal cuts taxes even for the
richest Americans but directs only a fraction of the overall tax cuts to low-
and middle-income Americans...
Read More
A Tax Cut By Any
Other Name
The
term "Bush tax cuts," which dominated fiscal debates for far too long, is now
history. But the legacy of these tax cuts endures in our crippling deficit and
our growing economic inequality. And now, thanks to President Obama and the
112th Congress, they will continue to distort our tax system into the
foreseeable future. When the Senate passed legislation based on the deal, we ran
the numbers and published our results on New Year's Day...
Read More