I am sure that Senator Mitch McConnell, whom some pundit called, I believe, a “turtle-hybrid” recently feels that he has accomplished quite a bit for his Party this last year.
The Neoconservatives, despite repeated and repeated and frustratingly, boringly repeated efforts by the President to have them join in, be part of the government of a country in desperate shape, have decided that not-governing is the best option for their own greedy, foolish, anarchist movement. They obviously want to bring the government down.
Right now, without a single “Republican” vote, the Democrats in Congress have a stimulus bill that has created about 2 million jobs. A large number of those jobs are on the Recovery.gov web site. Others are on state web sites. And the first stimulus is only about a third of the way through. But the former “Republicans” i.e., the Neoconservatives, Neocons, who used to be Republicans but are now just obstructionists, lent not one vote to the entire process in 2009. None. They did nothing.
One must ask: don’t even Republican voters need some help? Certainly the tea baggers were Republicans and, unless they were all paid demonstrators, they seemed to have needs. Did they vote for Neocon Republicans to obstruct? Even now, when 15 million or so people are still out of work, the Republican leader in January of 2010 said, before even seeing a bill, said that the Neocons will not vote for a jobs bill. They are voting against putting people to work. With their Right Wing propaganda machine behind them, making all kinds of rationalizations, no matter how silly, they still had enough people with them to elect a governor in Virginia, one in New Jersey and a Senator in Massachusetts.
It may be a joke. But it is not a funny joke. It is one of ridicule. We are ridiculed because we have let our media take over. Right Wing radio plus Fox News sends out millions of impressions of the same message every day. Every single one contains multiple lies, or no one would vote for Republicans. They believe Rush Limbaugh and the completely psychotic Glenn Beck. And that is why people outside this country looking in are quite cynically laughing at us.
Right now, without one single Neocon vote, we have three separate health care reform proposals, the least one of which will stop the vicious and greedy effort of health insurance companies. If the best of all three are passed, we will have a grip on our health care costs. Tens of millions would be eligible to get reasonably priced insurance almost immediately and a whole new and better system, still mostly in the private sector, would be built over the next four years. In four years, we would have a solid health care system and perhaps the best in the world at that point.
But to let the health insurance companies gain an even greater foothold as the Neocons wish to do is to allow them to hold on to their enormous profits and slipshod, criminally negligent distribution of health care delivery services. Our health care system is broken and the rich have paid off our Neocon Senators like Chuck Grassley, and Dick Ensign, and Jeff Sessions and John Borasso and Orrin Hatch and Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson among others, men who should be tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail.
They and others like Senator Olympia Snowe and Senator Susan Collins from Maine should both be voted out of office, as well as the Senator from New Hampshire, Judd Gregg, who is thankfully retiring from “serving” the People and will now continue to serve himself, which is what he usually does and did last year, as one of those obstructing health care to his last breath on behalf of AHIP and the billionaire government-defrauder, Rick Scott.
Why don’t we have 5 million electric cars on the road, the rest of the world asks? We have been up until the second coming of a George Bush, the most prosperous nation in the world. Under Clinton we balanced our budgets and created huge new technologies that were sold all over the world.
Why don’t we have at least a fourth of our energy in renewable sources and half of the new energy grid for the 21st Century built? Neocon obstruction. Ask the obstructionists in Congress, like Senator Shelby of Alabama who is using a technical hold-up in the parliamentary procedure, the rules of the Senate, to hold up 70 key administrative positions in government.
Why aren’t we examining every cargo container that could be bringing a nuclear or biological bomb into the country on any given day of the week? Ask Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina who held up the key appointment of a hyper-qualified, ex-FBI, terrorist expert to head up TSA security so long that the man, an African-American (DeMint is an old-line, Confederate-state, South Carolinian) withdrew his nomination.
This is why we are the laughing stock of the world’s statesmen. Why don’t we have a solid social network like those of European countries or a public health care system that provides the same care we have now only at about 30 to 40 percent lower cost? Because a huge number of Neocon idiots are obsessed with Sarah Palin. While they are being distracted by a self-aggrandizing opportunist, the Neocons in the Senate and House are voting against every single valuable proposal designed to help the people.
The Neocons have no proposals because they still look to the man who defeated health care reform in the 1990s and is still against it, Newt Gingrich. He is being paid…and you can see for yourself on his web site….by the health care industry to defeat, as subtly as possible, any health care reform. His solution: “start over.” That is code, very simply, for stalling. He is paid by the health care industry to try to kill or postpone health care reform for another couple of years. By then, the health care industry will have built an even bigger war chest and have a better opportunity to defeat Democrats. If any plan passes now, they are finished and Newt’s new “best friends” will be forced to compromise and that means…lose big profits.
