GOP's Pledge To America; Anything New?

It's clear from what is happening in our society these days that a lot of people don't understand what goes on in society which is that government is basically for the service of the rich. The rest of us just happen to be incidentals. We are the little annoyances that government has to deal with while doing its major job of taking care of the rich. The way they do it is throw us little crumbs, from time to time, to shut us up while they appropriate everything else for the rich.

This fact is no better represented than in the policies of the Republican Party as they recently re-stated when they rolled out their latest, recycled and touched up to deceive, policy statement. This time they called it their "Pledge To America" and in it they pledge to basically continue on the same path that brought America to this impasse. They pledged to continue with the regulatory anarchy that brought about the recession and glossed over everything else, which is what they usually do in order to deceive. They'd wrap their policies of helping the rich take over the country, in a cloak of falsehoods and misrepresent it to the people as freedom of enterprise. This is nothing but balderdash as you will find out later in the article.

They have found an ingenuous way in which they brand anything that's proposed which will help the poor as socialism, while they help themselves limitlessly to our common wealth? A jobless citizen subsidy is socialism which will add to the deficit, but a multi billion dollar subsidy to multi-billion dollar companies is normal and good for the economy. And these, for the records, are companies whose owners are pocketing billions of dollars in profits and paying tens, and sometimes, hundreds of millions of dollars in salaries and compensations to their CEOs and other top staff.

Subsidize health care for the citizens? No, that's socialism and we can't afford socialism, not if we want to maintain our rich lords in all their opulence is the part they won't tell you. After all, that's what makes America great, the rich. Why else would the Republican Party be talking about repealing a Health care law that more people in the country believe is wonderful. The people's major grievance with the Health care law is that it doesn't go deep enough in what it's supposed to do, a fact that is supported by various polls taken since after the enactment of that law. Yet the Republican Party, with the full support of the rich, want to take that away from the people, obviously so that they can add the money to support the tax breaks for the rich.

How about a bill to support the small businesses and make sure that they start to thrive again being that they are the major employers of American workers. The Obama government wanted to do that but the Republican "rich man" Party stood in the way. Their argument was that ..............? Up till now, I have not been able to make any sense out of their blabbing on why they opposed that bill even when they kept mouthing their wishes to get the economy going.

Or about holding hostage, a bill to extend unemployment benefits for poor unemployed Americans, who are suffering the results of the Republican Party's greed and incompetence, while demanding that the richest Americans each be given, at least, a hundred thousand dollars in tax breaks. This tax break they were, and are still demanding for the rich will cost in excess of seven hundred billion dollars while the unemployment benefit bill cost less than forty billion dollars. Yet they claimed to be blocking the unemployment benefit bill in other to bring down the country's deficit.

How do you keep claiming to want to get the economy going while blocking everything proposed that will help jump start and sustain that growth? It's really confusing to people when your words speak one thing and your actions speak the very opposite, but don't forget the saying that "action speaks louder than words." What that means, therefore, is that people see and feel the Republican Party's actions more clearly than they hear their words which are drowned out in the madness and confusion, that is that party, most of the time, anyway.

The Republican Party has proved, over the years, to be a party that operates on the premise that this country is supposed to operate on a divide of the "haves" and the "have nots". All their policies, from the nineteen eighties when Ronald Reagan became president, has been geared towards creating that reality. This continued through the government of Bush 1 to George W who took it to the pinacle. They broke down all the barriers that had been put in place by their forebears and this country's fore fathers to guard against that very situation.

This they achieved by removing all the regulations, financial and otherwise, that controlled the way companies and banks did business. The result was that these entities operated as most humans would under an anarchy - without scruples and fear of repercussions. What we got was a system, or lack of it, that encouraged the worst of human greed to thrive. Wall Street ran amok and basically gambled with the nations economy, making obscene amounts of money and creating obscene amounts of wealth for themselves and a very small number of privileged people, at the expense of the vast majority of the population.

