The religious right has turned itself into a political action tool. When they did that they changed the very nature of our country. Republicans have aligned themselves to that movement because it represents a large block of votes. And that is what most politicians concern themselves with when they are campaigning—blocks of votes. Mind you that is mostly their only reason for this concern. Career politicians spout a lot of rhetoric, but their biggest concern is getting elected…and re-elected…and re-elected. Before the religious right turned themselves into a political movement, neither political party worried about the issues the religious right focuses on.
Once elections are over, however, politicians from both parties go back to behaving the same as they always have. A few years ago the Republicans got together and created a contract with America, in which they promised to promote certain ideas and issues that further basic conservative values. Once they were elected, they conveniently forgot about the entire thing and went about their normal pro corporate activities. It turned out to simply be a ploy to get elected; and it worked, capturing the election for them and giving them control of both houses of congress during a Democrat presidency. They achieved their objective.
What we have now is a Democrat party in control that, although they consistently vote in favor of basic human rights, they either know nothing about economics or they simply don’t care. When Democrats come up with programs to help people, as noble or honorable as those programs may be, they immediately go after more tax money to pay for it instead of trying to shave the money out of programs that are otherwise a waste of taxpayer money. It seems that money to them is nothing to concern themselves with at all. They can always simply get more from the taxpayers. Their programs are not perfect either. They are usually over complicated, and they almost always cause many unintended consequences.
Somehow the Democrats have arrived at the opinion that if you throw money or workers at the bottom of the economy that the economy will grow. Anyone who knows economics knows that the economy is not a plant. It will not grow from the ground up. Without steady income, people will not spend enough money to cause economic growth. This requires jobs. Providing welfare and food stamps will help those on the bottom of the pay scale but it will not create economic growth. Those two are separate things. Giving money to the unfortunate for bread and salt will not cause enough economic activity to warrant, say, Walmart to start hiring more people.
We have a number of programs and grants that are absolute failures and total wastes of money. They could cancel or revoke these programs to get the money for their other precious programs, but they don’t. To compound this debt crisis, we give aid to countries who openly hate us. Where is the logic in that? There are sizeable sums that could be recovered by revoking this aid. But nobody in Washington is looking at this waste. Instead, we have a government actively shaving benefits from our veterans as though we owe them nothing, while at the same time creating a pension plan for themselves that pays them full salary for the rest of their life. And this money is a small sum when compared to what we send out to other countries, only to have those countries use it to fund efforts against us.
We also openly fund stupid things like studies on bovine flatulation. Seriously, cow farts? We are funding studies on this? That is correct. Regardless of any scientific value that study may have, it is doubtful that it is more important than managing our debt crisis. We have a lot of funding out there for scientific studies that are not necessary at the moment. There is a lot of waste in Washington that could be cut to help fund their seemingly important projects.
When the Democrats took the White House, one of the things they did was to create grants for large sums of money and earmarked it for ecology oriented, or green companies. It is for improving our environment, they stated. Millions of dollars went to companies that didn’t even last a full year before they went completely out of business.
I must say as a small business owner that when you start a business you are going to face ups and downs when you first launch your enterprise. If you are funded with millions of dollars in the form of grants which you are not obligated to pay back and you do not even make it for a full year before going belly up, then it appears to those of us who know about starting and running a business that you never intended to do anything with the money except steal it.
Many of the owners of these start-up companies were political donors to the Democrat party during their last election campaigns. Perhaps they had good intentions, but if they cannot even stay solvent with grants that large they are either stupid or unethical. To some of us it simply appears that they gave large sums of money to a political party to help them get elected, then received their money back from the government’s general fund as a thank you for their help in winning the election.
Even if we are wrong in this view, there is no way this can be looked at which does not make the Democrat party look corrupt, here. It also had to be obvious to members of congress, but the Democrats funded them anyway. And to be fair, this is only one example. And although this example illustrates problems with the Democrats, they are not alone in wrongdoing, or in corruption. Our congress is infested with career-minded leaches that don’t bother themselves with looking after the best interests of the country. And this is prevalent in both parties.
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Republicans have changed their focus, too. Although they understand and respect the principals of economics, they blindly support capitalism’s most basic structure and flatly deny that it is imperfect. Minimum wage has been controlled by our government during my entire working life, which is over 40 years. The economy still went through its normal cycles, year in and year out in spite of the controlled minimum wage. The sky did not fall. Anne Coulter was recently quoted in opposition to the increase of minimum wage. She stated that the iron law of supply and demand would raise the minimum wage if only we would leave it alone. This is gobbledygook. Conservatives also state that raising minimum wage will cost jobs.
The current minimum wage we had was established by the government in the first place. Yes, it is true that the laws of supply and demand will cause our capitalist economy to reach what we know as equilibrium. However, that equilibrium will not ever be livable for those at the bottom of the wage scale. Our economy will not and cannot ever reach equilibrium anyway because the government controls our imports and exports. Left unchecked, the unregulated economy would produce worse conditions for those at the bottom and better conditions for those at the top.