And what about John Boehner? He’s no leader. He is a former vocalist for the tobacco lobby who found a new gig in trying to defeat health care reform. Now he shills for them. Instead of taking inspiration from a truly intelligent, well-meaning, dedicated politician in Barack Obama, who would work with Congress to advance health care, Boehner obstructs at every turn. Instead of trying to help the average middle-class American, not to mention the millions who are slipping from the middle class into basic substance, he leads the Republican House members on a merry chase of military spending, and attempted obstruction of benefits designed to help the middle and lower classes who have been damaged by 30 years of tax cuts and benefits to the rich.
The Neocons in the House, like Jeb Hensjarling, and Steve King and Louis “The Redneck” Gomert, and wacky Michelle Bachmann offer nothing but criticism that usually is dispelled in about 30 seconds by simply relating the facts. They attack the vulnerable, like illegal immigrants, and instead of offering solid solutions, they simply make racist attacks.
They continually attack President Obama for damaging an economy, when they grew no jobs…none…no net jobs in 8 years while the population grew. They attack him for the current conditions when the housing bubble and the speculation on it was caused by ever-greater lax regulations, cutting huge numbers of attorneys from the SEC and holding interest rates abnormally low to make it seem as if we had a growing economy.
In addition, Bush’s legislation not only allowed firms to send jobs overseas, it rewarded them for sending jobs overseas. This hit hardest in the manufacturing sector where we have now dropped from about 20% or so of our commerce being in manufacturing to about 10% today. No country can become affluent with only one out of ten people involved in making things. We don’t need that many dry cleaners and fast food outlets. And
It is very interesting how the Republicans are running for office. Scott (The Nude Model) Brown ran in Massachusetts by evoking images of Jack Kennedy in his television commercials. Wait until the morons in Massachusetts who voted for him find out that he will be voting right along side all the Southerners who are, right now, proposing to eliminate Social Security again, and make big cuts in Medicare. The hicks in the North are now voting with the hicks in the South to take away the only lifelines between many of them (especially those whose 401Ks were riding high on the speculative market and are now in the dumper) is the social safety net that Scott Brown and his Neocon friends are so eager to unravel. Brown doesn’t care. Do you know why?
Because he hit the jackpot. Becoming a Senator these days, especially now, after the Supreme Court codified fascism as a way of life, is a direct path to being rich. Every big corporation understands that all the Republicans are for sale and ten to fifteen percent of the Democrats. The other Democrats will take the money and then vote the way they want. So it is a pretty cynical business.
Now that the Supreme Court has said that corporations can give directly to campaigns of candidates, it will be a completely purchased Congress and also completely purchased judicial system and state government system. They have the money to do it because the returns are a minimum of 25 to 50 to one dollar spent. Halliburton paid Dick Cheney around $44 million. He got them a minimum of $12 billion in new government contracts.
It is time to organize. Time to go to meetings. Certainly there is a populist wave sweeping the country but you will not find it at tea parties. Sarah Palin, nearly drooling in imbecility, writing crib notes on her palm, as the inspiration for a bunch of rabble who were conned into going to their first, and predictably, last, convention, is no leader. Rush Limbaugh is a pig and a compulsive blabbermouth who simply found his pot of gold among rich Texas Right-Wing oilmen who underwrite his and their racist, fascist, homophobic points of view.
Doing nothing is not the remedy for our problems. Cutting taxes and cutting social services and Medicare and VA benefits is not the answer. Ending both wars and coming home might be the answer. Finally strengthening our borders, hiring…yes…unionized, trained, skilled TSA workers might be the answer. Creating 5 million government jobs and then initiating legislation to encourage rather than discourage manufacturing, so that those jobs could transition to clean energy and alternative energy and hi-technology products might be the answer. Creating severe tax penalties for sending jobs abroad may be the answer. But doing nothing, being a do-nothing Neocon is not the answer.
The best chance of changing the way things are is to get involved with Democratic politics…now. Don’t wait until the fall. Elections are won by those who get out front early and have the stamina to stick until the last vote is counted. We haven’t seen the last of Neocon obstruction. We know that the voting machines are being rigged. We know that there will be huge amounts of money spent on television by corporations, dwarfing the efforts of Democrats.
The key thing the Democrats have is people. There will always be more middle class people that there will be exceptionally rich people. There will always be more thinking people than those led around by their noses, like the tea baggers. We’ve had our breather. We’ve had a year to rest up. It is time to get out into the public and work for Democratic candidates who are populist or populist candidates of whatever party.
You won’t find them on the Republican side, but there may be Independent candidates who are totally people-focused. They will need your help most of all. And the country needs politicians who are for the People most of all.
