A Republican celebration of Dependence
How the Reactionaries have replaced the "Nanny State" with the Nanny Corporation
Cross posted at Conceptual
Guerilla
On this Friday before labor day, supposedly a day honoring working people, it is instructive to look at exactly who and what we are working for. In an age when wages are taxed at a higher rate than investment income, and falling income and wealth for the bottom 90 percent of Americans is a matter of fact, it is time to take aim at the so-called American Dream and how it has been perverted by the "less government" crowd of reactionaries currently running the U.S. A one-sided class war is being waged, with monopoly crony capitalism simultaneously winning and making us more dependent on it. Below the fold, we puncture the myth that every American can get ahead, as reality proves otherwise.
One of the classic memes, or frames of reference, that the reactionary ripoff artists known as the Republican party, constantly invokes is the rugged individualist American, freed from the tyranny of taxes, has control over his/her own destiny. Republicans are constantly deriding the "nanny state" and using that simplistic, hollow theme as justification to eliminate government involvement in activities other than war, preparation for war, funneling money to the upper classes, and developing a police state. Of course, there is also what we know as "corporate welfare", but that is another issue; indeed in this case the corporations are dependent on the same nanny state their mouthpieces and fixers constantly deride through media propaganda. We are now at a crucial crossroads, and unless we make a sharp turn, we are careening down the highway to a feudal, third world totalitarianism, in which the powers that be are completely unaccountable for their actions.
The average American is no longer being served by the nanny state, rather by the nanny corporation, which instead of a nurturing relationship, is forging an exploitative one. At the behest of monopoly capitalists, options for ordinary Americans are being foreclosed, and we are hell bent on a future dependent on the status quo in energy, food, health care and other necessities, one in which you're on your own from government, yet dependent on corporations, unless you are among the power elite. The bottom line is they want US, Americans to be dependent on them, not rugged individualists or small scale local and sustainable economies that do not require the goods and services they provide.
Small business is crushed by taxes, such as the self-employment tax and entry fees that simply make it extremely difficult to make the transition to profitability, while wages are taxed at a higher rate than capital. The credit system also creates road blocks to businesses (see below). It all boils down to warfare on the small individual. The probability of an individual moving up in income or wealth to the upper 1 percent is scarcely better than winning the lottery. It is not surprising that many poor and middle class people think of the lottery as a road to riches - the odds are not much worse for hitting the jackpot as they are for simple hard work.
Let us consider why we have not progressed further in renewable and alternative energy technologies. If you look at oil, coal, nuclear, and natural gas, they are a reactionary ripoff Republican (a.k.a.cheap labor conservative) marketers' wet dream. Here are products that have to constantly be re-purchased since they are always being used up. Coincidentally, they require large amounts of capital to develop and market, therefore foreclosing small operators from becoming involved and by necessity limiting competition through the simple requirement that few have access to the resources needed to sell the product. Finally, a vast infrastructure has been developed that requires these products to function, therefore developing a captive market for the product. Do you really think that the cheap labor powers that be really want Americans to be empowered with an alternative, even if that alternative turns out to be cheaper, better, faster and more environmentally sustainable in the long run? As Conceptual Guerrilla has stated, the aim of the Republican cheap labor boys is to have you "over a barrel". I submit that the real reason Jimmy Carter was removed from power is that he was adamant about creating a wealth of alternative and renewable energies. This was poison to the petroleum boys that are now currently in power. So the GOoPer oil boys and the CIA operatives overblow an energy crisis, run up inflation to damage the economy and drag out a hostage crisis to sweep them into power. Poof, gone are the alternatives. Every attempt since then to turn Federal policy towards renewable, alternative energies and conservation has been shot down in flames. Clinton tried a carbon tax to reduce fossil fuel usage, but that was shot down in flames by a reactionary Congress spouting the "no new taxes" meme. Funding for energy alternatives and conservation is stuck at less than 1/250 of the Federal budget (less than 2.5 billion dollars), yet fossil fuel and nuclear are subsidized to the tune of $30-50 billion. The hypocrisy is so thick you can cut it with a knife- there is a good reason trucking, roads, airplanes, and cars are worthy of federal largesse, to the tune of $250 billion a year or more, while expenditures of less than one-tenth that amount on more efficient transportation alternatives such as rails are constantly derided as a waste of money and beneficiaries of federal welfare (witness the perpetual starvation of Amtrak's budget and the Republican "budget cutters" using the threat to eliminate Amtrak as proof of their "fiscal responsibility"). The Republican alternatives like to focus on a few narrow items, like ethanol from corn crops. The inconvenient truth about this is that most of our farmland is already used up to produce food crops, the energy input from mechanization, cultivation, herbicides and fertilizer provides a poor return on investment, degrades the environment, and uses virtually as much energy to extract the ethanol than is gained by burning it. The fact that this alternative is so ballyhooed is more a testament to the political clout of Archer Daniels Midland than anything else.
