Can the Republican Party Change?

No longer a party that supports individual rights, it now seeks to impose almost parental power over people, reading their mail, snooping in their bedrooms and implementing radical new forces to keep the great corporations of America growing in power.

After Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Addington, McCain, Palin, McConnell, Stevens, Falwell, Boehner, Gingrich, and others, there's not much left in how it can reasonably hope to achieve anything constructive in today's world. These vengeful angels appear ready to drag down the ship of state if they can't get their own way which means no discussion, no debate, no new ideas and no compromise.

The Republican Party has always been a party of power. Now, with one war in Iraq, another in Afghanistan, and continuing drive-by shootings by American military forces taking place in Sudan, Syria, Pakistan, and maybe elsewhere, the party seems committed to long-term international policies involving pre-emptive political and economic force over other nations - more and more including our traditional allies. War and bombings seem to be always a ready alternative to solve all problems . The rest of the civilized world is trying to veer away from war, and now we wonder if the republicans can live in that kind of world? Will the American Repubiclan Party even allow such a world to develop?

In order to stabilize its quest for power the party has been forced to seek help from other groups. Religion has answered the call and is already moving to take charge. Which religion? Well, that won't be clear for some time. They will call it Christian, but it will be based on power just like the military and economic forces it plans to use. It will know Jesus' wishes and will intend to bring them to the entire planet, again by use of force if necessary.

So the Republican Party which emerges after this election will be "conservative" in political philosophy, but like its religion, that meaning will also require explanation on the part of its leaders. It will clearly attempt to take us back to what the new leaders of this movement think our founding fathers were trying to do when they wrote the constitution.

Economically, the new party will insist on the "Gospel according to Adam Smith". It will be raw capitalism - uncontrolled by any government. If the new economy should ever need governmental help, it will tell the government what to do, and when and how much it needs.

There will be no place left for intellectuals, or any form of "progressive republicans". This new Republican Party will be a construct of the 19th and 20th centuries, and will attempt to establish itself as the rightful leader in a world of military power, economic force and God with a cross, and America will be its supreme ruler, world policeman, inquisitor and punisher.

So now the election. If McCain wins, America will be in for a very long and disastrous period. There will almost certainly be a democratic majority in both the house and senate, and they will feel the call of a mandate for change. McCain and Palin will be firmly rooted in the past as the rest of the United States and the rest of the world move into a new era of international relationships.

If Obama wins there will be new challenges, new opportunities and perhaps a very different world will emerge. Sarah Palin apparently sees herself as the "republican winner" if McCain loses the election. But it seems clear that she will pull a large part of the most fanatical republican base out of the party.

Syria

Once again the Cowboy strikes. One more time he slaps down the blackguard who should have known better than to tweak his omnipotent nose. Syria has to feel the consequenches for insulting the Great One, and there is nothing they can do about it! America will strike again into sovereign soil and leave the blood to sink into the barren land. Once again the American president waves his stupidity into the air and shouts "I am the Leader of the Whole Wide World!" Then he retires smugly back his ranch. Well, we'll see. Again.

When will we ever learn? We think we can strike anywhere we want and kill without regard to law. No need to negotiate when we can kill at will and with ease and we think they can't do anything about it. And when they do we are always stunned.

The Corporate Contract

Like the old Social Contract, in which concept mankind allegedly surrendered some of his individual rights to a local sovereign in return for social order and collective protection, there has existed for the last one hundred years or so in this country a Corporate Contract. This Corporate Contract began with people offering to become company workers who surrender a number of their individual rights to a specific corporation and in return receive prizes of great value. The rights they surrender include the right to work elsewhere or at times they would prefer to work, or to receive a higher rate of pay than the corporation was willing to pay, or agree to be transferred to another part of the country. In return the workers would receive from the corporation a regular paycheck both in regard to amount and regularity of payment, medical care, vacation or time off from work with pay, even sick leave with pay, and ability to negotiate with the company in union with other workers. Most corporations had a provision called "seniority" under which a worker, after working a specified number of years with the corporation, could receive protection against layoffs and transfers, and then after thirty or so years of constant work, they would receive "retirement", a regular paycheck for the rest of their life without ever having to work again.  In truth, this "retirement" was supposedly a portion of that worker's weekly paycheck that was withheld and invested in a retirement fund by the corporation, so that the "retirement" pay was actually a portion of the wages already earned buy not yet paid.

And there was more. The workers remained in the country and so did the corporation, and so did the jobs. A great benefit that many workers realized was the thrill of finding employment for their own children at the same company they had worked at for the greater part of their lives. Large numbers of corporations prospered in this environment, and together they, and their workers made the nation stronger. And the nation became a more powerful, capable and respected member of the international community. Also, if war came to the nation, there was ready workforce able to quickly retool into the defense industry.

