How does the big business-indentured Republican Party get away with expectations of a runaway election victory this November? If such a victory should occur in Congress and for many governorships and state legislatures, it will be due to a 10-percent or so shift in voters who voted Democratic in 2008 and are expected to vote Republican this year or stay home in despair or disgust. The rest of the voters who do vote will still stay with their hereditary Republican or Democratic candidates.
So what is accounting for a possible 10-percent shift? Let’s briefly review some of the Congressional Republicans’ voiced positions.
1. They want to do nothing about unfair Chinese trade practices that lure jobs away from our country though huge factory subsidies, and where workers are repressed and counterfeit products abound. Imagine, Republicans coddling a communist regime, luring the auto parts, electronic, solar and drug ingredients industries away from America, often in violation of the World Trade Organization rules. And, in turn, China is exporting to the United States impure food, faulty tires, toxic drywall, lead-tainted toys and medicines that are contaminated, defective or harmful. Don’t forget the dumping violations.
2. Republicans, led by Sen. Richard Shelby and his banking friends, declared their adamant opposition to Professor Elizabeth Warren becoming head of the new consumer financial regulation agency. (To avoid a confrontation with them, President Obama made her a special assistant to organize this consumer watchdog.) Ms. Warren has a solid record of exposing and communicating clearly to families the tricks and traps of credit card companies, mortgage firms and intermediaries that have taken so many billions of consumer dollars with impunity.
3. The Republicans, led by their House leader, John Boehner (R-Ohio), a total toady of the gouging student loan companies, opposed the Democrats’ successful reform of this taxpayer boondoggle that guaranteed obscene profits and had the taxpayers absorb any student defaults. Boehner’s lobbying should upset millions of parents who had to foot the bill for so many years.
4. The Republicans are opposed to raising the federal minimum wage to what it was, adjusted for inflation, in 1968. They opposed an adequate budget for health and safety enforcement by OSHA to diminish the 58,000 American workers who die every year from workplace toxins and trauma. They are now blocking protections for coal miners pending in the Senate after the Massey mine disaster.
5. Republicans oppose doing anything about “too big to fail� even after Wall Street’s reckless, avaricious collapse of the economy, costing 8 million jobs and trillions of lost pension and mutual fund dollars.
Moreover, they do not support genuine enforcement of the anti-trust laws that are supposed to break up monopolization efforts, monopolies or oligopolies like Monsanto (seeds) or the big five banks — bailed out by taxpayers and secure in their domination of well over 50 percent of all bank assets, deposits and the credit card business. This is by far the highest concentration of financial power in modern U.S. history. With few exceptions, the GOP want very few federal cops on the corporate crime beat.
6. Fighting for the last billionaire and multimillionaire, Republicans are blocking ending Bush’s tax cuts on incomes beyond $250,000 per year. Yes, Republicans want to reduce the deficit. yet they want to end revenues of over $700 billion over 10 years of restored super-rich taxes. They are blocking renewal of the estate taxes after their expiration on Dec. 31, 2009, left no taxes this year on the estates of the super-rich. (Over 99 percent of estates were already exempt from the federal estate tax.)
7. No matter that Republicans caved to the health insurance companies getting over 30 million new covered customers, starting in 2014, they supported the industry’s blaming the federal government, no less, for this month’s latest sharp hike in insurance premiums by Aetna and others largely on the policies of individuals and small business. The Republicans did this after blocking the “public option� that would have given consumers both a choice and the benefit of some competition to the big insurance firms.
8. Have the Congressional Republicans ever challenged the bloated, wasteful, contractor-corrupt military budget that makes up half of the entire government’s discretionary budget?
Even the Congress’s own auditing agency — the Government Accountability Office (GAO) — declares the Pentagon budget unauditable. Many Pentagon audits document the abuses of Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater and other firms in the deficit-driving, bloody Iraq and Afghanistan wars (both Republican espoused.) The Pentagon’s burgeoning budget, now nearing $800 billion a year, is deemed untouchable. (A few Republicans, like Charles Grassley and John McCain, sometimes object to contracting abuses.)
9. President Obama wants a counter-recessionary public works program renovating airports, bridges, highways, rail and mass transit, drinking water and sewage treatment facilities and other infrastructures. Republicans sneer at this local job creation for much needed facilities.
10. Unlike any Republican Party since its creation in 1854, it has misused the filibuster threat, and any one of its senators misuse the rules and block even going to a floor discussion or a nomination vote. The party is earning its moniker as the Party of No. Republicans have turned the U.S. Senate into America’s graveyard.
There is much more, but enough has been cited to ask again — how are Republicans seen by the polls as front-runners in the upcoming election?
The answer my friends, is not in the stars. The answer is in the clueless and spineless Democrats, busily dialing for the same corporate campaign dollars.
The other answer is in the 10 percent of the actual voters who need to seriously avail themselves of the facts and a modicum of thought. For if they don’t, they will continue to pay bills handed to them and their children by their ruling corporatists in Republican clothing.
Consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader grew up in Winsted and attended The Gilbert School.
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