Our food supply, being so large scale, and dependent on massive energy inputs, is being forced to raise prices due to the large scale ratcheting up of energy costs in this country. Yet localized, small scale organic agriculture and personal food production is pooh-poohed by the powers that be as the province of crunchy granola liberals, and is never seriously looked at in the corporate media.
How do the reactionary ripoff boys in the White House, Congress and Corporate America manage to pull this off, despite poll after poll indicating that the vast majority of Americans want energy and transportation alternatives that are cheaper, better, and less polluting, and want government to fund it. It is through poisoning the debate through the mass, corporate media through advertising and slanting the news. For example, when do they ever mention that personal vehicles cost upwards of $4000.00 a year each to own and operate? I can ride a train to work every day 52 weeks a year for about half that, and I live 75 miles from work. And fatal car accidents are so commonplace that many of them are not mentioned by the media, yet a train accident, even a nonfatal one, gets front billing on the TV media, as if they want to scare us away from the evil, plebian mass transit. Also, the media crows about how we are "so fortunate" to be paying half of what Europeans for gasoline, yet they only tell half the story; Americans are dependent on their cars, which eat up 15-20 percent or more of the median American income to operate, while Europeans can have access to work, shopping, parks and other amenities without the need for a car due to their excellent transit networks and compact neighborhood design. 20 years ago I was in Sweden, and could traverse the entirety of Stockholm on rapid trains that ran every 5-10 minutes all day and cost less than 50 cents to ride. And the latest red herring to crop up is the "wind farms interfere with radar fighting the war on terror", used as an excuse to strangle an emerging, better, cheaper alternative to fossil energy in it's crib.
Similarly, the debate over our overpriced, underserving health care system is predicated on the fact that "our health care system is the best in the world". Never mind that even hated socialist Cuba has better life expectancy and lower infant mortality than the U.S, and that the Europeans and Japanese with their universal health care best the U.S both in general health and in life expectancy, sometimes by five years or more. Plus, the scandalous pharmaceutical industry spends more money on advertising and polishing their feel-good image than on basic research, all the while charging Americans vastly more than other nations for their products. However, these inconvenient truths are drowned out by the smoke and mirrors of the U.S media who manage to cite a few horror stories about some people that have to wait for operations in other countries, while ignoring the fact that many Americans cannot even afford the same operations, or have to wait for them for economic reasons. Rationing of medicine is a harsh reality in this country, despite the corporate propaganda purporting it is not. Recently, research has found that even the British, with a similar life style and diet to ours, are generally healthier than Americans, and this even cuts across class lines. The only thing that is healthy about the U.S health care system, besides the care for the elite in "concierge" facilities and state of the art procedures for the elite, is a vast private sector bureaucracy that is estimated to consume up to 1/3 or more of each US health care dollar, while providing nothing in the way of actual health care. The parasitic nature of the health care system is not only found in the useless insurance bureaucracy, but within a system that milks cash cows by providing useless end of life care for people such as Terri Schaivo, who happened to have a multimillion dollar malpractice settlement in her name that provided a steady stream of cash to the facilities that kept her alive, while an African American baby, Sun Hudson, who happened to be in a poor family in Texas, happened to have his life support pulled and allowed to die despite the protestations of his mother. All under a law signed by George Bush when he was governor of Texas.
