In 2000, George W. Bush lost the popular vote and in reality the electoral vote and yet ended up as President, thanks to a Florida nightmare of “butterfly ballots,” “hanging chads” on punch card voting machines, military ballots that were passed deadlines In the end, a Republican dominated Supreme Court wruled in favor of the Florida officials who stole the election for him.
Barack Obama was elected with a solid majority in 2008 and re-elected in 2012, with a smaller majority and a smaller turnout—but a majority never the less. In 2008, Obama ran strongly against the “failed” policies of the Reagan-Bush era which had intensified inequality and led the nation to the precipice of another Great Depression.
The Obama administration, while it deserves the criticism it has received from the left and left center for its failure to do more to establish a national public health care system, reduce unemployment through public works programs, and carry forward the still postponed revival of regulation and taxation of capital did prevent a major depression.
It also passed the most significant national health care legislation since Medicare,passed in the Lily Ledbetter Act, a major upgrade of the 1963, Equal Pay Act , aimed at equal pay for women workers, and increased significantly a variety of social services for working families and low income people that the Reagan Bush policies had long undermined, among other positive policies.
At a time when major capitalist countries, including some led by nominally social democratic and or labor parties, were adopting pre Keynesian fiscal conservative austerity policies to “solve” the public debt crisis at the expense of the people, the Obama administration resisted these policies and instead revived Keynesian compensatory fiscal policies to contain the crisis.
Barack Obama was re-elected on a pledge to repeal the Bush tax cuts, which Republican and business opposition prevented in his first time. He defeated in Mitt Romney a candidate committed to repealing the affordable health care act and combining sharp reductions in social spending, including de facto raids on social security and Medicare, with even greater general tax cuts to large capital to “spur” investment that would, by the magic of trickle down, supply side, aka voodoo economics, provide millions of well paying new jobs and overall economic prosperity.
Do the 2008 and 2012 Elections Matter to the People if they don't Matter to Finance Capital?
But the Washington and Wall Street pundits seem to have short term memory loss about the elections. Romney, Ryan, Gingrich, Santorum, have disappeared from view. Now there is a “fiscal cliff” that threatens everyone, rich and poor, young and old, as if the last three decades, which saw the Dow Jones average increase twelve times and the national debt nearly 16 times, were characterized by huge increases in real wages, greater income equality. Now “we” who have gained so much and lived so high must “tighten our belts” and accept a lower standard of living, the only way to overcome the crisis.
First the “we all face the fiscal cliff” argument reminds me most of a famous putdown of laissez faire “iron laws of the marketplace” arguments over a century ago. A man pushes another man off a roof and then tells the court that he is innocent because the man was killed by the law of gravitation!
Remember the last thirty two years, where labor and the people have been the victims of political economic muggings. First the Reagan cutbacks, the largest reduction in discretionary social spending in history in the early 1980s, along with the tax cuts, which produced the worst recession of the post WWII period, a recession overcome only by the large increase in military spending.
Mass homelessness for the first time since the Great Depression, hunger, a significant overall drop in real wages for the majority, the deregulation which brought back multi-billion dollar Wall Street and banking scandals, junk bonds, Boesky, the Savings and Loan collapse and the stock market crash of 1987. Finally the U.S. becoming the leading debtor nation in the world and the deficit going from 1 trillion in 1981 to 4 trillion in 1993.
Then after eight years of more traditional fiscal conservative policies under Clinton, which contained the deficit and saw in Clinton’s second term modest increases in real wages although now reversal in the pattern of heightening inequality, they did it all over again.
Bush’s stolen presidency and a second, more destructive and ultimately much more expensive wave of tax cuts, social service cuts, large increases in military spending, and the toleration, if not outright encouragement, of the Enrons, the WorldComms, the Madoffs, et al, pursuing policies that would make a 19th century Robber Baron Green with envy.
The Past as The Present With No Future
Remember the movie, Groundhog Day. A man finds himself waking up in a time loop. Whatever he does, he is in the same place on the same day being confronted with the same situations until he can get out of it.
