KUFM / KGPR
T. M. Power
Reliving the Late Nineteenth Century
One of the advantages of an election in which there is an incumbent is that at least one of the candidates represents a known agenda supported by a know team of players. That, in fact, is the basis for one of John Kerry’s perceived weaknesses and George W. Bush’s strengths. Whatever the implications for the individual candidates, this does allow us to say something about where another term for Bush would lead us. Here is my particular, possibly peculiar, take on that.
As we continue to step gingerly into the 21st century, we will be led by a cabal that is dead set on taking us back to the late 19th century. When the Bush team surveys the 20th century, it sees nothing but wreckage caused by government, social programs, and a permissiveness otherwise known as liberty. They want to undo it all: The regulation of large corporations begun by Republican Teddy Roosevelt, the New Deal of FDR including Social Security, the Great Society Programs of LBJ including the effort to reduce poverty, and the environmental policies adopted by Republican Richard Nixon.
To repair family values the Bush team rejects the need for good childcare or medical insurance for children or decent paying jobs for single parents and young low- income males. Instead the Bush family-values prescription is to re-quarantine women in the home, drive gays and lesbians back into the closet where they can be “cured” by Bible-thumpers, censure books, movies, and games, and criminalize all sexual activities between consenting adults that involve something other than married couples in the missionary position.
To liberate the entrepreneurial energy of our population, the Bush team does not focus on supporting small businesses or expanded and extended life-time adult public education. Instead it supports the largest of our corporations as they wheel and deal their way to bankruptcy, dragging workers and their pensions with them. They tell us that we need to shrink government oversight and regulation of financial markets, large corporations, and public utilities, leaving a handful of powerful corporations in a position to manipulate markets and skim billions of dollars of monopoly profits from consumers while disrupting the economy with price spikes for crucial commodities such as electricity and natural gas.
Instead of boosting the middle class and fighting poverty, this administration has unashamedly focused on boosting the incomes of the wealthiest sliver of the population. The gap between the rich and poor and between the rich and the middle class that was narrowing during the 1990s is growing again. While squeezing our families in the middle and at the lower end, Bush pompously preaches about the need to protect families.
Before
Social Security and Medicare reached the majority of our seniors, they
represented a significant portion of those living in poverty in
As medical costs, and especially prescription costs, soar, the Bush administration has taken the side of the large pharmaceutical companies, offering to pay whatever unregulated price they choose to set on their drugs. Business-like behavior such as negotiating for at least as good a deal as these giant drug companies give other countries is foreclosed, transferring tremendous wealth out of our pockets into rich corporate profit centers.
Any thing that is public is under attack because it is seen as largely un-American. For over a century, our public lands have provided us with environmental services such open space, wildlife, clean water, scenic beauty, outdoor recreation, and the simple solace of nature, things that make living in dense urban settlements tolerable. Now those public lands are being converted to industrial landscapes. Increasingly, these public treasures are being turned over to private energy companies in order to give our petroleum addicted lifestyle a very brief additional injection. Meanwhile the energy cartel of which Bush is a member opposes efforts to improve the energy efficiency of our cars, appliances, and homes. War and the plunder of our public lands are preferred to cost-effective conservation.
In the Bush looking-glass we face a dreary return to a 19th century of powerful, free-wheeling, unregulated, private greed that generates the poverty of slums, the grimy degradation of nature, regular and deep economic cycles that leave people unemployed or underemployed for long periods of time, increasing inequality and the obscene displays of wealth by the gilded elite, and a rising population of imprisoned and marginalized poor people. The regulation and safety nets carefully constructed during the 20th century to protect us from the worst excesses of private economic power are to be removed so that we can all regularly enjoy the raw experience of pure impersonal market forces, unprotected in any way.
Why would we want to step back through that looking glass?