The minimum wage issue is a wasted debate. Establishing a mandatory minimum wage has been done by our government all along during my 64 year life, and it has not produced the harmful effects that conservatives are preaching. It has not even come close. Republicans consistently vote against anything that restricts how corporations can operate. And although they understand economics better than the Democrats, they have the opinion that leaving everything alone will produce utopian prosperity and a vibrant and healthy economy for all.
Even Adam Smith, in his book “The Wealth of Nations,” wrote that if the economy is left unchecked there will be rampant and uncontrolled greed among the owners of the means of production. And there will always be captains of industry who take advantage of the system to maximize their own gain above and beyond their already enormous profits.
Further, losing jobs to technology (another fear announced by the Republicans) was already happening and will continue to happen anyway. Business owners who can realize savings by using technology will do so. Walmart has self-checkout cashier stations, where a single cashier manages stations of four and more checkout registers, in most of their stores already. And that trend is spreading. Theatres are automating their concession areas to minimize manpower needs, and they are even raising prices as they do this, probably to pay for the remodeling they had to do to accomplish this.
Every business owner knows that making more profit in their business comes down to saving costs as much as it does to raising prices. Labor is a big expense in any business. Sometimes raising prices is either not practical because it will hurt sales, or not available because sales is not part of their business model. Managing costs is part of efficiency, and it is efficiency that makes a business solvent. Ask any small business owner. Changing the mandatory minimum wage may make it advantageous to automate sooner, but it will happen anyway.
What Republicans won’t acknowledge is that left unchecked, large corporations will exhibit no morals whatsoever. Big Pharma has used lobbyists to get laws passed stating that only a drug can be a cure for any disease. This is blatantly stupid. There are a number of cures for diseases out there that are not drugs. Sound wave frequency, proper food in your diet, changing your lifestyle, cannabis oil, varying your exercise regimen have all been known to eliminate certain diseases from the human body. That law is simply there to insure that big pharma still can make their millions with their extremely expensive and often harmful drugs. They do not care about the moral side of this; only the profits.
The food industry is currently using lobbyists of their own to attempt to make it illegal for people to have a vegetable garden. How ridiculous is that? This, too, is only about their profits. Where is the moral logic to this? There are 15 ingredients in the typical bottle of coffee creamer. Why do you think that is? If you say health, you would be wrong. Still, Republicans steadfastly work very hard to protect the rights of large corporations over the rights of the citizen. Between that and their efforts to pander to the religious right, where is their moral ground? It appears that in spite of their rhetoric, much of their work only panders to the desires of large corporations.
But in order to get the actual vote of the people they design their rhetoric to appeal to people who want to follow literal application of the bible that makes no sense at all. Republican candidates are making some of the stupidest statements possible during their campaigns. Statements like, ”allowing gay marriage will lead to sibling marriage,” can only appeal to people who already believe this stupid stuff (this is not a slam on the hillbilly states at all). Pushing for strict adherence to the written word of the bible and to make it the law of the land is merely an effort to appease the voting block they aligned themselves with for votes.
They got the political contributions which helped them get elected and they must pay it back by promoting their agenda, as non-caring and illogical as that agenda is. Contradictions can be found throughout the bible. One cannot select any passage that suits their myopic view of what life should be and then incorporate it into law without causing strife in the country. If you are using the bible to hurt other people, you are using it wrong. There are no exceptions to this.
I believe that Republicans are on the way out anyway. The Tea Party may be surfacing as the dominant party for conservatives. They want to eliminate the import export bank and do away with corporate subsidies. These are good goals. Still, they are also whoring themselves to the religious right. They say they are also for the right to life. Sounds good to them, but it is not accurate. If they were actually for the right to life they would allow their tax money to help the orphan children in our country, to help the unfortunate, or even to fund adoptions as a reasonable alternative to abortion but they don’t want their tax money spent that way. That makes them pro-birth, not pro-life.
None of this activity is acting in the best interest of the United States. How is our continuous bum rush to send military and financial aid to Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Kuwait, The Ukraine, Yugoslavia and Ethiopia in the best interest of our own country? Yet when we need to take care of our retiring veterans we will not find the money to do so? We give out corporate subsidies to companies that are profitable. We write bills in congress to provide tax incentives to companies who are moving jobs to foreign countries. Where do we benefit as a nation from any of this? When a small business owner mismanages his or her company they are allowed to fail, but when a huge corporation is mismanaged, it is bailed out. This is rewarding incompetence. How is any of this in the best interest of The United States?
Congress’ job is to take care of the country, not its corporations. Left to their own devices, corporations will take care of their selves—or not. In the automobile industry alone, American Motors, Packard, Desoto and Studebaker were at one time all viable corporations. They were allowed to fail. Why do taxpayers have to bail out large companies that are failing because of their own bad management?