Like the health care industry of late, the financial industry salivates over the prospect of providing a vast level of disservice to the average American, while all the while thinking of creative ways to fleece their "customers" out of more and more money by instituting more and more fees for non-existent "services". Despite low interest rates, credit card issuers have persisted in keeping interest rates high, creating "universal defaults" so one late payment to one creditor gives them all an excuse to jack up rates to a customer, a plethora of fees such as internet or phone payment processing fees for something that actually benefits the creditor by getting the money in their hands faster, ridiculous late fees that recoup far more money than it costs the creditor for the late payment. This is not to mention the payday loan operators that take advantage of the underpaid lower middle and lower classes cash flow problems, much of which is due to being underpaid in an economy where the minimum wage has lost 40% of its purchasing power since 1969. An outgrowth of the credit usury system is the creation of a vast private sector big brother data base that profits by selling credit "scores" to the consumer and information to prying eyes in both government and the private sector. The result of this is a porous system that makes it ridiculously easy to steal identities, and a system rife with error. Huge compromises in data bases maintained by such huge private information bureaucracies such as ChoicePoint are commonplace and are even discussed in the corporate media. Unfortunately, the question is never asked as to why these companies were allowed to amass these data bases in the first place. It is estimated that 40% or more of credit reports contain at least one significant error. Many of these errors benefit creditors by allowing them to redline consumers by placing them in "higher risk" categories, therefore dictating much higher cost terms of loans or credit cards. Good luck to the individual who attempts to make these bureaus correct the mistakes; it can take countless hours to collect the documentation to prove the error, forward it to the creditor, and it takes several months at best to remove it from the credit reporting. The upshot of this is that a huge monetary and privacy cost has been foisted on Americans in order to fuel an industry that is out of control. Just ask someone whose identity has been stolen or one who is dunned by a false creditor, or one who has been redlined and tries to correct their credit report.
The credit industry has been instrumental in facilitating a level of consumption that would not have been possible given the income and wealth stagnation and subsequent decline of Middle America under the Bush regime. What is worse is that the abuses of this industry also promote a level of dependency on corporations that would not exist if wages were able to keep up with expenses. It is commonplace now for utility bills, food and other necessities to be put on plastic, which adds to the cost of these items for the consumer.
With respect to the real estate sector in the financial world, the downside to the real estate bubble is a negative impact to those who would like to live sustainably in their homes for extended periods of time. A speculative, inflating real estate market drives people out of their homes through increased assessments leading to rapidly increased property taxes that soon become unaffordable. Such a system does not encourage constructing homes that are to be lived in for a long time by one family, as it is better to "flip them" or extract the equity, which sometimes is needed just to pay the high taxes resulting from high assessments.
The combination of the gutting of regulations that control corporate behavior and a money for nothing mentality endemic to reactionary ripoff Republicans and their sycophants, is an economy where the bottom 90 percent of Americans is shackled to a "necessity tax" for basic needs such as energy, transportation, shelter, and health care. Under the Bush regime, these items have inflated 5-10 percent a year and sometimes more (witness gasoline prices since 2004, a 50% inflation rate for this item alone), and capture an increasing proportion of the average Americans' family budget. This is in light of the fact that incomes for the lower 80 percent of Americans have remained stagnant or declined relative to inflation (even factoring in cheap consumer electronics and Chinese-made Wal Mart consumer goods that depress the inflation rate). To use myself and another young professional family as an example, the necessity costs alone to sustain a family of four run between $50-$60,000 a year with little left for discretionary spending. With little in the way of alternatives such as local, community or individual based economy to provide necessities, this has resulted in a negative savings rate for average Americans of late, which has accelerated due to the recent run-up in fuel prices. One has to look at the entire bottom line, not just "taxes" in a vacuum, as the reactionary ripoff boys like to do in their mythical "free market". If it is something you are required to purchase to exist, it can be considered a tax, or at least an impact to your bottom line. Expenses are expenses, whether they go to a corporation or to the government. The ratcheting upwards of necessities is a cheap labor wet dream, for they really and truly have made you dependent on things you need to buy again and again.
Perhaps it is now high time for us to revisit a system in which government handles some of the necessities, as is the case in the European economies, where average citizens actually have more money after the necessities are paid for, or put a combination of incentives through regulation and cost controls in place to nurture renewable necessity economies that do not place premiums on private bureaucracies and the upwards redistribution of wealth to the CEOs and major stockholders of Exxon and United Health Care. Let the debate begin - it is time to free America from a corporate dependency equal to or worse than that our founding fathers once fought over 200 years ago to free America from the tentacles of the East India Company and their monopolization of resources.
As a footnote, many sources have commented on the use of and manipulation of fear in the war on terrortm and how striking the fear into the heart of the populace has also forged a dependency on the power elite to take care of us, and not to question their motives. This is yet another way in which to pick our pockets and accelerate the trend towards serfdom.