Now this contract has changed dramatically. It began to change as the civil rights protests and the war against Vietnam also pitted ordinary citizens against their governments. There was a subtle shift that also began to take place in the Corporate Contract fundamentals. The Carter administration was unaware of this shift and the Reagan administration began inserting new provisions into the old Corporate Contract - provisions that began shifting the cost/benefit relationship between corporations and their workers to "agreements" between the corporations and the US government. Today, most new corporate workers receive a temporary job at reduced pay. The health care they receive is whatever they purchse with their own money, so are their retirement provisions and most workers are less concerned they might be transferred to another state than that their company might transfer itself to another country.

Corporations have long enjoyed a special place in America. They have been defined by the US Supreme Court as a "person", with all rights and privileges pertaining to all other people. The only rights denied to them are the rights to marry and vote. They have protection provided by the government, tax relief denied to their own workers, and bankruptcy procedures that allow them to sluff off many of their obligations when they need to, and continue to operate. They still can't vote, but they can "hire" their own representatives, senators and even presidents by providing enormous "contributions" to the candidates of their choice. A corporation can feed money to someone running for representative in another state helping that candidate to win and then provide supporting legislation friendly to that corporation which is in another state. Many corporations use their state charter as a den from which they can roam the United States and the rest of the world as they are able to penetrate -truly citizens of the world, yet beholden only to regulations of the state in which they are chartered, and they compete with each other in a cannibalistic market, cutting expenses as well as services and product. Their workers are used as necessary and older workers and retired workers are shaken off when they become too expensive to the corporation.

Now governmental officials need the money of the corporations more than it needs the votes of the citizens (workers) so the "Corporate Contract" lives on - but as an agreement between the American president, senators and representates, and the corporate world. It reads something like this - "You pass the laws we need, and enforce the ones we want and we will give you the money you need to run for office - if not, we will withdraw our monetary support from you and provide it to someone else who will represent us."

End of an era.

It is obvious that a great era is ending. The capitalistic market has become a great spectre arriving just just a little early for Halloween. As it dies worldwide though, it is still sucking vast amounts of money from the people of many nations into hidden pools of unmeasurable wealth. The term "deregulation" has become a synonym for "gotcha", and now the survivors are having to figure out how to "bell the great cat".

The very concept of a free enterprise system requires a free market. Without a free market, there can be no free enterprise. No market can possibly be free if it is dominated by a single organization or a small number of very large organizations. No free market can exist in any economic system unless there is adequate governmental regulation and enforcement to protect it and keep more powerful companies from seizing that market and reshaping it for their own purposes. A free market is not a market that is free FROM governmental regulation but a market which is free BECAUSE it is strongly regulated by the government. It makes no essential difference whether a market is dominated by a communistic, dictatorship, or theological government or by a cartel of capitalistic corporations, in any of those cases the free and competitive market ceases to function and begins to serve its master.

It is not enough to simply pass strong regulatory laws and enforce them rigidly. There must be significant enforcement as well. If a poor man robs a 7-11 store and gets $13, the police will pursue him, and if found and convicted he may serve years in jail. However, if a rich man robs thousands of people of millions of dollars, no police will pursue him, he will not be tried for anything, and the worst that will possibly happen to him is that he will have to spend the rest of his life in luxury.

A New World

The next president of the United States will confront a very different world from the one George Bush used to vacation in eight years ago. The new congress will be heavily democratic, our international allies will be very suspicious of us and the rest of the world will watch every move we make with grave interest. Meanwhile, the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression will be rearranging the foundations of the world’s economies.

Our new president will have to help build a new world. Many of the old traditions can be salvaged, modified and used in different ways. Many new traditions will have to be created though, working with a heavily democratic congress and nations in Europe in Asia and the Middle East. This work will require leadership from people who possess skills in organizing and communication, and who have experience in reaching across many different aisles and oceans.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden seem to possess these understandings and experiences. On the other hand, John McCain would bring his belief that war actually works, an admitted ignorance of economic matters, and a trust in the ability of markets - like finance, healthcare, armament, energy, education and all the others, to regulate themselves. And if he dies or is assassinated, the former mayor of Wasila, Alaska, will have to work with the democrats in congress and our allies abroad, and those other people too, in a world that never existed until now.

Trickle Down Peters Out

The great idea behind the old “Trickle Down” theory was its prediction that if the people and government of the United States took care of the large corporations, those corporations would, after they had taken care of their own needs, take care of their workers and then all the rest of the people of America. There would be no need for a “new deal” of any “cards,” instead the great national economic “pie” would be increased so large that everybody would eat cake all the time. 