In a sense we have been in that time loop, struggling to get out of it for the last three decades. Military spending goes up spectacularly to fight the “evil Soviet empire” and its agents from Grenada to Afghanistan. The “evil Soviet Empire” is no more and military spending stays pretty much where it was and then goes up spectacularly to fight international terrorism, led by al Qaeda, the former “freedom fighters” funded to fight the “evil Soviet empire” in Afghanistan and do in the dictator Saddam Hussein, supported in the Reagan era in a war against Iran.
Deregulation in the 1980s produces the greatest corruption scandals involving Wall Street and banking since the late 19th century. Then the Savings and loan bailout. Then further deregulation. Then much bigger scandals and a much bigger Wall Street crash in the first decade of the 21st century, followed by a much bigger bailout.
The Republicans win, the Republicans lose. The Democrats win, the Democrats lose. The time loop continues. Actually, for the working class there is no “fiscal cliff” but a kind of economic quicksand where one lives paycheck to paycheck, sinks a little more in debt as wages stagnate and “social wages” health care premiums, public transportation costs, education and other basic services funded locally by regressive property taxes becomes more expensive.
What can we do to demand that the Obama administration pull labor and the people out of the quicksand rather than merely stabilize their situation so that they are not sinking as fast.
First, we must reject all of the reactionary rhetoric about a “fiscal cliff” since that leads only to one policy—austerity, and austerity leads labor and the people deeper into the quicksand.
Then, we, meaning the left, since only the left can do this, must come forward with a general program that will compel capital to "bite the bullet" that they have been forcing us to bite for decades
We must begin to call for the redistribution of the wealth(yes, the great unthinkable in U.S. politics) that was taken from the people over the last three decades and placed in the hands of finance capital, the high corporate managerial class, and the “ idle and undeserving rich” whose trust funds and hedge funds have kept them
Learning from History
We can take some lessons from U.S. experience in World War II.
First, union membership was increased greatly when the War Labor Board called for all employers receiving government contracts to accept unions and employ union labor only for the length of the contract.
This should be made into a national policy not only for all companies with federal contracts but for all companies, including all of their contractors and sub-contractors, who have received federal stimulus/bailout funds, which are scheduled to continue. This would increase wages and mass purchasing power.
The federal government should respond to this crisis as it did to the war crisis, creating planning agencies whose purpose would be industrial expansion to overcome the deficit crisis, not austerity, boards in which government planners and representatives of labor and environmental and consumer organizations, along with business and finance, would participate.
I am not talking here about the “dollar a year men” who flooded Washington from corporations during WWII, although they at the time pursued policies(because they had to) which were more progressive than any being suggested today.
Of course, the main target of “cutbacks” should be the military industrial complex, which when everything is added in, including the enormous waste associated with the Bush Homeland Security Agency, which replicates and often interferes with what existing federal, state, and local police agencies are doing, amounts to more than 700 billion a year.
There are also simple symbolic actions that can be taken which would encourage working people to believe that politics and government are not merely bad jokes. During WWII, Franklin Roosevelt unsuccessfully advocated a $25,000 a year income cap(at the time this was a very high income). Today, President Obama advocates eliminating the Bush tax cuts for those with income above $250,000.
We might go him one better, much better, by re-establishing a graduated income tax for those above $250,000, along with a new version of the old and largely forgotten “excess profits tax” for all corporate bonuses, stock options, and other ways that the capitalist class uses to reward itself and its higher servants.
Finally, there are the trillions in the unregulated “hedge funds,” the source of vast corruption in recent years. If, and this I realize would be a revolutionary act, the federal government could gain control of these funds and use them the way public bond acts are used, that is, to back up general revenues and support various public projects, this “redistribution” of wealth could rapidly become the financial foundation for the “change we can believe in” that President Obama campaigned for in 2008.
In conclusion, we should stop reacting to the media blitz about the “fiscal cliff” crisis and start demanding policies to both deal with the immediate crisis and address the long-term crisis. Everything that is being suggested in mainstream media today rewards those who in effect created the crisis. The real waste, the massive export of capital from the U.S., the time loop of more cutbacks and more personal and public debt year after year, decade after decade, was facilitated by reactionary Republican governments but instituted by and for capital.
We must act and act now to get out of Groundhog Day, to not wake up in a 2013 which will be like all of the last three decades, as if the 2012 election and the whole Obama administration didn’t exist.
