{"id":2172,"date":"2011-06-18T23:02:48","date_gmt":"2011-06-19T04:02:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=2172"},"modified":"2011-06-18T23:05:26","modified_gmt":"2011-06-19T04:05:26","slug":"triumph-of-the-rich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=2172","title":{"rendered":"Triumph of the Rich"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Barack Obama caught fire in 2007, pro-government liberalism tried to make something of a come-back in the USA. To be honest, Obama’s new liberal movement didn’t thrill me, given that it built itself politically on the stale form of left-over liberalism from the mid-20th Century, fronted by worn-out leaders like Nancy Pelosi, Barney Franks, John Kerry and Harry Reid. It wasn’t a good sign that one of the newest lights in the liberal world is a clown named Al Franken. (Oh for a Robert Kennedy and a Theodore Sorensen). And its biggest cheerleader is Keith Olbermann, a media jerk just as jerky as the Fox News bad boys (Glenn Beck, etc.). Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow also fail to inspire me. <\/p>\n

So I got interested in the counterviews being presented, quite intelligently, by conservative writers such as Victor Davis Hanson, Charles Krauthammer, George Will and Thomas Sowell. I was just about ready to support the more thoughtful contingent of young, upcoming GOP leaders such as Paul Ryan, Rob Portman and Marco Rubio (oh yea, and Nikki Haley). <\/p>\n

But it finally occurred to me that despite some serious grains of truth mixed in with the new Republican stew, most of it is also pretty stale and warmed over. In the end, the GOP is still the party of the rich minority, which builds majorities with the populist support of the wanna-be rich, the ‘frustrated we’re not rich’ (i.e., Tea Party), and the theocracy fringe. <\/p>\n

It became clear to me not long ago that the GOP is using the on-going economic doldrums that plague our nation to further cut-off the poor and take away the gains and entitlements that the middle-class had won during and after the last Great Depression. All of the GOP’s proposed and actualized tax cuts and government program cuts and reductions in Social Security and medical care and abolition of regulation\/oversight programs quite clearly accrue to the benefit of the rich, who still own most of the industrial capital propelling our economy. <\/p>\n

Industrial profits are doing just fine, even though the labor market remains in the pits. Opposition to high speed rail systems and support for expanded oil drilling will continue to benefit those within the closed, gated communities where the rich congregate, while allowing the cities and environmentally sensitive resources affecting the masses to continue their decay. Breaking public worker labor unions and rolling back their benefits makes sure that the last hold-out of middle-class privilege is extinguished, as to keep the rest of the laboring class from getting ideas about demanding a better share of the expanding modern economic pie. <\/p>\n

In sum, despite Obama’s new liberalism, the GOP reaction seems to be winning the day, repeating the message that government is bad and capitalism is good. Two recent articles map out the two poles of current attitudes about government versus capitalism. The first<\/a>, by conservative writer Walter Mead, says that the many of the government programs that helped expand and support the middle class since the 1930s and 1940s have \u201cjumped the shark\u201d, a modern term applied to TV programs that were once entertaining and creative but go beyond their time and are ripe for cancellation. <\/p>\n

But despite Mr. Mead’s clever analogy, government programs aren’t TV programs that you can cancel without consequence. In the 1990s the federal government canceled a lot of financial regulation programs that no longer seemed needed (so argued the capital owners and financiers).\u00a0 And what happened? Looking back now, it’s clear that the financial sharks ran amok. As a result, the economy is still underwater bleeding.<\/p>\n

There is still plenty of reason for government, if you believe in shared opportunity and providing a quotient of fairness in the economic realm. We definitely need government reform, as a lot of well-intended programs become antiquated or are perverted and exploited by the rich themselves. Think of all those farm subsidy arrangements, and the ethanol subsidy. However, we DO NOT need wholesale abolition of the programs that maintain fairness and keep the middle class and poor from being swallowed whole by the powerful, shark-like interests in our economy.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Distribution of income trends keep on getting worse in our nation; we are tending toward a growing, fabulously privileged wealthy class. This segment of the populace is perhaps the biggest ‘upper class’ ever know to history; but it still is a minority. The balance includes scads of poor people living at subsistence levels; under GOP plans, they will be denied access to the health care that allow upper class members to live to 85 and beyond.\u00a0 Mr. Mead complains that the original intent of Social Security was to support retirees for 5 years to around age 70, versus 20 years to 85 (and thus all the financial problems with it). But once the GOP manages to cut back middle and lower class access to the same standard of health care that the rich and privileged enjoy, the problem will take care of itself, as life expectancies will fall. <\/p>\n

I myself feel that there are better ways to govern which balance the interests of incentive, entrepreneurship and freedom with social equity and stability objectives.\u00a0 But I’m totally turned off by where the conservatives, neo-conservatives, and Tea Party movements are going today.\u00a0 The rich are obviously tired of paying taxes to help sustain a middle class, obviously they no longer need the laborers and workers of our nation.\u00a0 The economy can be run mostly by machines now, and whatever human labor input that is still needed can be farmed out to peasants anywhere in the world, based on who will work for the least.\u00a0 The CAPITAL in capitalism seems to have triumphed, with help of the shrewd political maneuvering of the GOP.<\/p>\n

Given the fading light of Obama’s new liberalism and the rising star of reactionary GOP political economics (or economic politics), it surprised me to actually see an anti-capitalism article in print! The article is entitled \u201cThe End of Capitalism and the Wellsprings of Radical Hope\u201d<\/a>. Sure, it’s in The Nation, which was always the liberal vanguard. But this article really spits into the hurricane-force winds now blowing in favor of the nation’s capital-controlling class. Personally, I don’t agree with Mr. McCarraher’s contention that capitalism is beyond reform and has to go. But I do sympathize with his contentions that capitalism is ultimately grounded in the more negative aspects of human experience, i.e. greed, accumulation, winner-take-all, winning-is-everything. Mr. McCarraher calls for \u201cmoral and spiritual imagination\u201d to come up with something better than capitalism. <\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the world’s track record in coming up with a better alternative is quite terrible. Capitalism has taken our nation’s political and social life to a very ugly place. But large scale cooperatist experiments that minimize personal economic incentive never seem to work. I think that we’re stuck with it, regrettably. We can only hope that Mr. Obama’s vision of a new liberalism will come back to life and somehow find renewed vitality through a more inspiring cast of supporters and interpreters and popularizers and enforcers. And that the capital controlling class will learn that it still does need the masses and somehow return to a more enlightened political stance, engaging with the dreams of a better America that Mr. Obama voiced back in 2007 and 2008. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Barack Obama caught fire in 2007, pro-government liberalism tried to make something of a come-back in the USA. To be honest, Obama’s new liberal movement didn’t thrill me, given that it built itself politically on the stale form of left-over liberalism from the mid-20th Century, fronted by worn-out leaders like Nancy Pelosi, Barney Franks, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,13,7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2172"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2172"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2174,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2172\/revisions\/2174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}