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Point of View re: There is no Worthwhile Republican Alternative in November


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Larry Hernandez

Thu Jul 01 2010, 02:45AM

Registered Member #6

Joined: Mon Jun 29 2009, 02:44AM
Posts: 21

I have written a new Point of View for publication in the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin. At least I hope it is printed. I will submit it as soon as I sleep on it to think of changes and edits. Here it is in full as it stands now:

Point of View
The Inland Valley Daily Bulletin
July 1, 2010

Teabag summer is turning out to be a wild and reckless ride, thanks to the GOP’s decision to hide its old unchanged ways behind a loud wall of Teabag agitation in these pages and elsewhere. That unchanged party wants to win back Congress in November by giving us even more of what put us in the middle of a Great Recession. Need proof? Look at what Republicans are actually proposing right now, while we teeter on the verge of a second wave of recession.

Now that it is in opposition, the Republicans have gone back, as they always do, to cross dress as deficit hawks. Which is an ironic act for that party to play, seeing that the GOP gave us deficit spending on steroids nearly every year it held power over the budget in Washington, from 1981 to 1993 and from 2001 to 2009. But now that it is imperative to convince us of its deficit-fighting sincerity after all that recent history, how do Republicans in Congress propose to fight deficit spending? Not by fighting corporate welfare, but by fighting against the extension of unemployment benefits to those hundred of thousands of Americans who have become the long-term unemployed in our time of deep recession. Some prominent Republicans have even slandered the unemployed as lazy and unworthy of these benefits, which the unemployed themselves paid into all their working lives. Blame the unemployed/ let British Petroleum off the hook. How is this a new Republican tune? Where is the change?

Besides which, going on a binge of social program cuts, spending cuts to reduce the deficit, and tax cuts for the wealthy, which is what the TEABAG Republicans promise, will only make the recession worse, and may bring on another Depression. Remember, in spite of what so many believe to be true, FDR came very close to producing balanced annual budgets from 1933 till WWII broke out in 1939. What good did that do him, do us? Full employment and the end of the Depression only resulted when he ran the deficit as a percentage of national GDP from zero in 1937 to 30 percent in 1945. If we swallow the GOP Kool-Aid about deficit cutting at this time, as Obama nowadays seems to be doing, we’ll be repeating the mistake every government of the early to mid 1930s did, which turned a major world recession into a decade long world Depression.

And what about the wars the GOP started in Iraq, and started and abandoned in Afghanistan? House Minority Leader Boehner has urged that the age of Social Security retirement be raised to 70 years immediately, and that benefits be cut, with the savings used to pay for the Iraq and Afghan wars. Not a word about ending them ASAP.

And haven’t we seen this pattern before? Once again, the GOP has its gun-sight on our Social Security. Not a peep from the GOP about the obvious means of keeping Social Security solvent, which is to lift the cap on income on which individuals pay FICA taxes from the present $106,800 annually. Why should all those huge corporate and Bankster bonuses, ranging from the millions to the hundred of millions of dollars per year, and handed out even in hard times, be each limited to only $6,621.00 a year in individual contributions to the Social Security fund?

Speaking of the Banksters: are we so dumb to believe that the Republicans intend to protect us from a repeat of the Bank frauds and bailouts of 2008? Is not the GOP’s current near total opposition to having the Banks put their own funds into a future bail-out fund nothing else but a virtual guarantee that once again we, the taxpayers, will pony up billions to bail them out? And we will, considering that unregulated banks have twice had to be bailed out in the last thirty years, (does anyone still remember the Savings and Loan bailout?), and both times under Republican misrule. If they don’t fund their own bailouts, we will most certainly have to.

Even our own Congressman Dreier has revealed his refusal to change from his corporate-lackey ways. Recently he voted against the DISCLOSE act, which meant that he voted against requiring corporations, unions and advocacy groups to disclose their full participation in federal elections. Moreover, by his NO vote, Dreier refused to ban federal election spending by corporations holding over $10 million in federal contracts and by corporations controlled by foreigners. Can we expect any different by re-electing Dreier in November?

It is easy to lash out at the Democrats for the outright failures and betrayals rampant in today’s Washington. In spite of some valuable reforms, such as the passage of a Health Care Reform Bill, too many Democrats holding power today, most notably in the Obama administration, have not broken away fast and full from the practices and the outlook of the Bush and Clinton years. Too many in office have failed to serve homeowners, the jobless, and other average, and very hurting Americans with the same speed and care as they have served and protected corporate powers, the banks, the warmongers, and now: the gross polluters. A lot has got to change further and faster than it has.

But is voting Republican anyway to do it? Frankly, does today’ GOP offer any real alternative? Has it promised in any way to change its old patterns? I could point out a lot more to show us all that it hasn’t. We will NOT turn anything around by handing the levers of governmental power to the current crop of Republican nominees.

The GOP is just plain clueless and thus hopeless, and the TEA-baggers are just phony populists. We have a better chance of getting what we need by electing real populist, peacemaking, anti-corporate Democrats. We need to send a message through the kind of Congress we elect that will force Obama and Washington to do the right and the brave thing on so many fronts. We may be on the edge of a second recession or even a real Depression. Therefore, the stakes are way too high to otherwise let the next two years be surrendered to gridlock or to retreat from fundamental change.

Larry Hernandez


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