But the Reagan, Gingrich, Bush-Bush bit has tested that theory very thoroughly from the 1970s to the beginning of 2000. We found the pay of CEOs rose during this great Trickle Down Development Period from about 45 times that of the average worker to 300 to 400 times, even now passing through 600 times, that of the average worker. The “average workers” meanwhile, found out that what was really trickling down was their standard of living. They found that even two “average” incomes were not able to keep up with increasing costs as they experienced increasing personal debt, decreasing personal savings, and an income that by 2002, when adjusted for inflation, had actually fallen since the 1970s! (More Trickle Down!) 

The great CEO’s of the great corporations increased their profits by laying off workers.  Some of the more successful ones absorbed (“merged with”) some of the smaller corporations, thus “greatly improving service to customers” and laying off thousands of workers.  Some corporations declared bankruptcy, then “reorganized” (discarding their previous obligations to former workers in the form of retirement benefits and medical payments). Other great CEOs of the great corporations blew their bottom line beyond the realms of glory when they out-sourced the jobs of their American workers to Mexico, then to South Korea, then to Philippines and onward to China.  The “pie” became as large as the moon, and just as inaccessible to American workers who saw themselves falling out of the middle class as their retirement benefits vanished, their medical care was converted to an insurance game, and their pay dwindled in indirect proportion to the new hours of work then began to encounter.

So if anyone ever tries to tell you again, like John McCain did in 2008 for example, about how great the “Trickle Down” theory is, you could just tell them that after thorough testing it has been found to be an exact copy of what the military used to call the old “Slide Down Hill” theory, or without having to explain all those ramifications, you might just say that Trickle Down has Petered Out.

© John Womack, 2008. All rights reserved.

VP Debate, 2008

My first impression from the Biden-Palin debate was that the media has failed us again. I have always liked and respected Gwen Ifill, and considered her to be a good interviewer. But she dropped the ball again and again tonight. I wound up feeling that any member of the audience could have been chosen as the debate began and would have done as well as Gwen Ifill did.

Palin acknowledged that she can’t answer the questions AND she was saying that it just doesn’t matter. Her "opponent" was the only participant in the “debate”, trying to answer sometimes difficult and meaningful questions while she gave her stump speech, leaped into her memorized talking points and used numerous clichés and innuendo. The moderator did not try to hold Palin accountable for these practices. Palin twice referred to General McKiernan as General “McClelland”, and that was not picked up on by Ifill either, nor by Biden for that matter.

Palin falls back on her energy “expertise” ~ why no questions about that? what is her background on “energy”? what is her education, engineering qualifications, experience in distribution, pricing, dealing with pollution, etc.? No questions, just a general acknowledgment that Palin truly IS an expert on energy.

Palin Played the “sex card”. Winking, flirting. I personally found that insulting. It also led me to wonder how touched other people, like King Faisal, Vladimir Putin, Angela Merkel, Gordon Brown, Hu Jintao, Kim Jong-il, or Mugabe, among others, might be affected by such hustling behavior. Or maybe she would just reserve those irresistible flashes for Pelosi or Biden or maybe the CEOs of Exxon-Mobile, Shell, BP and other easily swayed people like those.

She referred to expanded powers for the VP, especially legislative powers! Wow. How will that play in truly conservative circles? And why didn’t Ifill pick up on that and ask her to elaborate?

Palin probably played well to her conservative base, but her unfortunate references to comments by Reagan (Morning in America, Shining city on a hill, etc.) only served to remind us how far she falls short of even that pathetic figure.

And as far as Biden goes, I got the feeling that Biden is there and always WILL be there. Regardless of what might happen, Joe Biden seems to be a steady performer and a person with a lot of contacts on both sides of the congressional aisle and beyond our shores. He looked very reassuring to me and I felt better about him after the debate than I ever had before.

John Womack.

Fey/Palin

The debate tomorrow night between Biden and Palin have already been skewed. This by Tina Fey's parodies of Palin's performances. People who never could have possibly seen Palin on the news responding to questions by reporters, although few in number, have certainly seen Fey's parodies on late night shows. So that is how many people know Palin - as an intentionally daffy, poorly informed and absolutely clueless mayor of a town of 4,500 people out on the far extreme end of America.

Tomorrow night when she speaks and performs as a normal human being - although still not by any rational means qualified to run for the position of vice-president of the United States - she will almost certainly look human, professional, knowledgeable and compassionate which will leave people in the country amazed.

As a result of Fey's amazing performances and Palin's debate, Palin will wind up looking amazingly good to the
American people even though she will not have earned the rating which will have been given to her by Tina Fey.