A bank makes loans that are way too risky; a manufacturer doesn’t compete well against foreign companies in the same market; an auto maker loses market share because they make a less reliable product than their foreign competitors. These are all the results of bad decisions by management. Should the legislature make taxpayers bail them out? Is that taking care of the country?
Anyone who researches the written works of our forefathers will find throughout those written documents, abundant references to the absolute necessity of the separation of Church and State. And all of these references express fears of just exactly what is happening in our government today. Our congress is more polarized now than it has been since the civil war. It is also the least productive congress we have ever had.
When your conservative politicians are quoted in the media as being unwilling to compromise at all on any of their issues they are basically stating that they are unwilling to govern. For it is in the very compromise that they are against where we will find in ourselves the ability to move forward and make progress for our citizens. But they took money from the religious right; and now they owe them.
Instead of steering us into the future, we find ourselves in a constant fight to undo decisions of the past. Roe vs Wade was a decision made by a conservative-controlled Supreme Court. Yet our people remain focused on undoing this mandate, presumably based on religious reasons. Nominees for the Supreme Court are no longer questioned at length to determine if they will hear each case presented before them and honestly judge these cases on the merits of the presentation. The right always asks, point blank, if they will overturn Roe vs Wade. They are not interested if the candidate is willing to hear cases as they come. This is clearly a blatant effort to stack the deck. This fight alone has our congress, and the country, so polarized that we are hardly recognizable as The United States anymore. And there are more fights in today’s political environment that have our citizens acting like fools.
The ongoing gun control debate is another example of how we are over reacting so much that we look foolish. One side wants to get rid of gun ownership. They don’t care how, really, and their logic is based on the rise of mass killings in our society. But that is just their excuse. They have made no effort to create laws making a mandatory life sentence (or death if you prefer) for anyone who commits one of these mass killings. It doesn’t matter that the right to bear arms is guaranteed by the constitution. They don’t care. They are pushing for tighter regulations, but that is just the foot-in-the-door excuse which serves to advance them toward their ultimate goal of removing every gun from every home.
As a result, gun owners are going public, carrying guns into stores just to display and flaunt their gun rights and gain attention for their cause. The entire debate has taken on a most gruesome, bizarre and irresponsible display of bad taste and flawed logic on both sides. On the one hand, eliminating private gun ownership cannot be achieved in this country because there will never be complete compliance. The best case scenario will result in a huge black market for guns that will no longer produce tax revenue on sales. On the other hand, groups of people walking into Home Depot, Target or Chili’s with semi-automatic rifles hanging from their necks on lanyards is far from responsible gun ownership. This is becoming such a big deal. We are losing our common sense as a country.
If Republicans and Democrats were to get together and stop sending aid to countries that hate us, perhaps we would be able to use the money saved that we now squander on useless endeavors, to help make America a better place to live. Perhaps if we used our military to protect our own country and make us more secure, instead of to protect our large corporations’ business interest or to meddle in the affairs of other countries who don’t like us anyway, maybe we would have the money to accomplish more things for Americans.
Believe me; we have plenty of problems of our own to work on without going around the world to find problems to solve. We are so hung up with getting involved in conflicts around the world that we somehow don’t find it easy to let other countries settle their own problems. Who, I wonder, actually wants us to get involved in their private civil war? They just want our money. And they are unwilling to even give us any respect for it. Besides, spreading democracy by placing a puppet government in a foreign country, then expecting that democracy to take the same shape as the one in this country is unintelligent.
Any democracy will take the shape of the character of the people who embrace it. And for it to even take hold anywhere it must truly be embraced by the people there. We are so caught up in dropping little democracy bombs around the world that we are losing sight of our own problems. We care less about democracy in other countries than we do about our business interests over there anyway, or we would not behave the way we do. Our sons, daughters, brothers and sisters in the military deserve to not have their lives placed on the line for things unconcerned with our own liberties.
Right now our own little problems are growing as fast as any other problems in the rest of the world. I am not advocating isolationism. Nor am I in favor of shrinking our military in the blind hope that what is happening in the rest of the world will never present itself as a problem here. Only an idiot would believe that. But our military is supposed to be used to protect our own country and our own way of life. It was never intended for us to use our military to police the world.
There is nothing wrong with letting the rest of the world develop its own character without our interference. Besides, we are spending ourselves into unrecoverable debt on this stuff. And we are getting nothing in return for this except declining respect and in many cases, outright hatred. We really need to get control of our national debt. Don’t you think? And what is happening to our national respect? We no longer respect ourselves like we used to. We certainly are not respected by the rest of the world like we used to be.
Focusing more on our own problems would be much more possible if we are not also spending our money to change the rest of the world and remake it in our own image. It’s not about us anyway. It is about the money. Corporations will never focus on what is good for the country over what is good for their company. Why do we let the government focus on what is good for the companies over what is good for the country? We can have a free market economy without draining the general fund to support corporations. We can have individual opportunity without sacrificing our rights for the benefit of the machine. It is time for level heads to prevail again, don’t you think?
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