The Approaching Republican Armageddon

The last flood of secret Republican political spending produced Watergate; the current deluge may have more violent, lasting consequences.

E.J. Dionne Jr. reports in the Washington Post of October 18, 2010 that Republican “outside groups that refuse to disclose their donor lists. . . are doing the dirty work of pounding their Democratic opponents in commercials for which no one is accountable. The Republican candidates can shrug an innocent ‘Who, me?’ Deniability is a wonderful thing."

And then, on the far right, Glenn Beck and his allies cast President Obama as the central figure in a conspiracy against America itself, fueling participation by the most extreme 10 percent or 15 percent of the electorate.

Their crackpot ideas, as the historian Sean Wilentz documented in the New Yorker recently, originated in the 1950s and '60s, in the paranoid theorizing of the John Birch Society. But whereas responsible conservatives such as William F. Buckley Jr. denounced the Birchers and the rest of the lunatic fringe back then, Republicans this time are riding the radical wave. . . .

Frank Rich reports in The New York Times on October 17, 2010, under the title “The Rage Won’t End on Election Day,” that the current “wave of anger began with the parallel 2008 cataclysms of the economy’s collapse and Barack Obama’s ascension.”

The economic meltdown precipitated by forty years of financial deregulation and tax avoidance borrowing threatened the illusory security of Middle Class America; the election of President Obama stirred the sleeping violence of what we hoped was long dead racism. Republicans fired these twin frustrations with lies and cash to distract attention from culpably risky GOP financial adventurism.

The immediate consequence, as Rich points out, was a report in the Boston Globe last fall “that the Secret Service was overwhelmed by the death threats against the president as well as a rise in hate groups and anti-government fervor. In a cover article last month, Barton Gellman wrote in Time that the magazine’s six month investigation found that ‘the threat level against the president and other government targets” is at its highest since the anti-government frenzy that preceded Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.”

The ugly names Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and other Democrats have endured and that’s a mark of how well they’ve done their jobs in the face of bought and paid for vilification and do-nothing, filibustering opponents. Mr. Dionne’s report concludes that Republican candidates “can be calmly affable, knowing they have behind them oodles of secret cash and a far right that sees Nov. 2 as Armageddon.”

If you want a close-up up of current rehearsals for the approaching Republican- managed Armageddon—the thousands of violent participants and hate groups, their sordid criminal activities, and their connections with Fox News, read Intelligence Report, a monthly periodical published by the famous nemesis of the Ku Klux Klan, The Southern Poverty Law Center, now battling a gigantic resurgence of Klan successors.

Democratic voters must not be discouraged by what a gullible media reports as the “enthusiasm” of Republican voters (all bought and paid for).

You didn’t make any mistakes in 2008, and you’re going to do a grand encore November 2, 2010 and save us, once again, from secret, bigoted Republican money.

photo: flickr, bobster855, Harvey Comics

Are You Rich Enough to Vote Republican?

Being rich is not enough; only the very rich count with Republican politicians. In addition to their wealthy human base, a recent 5-4 Supreme Court majority handed them a vast new source of campaign funds. News reports are beginning to discover the infusion of enormous corporate contributions into an already well-endowed Republican effort to buy themselves a Congressional majority this November.

During the last forty years (since President Nixon), Republican politicians have been making ordinary voters happy with an illusory prosperity by recklessly inflating the amount of money in circulation. They eased bank regulation, manipulated interest rates, and, finally, W applied the most powerful inflationary “stimulus” of all, financing two wars and tax breaks with borrowed money.

The only people that benefited from Republican financial manipulations, however, were the very rich. According to James Surowieki writing in the New Yorker, “People who earn a few hundred thousand a year have done much worse than people at the top of the ladder.

“Between 2002 and 2007, for instance, the bottom 99% of incomes grew 1.3% a year in real terms—while the incomes in the top one percent grew ten per cent a year. That one percent accounted for all income growth in those years.”

But us 99% are bearing the brunt of the catastrophic economic consequences of W’s reckless tax avoidance borrowing since it came home to roost in 2007.

Most professional Republican advisors have publicly regretted going along with such risky financing. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board on whose watch W’s wartime borrowing boom occurred, now wants all $3.7 trillion of 2001 and 2003 tax breaks repealed and applied to reducing the national debt.

Now repentant deregulators read like a former celebrity list. Richard Posner, “The crisis is primarily, perhaps almost entirely, the consequence of decisions taken by private [banking] firms in an environment of minimal regulation.” David Stockman, former director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan, is writing a book on “How my G.O.P. destroyed the U.S. Economy.”

President Obama has been forgiving—many say too forgiving—of Republican financial advisors. Timothy Geithner, who managed the Bush bailouts in 2008, is now Obama’s Treasury Secretary.

Republican politicians, however, are neither repentant nor forgiving. They’re in denial. The only song they sing, in the midst of the money meltdown their excessive borrowing spawned, is more tax breaks for their very wealthy supporters, paid for, again of course, with borrowed money. Every other kind of “government spending”—except for their endless nine-year old wars—must be sacrificed to “decrease the deficit” those wars and tax breaks created.

Obama, ever the conciliator, would cancel only $700 billion of the expiring $3.7 trillion in Republican tax breaks; that is, only tax reductions benefiting taxpayers with net joint income above a quarter of a million dollars annually would expire.

As revealed in Mr. Surowieki’s statistics, Republican politicians have, in effect, if not deliberately, been waging class warfare on behalf of the very rich against their poorer fellow citizens.

Republican are spending tons of money firing up a lot of angry people brimming with vituperation, including some armed and dangerous. I hope we survive such madness long enough for Republicans to repent cheating their poorer relations.

artwork: flickr, Patrick Hoesly