I am appalled. I am disgusted. I despair for my country. The forces of economic ignorance, the forces of privilege for the wealthy, the forces of indifference to the plight of people in need and to the hopes and aspirations of most Americans have carried the day. My national government has enacted a law that will harm millions of people, and it has done so only so that wealthy Americans will not have to pay taxes at a fair rate, a rate that they have paid in the past, a rate that reflects their ability to pay and the benefits and advantages that they have received from the American economic system, a level that would still represent one of the lowest levels of taxation of the wealthy in any so-called developed country. I refer of course to the credit limit/budget deficit legislation that became law on August 2, 2011. President Obama botched the whole issue in his naïve belief that the Republicans want to work with him and the Congressional Democrats in a constructive way. He is the President, and his party controls the Senate; but he let a radical minority of the Republicans in the House of Representatives hold the entire nation hostage to their destructive ideology of small government and low taxes, an ideology that benefits not the American people as a whole, certainly not those in need among us, but only those who need no help from the government, those who need no tax breaks, those whose wealth keeps them above the vicissitudes of the economy, who are insulated in a way that assures that they will prosper no matter what the economy or the government does.
In his column in the New York Times published August 1, 2011, the day before this unconscionable piece of legislation became law, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman analyzed the matter brilliantly. He said that the deal President Obama reached with Congressional Republicans to raise the country’s debt limit
is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy. It will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.
Krugman is clearly correct. That the measure that became law on August 2, 2011, “will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status” is a succinct statement of a truth that simply cannot be denied.
To understand that comment we must first understand what “banana republic” means. The term refers to the governments of Central American countries such as Honduras and Nicaragua during the time when they were dominated by large American corporations, specifically corporations that exploited the resources and the people of those countries by exporting produce, typically bananas. Those governments were put and kept in power by American corporations. They served the economic interest of their corporate masters. They were politically oppressive and brutal. They would use any means to keep themselves and their corporate overlords in power. They had no interest in the welfare of the people, only in their own power and their own short-term gain. The real rulers of the country were the big corporations, and the people had no say in how their land was governed. There was nothing these corporate puppet governments would not do to preserve their power and their privilege. The phrase “banana republic” is shorthand for a country with a brutal, corrupt, oppressive government that operates in its own interest and in the interest of big corporations and of the wealthy, not in the interests of its own people.
That is what the United States of America is becoming. Our slide into banana republic status began with the Reagan administration in the 1980s. That’s when the Republicans began their assault on the few social safety net programs that we have in this country. That’s when the tax code began to be revised to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the people, a development that reached its nadir under George W. Bush and that the Obama administration and the Congressional Democrats have done nothing to reverse. That’s when the process of concentrating more and more wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer people began. Yet the ideology of the Republican Party today makes Ronald Reagan look downright reasonable, and that is a very difficult thing to do. Even Reagan agreed to some tax increases when they were necessary. Not today’s Republicans. Certainly not those Republicans today whom we so quaintly call the Tea Party. They are hell bent on implementing policies that will destroy this country, and they are having considerable success in doing so. The current debt limit and deficit reduction bill is their crowning achievement (although even it doesn’t go far enough in the direction of benefiting the wealthy at the expense of the people for some of them).
Today in America money rules. It has always ruled to some extent, but in some meaningful ways we are returning to the 1890s, the age of the robber barons, the age when big corporations ran the country and exploited the people for their own gain with no meaningful governmental curbs on their power. The Supreme Court has declared almost all limitations on the power of money in the electoral process to be unconstitutional. When we faced an economic crisis unlike any we have seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s the government bailed out Wall Street and did nothing meaningful to help as millions of Americans lost their jobs and lost their homes to foreclosure. When the crisis in American health care became so obvious and so acute that not even the federal government could ignore it any longer the power of the insurance industry, a power exerted through campaign contributions that the Supreme Court will not let the government limit, forced us to accept half measures that do essentially nothing to address the problem of access to affordable health care for millions of Americans. Today in America money rules, and ordinary Americans are being harmed in myriad ways because it does.
So many Americans have bought the lies of the conservative ideologues that there seems to be no way out. Progressive pundits and talk show hosts tell us not to despair. They tell us not to give up. They tell us that there is hope of turning the tide. I wish I believed them. I want to believe them, but somehow I just can’t. We may have reached the point where the only thing that will reverse our slide into banana republic status is to let the conservatives have their way. Let their policies ruin the country. We don’t seem to be able to stop them in any event. Many people will suffer in the process, but maybe that is what it will take to put American on a path toward justice for the people, a path away from the control of the wealthy and their big corporations, a path toward common decency and care for one another. I hope it is not the case that only greater economic and social disaster will turn us around, but I’m having a hard time believing that that is not the case today. I am appalled. I am disgusted. I despair for my country.
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