In the same vein, other big companies and corporations went haywire, cutting corners and putting the lives and jobs of their employees in grave danger by shipping jobs overseas, and not bothering with improving work place safety. The absence of regulations meant they could do this and increase their profits tenfold, legally, even if it meant that more Americans lost their jobs, or died from very preventable accidents on a regular basis. That was a small price to pay in the quest to create more wealth and riches, albeit for a very few. That is, after all, the mantra of the Republican Party, "wealth creation for the few, at all cost".

What they did, and how they did it, is saturated history but the fact remains that the Republican Party, for some reason, is still not satisfied with the harm they have done the middle class and poor of this country and want to continue. I shudder to imagine what they want to achieve and where they want to lead this country. This is because they have kept getting worse as the days have gone by and are now at a point where they are doing things with a certain amount of cockiness. It is as if to say that we will keep doing what we want and there is nothing you can do about it. The leader of the party said this at the unveiling of their "Pledge To America" document, " We will not be any different than we have been" and that says it all.

The Republican Party has always believed that America should be a country of the rich, for the rich and ruled by the rich. That is their own definition of democracy as they have kept telling us by their past actions and planned future actions. They believe that the poor have to have people to look up to so as to keep the "American dream" alive. They believe that, when you keep the poor hoping, they will, in turn, keep working harder and harder to keep you rich while dreaming that, one day, they can be like you. Genius, isn't it? It is, because we've bought it as normal. So much so, that many of us actually feel guilty having anything done for us by our government. Somehow, through propaganda, we have been made to feel inadequate for receiving any help from the government but feel it's okay for the rich to receive all the help.














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Is The GOP Still In Charge of Itself?

I have watched, with more interest than I would normally do, I must confess, the role the tea party is playing in the goings on in the Republican Party as it concerns the election of candidates for the upcoming elections for congress. What has been outstanding has been the frequency with which the tea party has usurped the candidates that were backed by the national party -the establishment, if you will.


This has had the effect of putting the Republican Party in some sort of quandary, in the sense that they are saddled with candidates whom they’re not very comfortable with. In most cases, these are candidates the national party has run negative campaign ads against, a fact that makes it even more uncomfortable now that they would be forced to work with these candidates.

What has happened, so far, has been that the beaten establishment candidates have found it difficult to accept the victorious tea party nominees and vice versa. Examples of this abound but I will mention only two in Nevada and Alaska. In both states, the defeated establishment candidates have refused to reconcile with the victors even refusing to attend the reconciliation parties that are thrown in order to bring the party together after election primaries. In fact, the Alaskan losing candidate has gone as far as intimating that she might still run in the general elections as a third party candidate. This scenario is in very sharp contrast with the one presented by pundits and party leaders of the Republican Party which is one of unrivalled party unity and confidence heading into the fall elections.

Another fact that has held my interest is the quality of these tea party candidates that have been selected the Republican Party’s nominees for the November elections. These are mostly people who would have been judged too extremist to be considered as candidates a scanty two years ago. Candidates like Sharron Angle of Nevada whose views that social security should be scrapped and that women should not have the right to chose abortion even in cases of rape and incest are, at best, very far right. It was also Ms. Angle who said, and keeps repeating, that Americans should expect conservatives to pick up their guns and fight their way to power if they fail to get it through the ballot box.

In other words, Ms. Angle is calling for a civil war in the event that conservatives don’t succeed in electing all their extremist candidates which makes you wonder if this is just Sharron Angle talking or maybe something behind her. You also have nominees like Rand Paul who in addition to wanting to privatize social security and scrap Medicare, also wants to abolish the department of education and remove all regulations leaving industries and corporations to run on their own terms.

Then there is the Alaskan Joe Miller whose positions keep changing with every new interview. First he was for scrapping social security, then he was for privatizing it and then he changed to ending it for any child born from the day he is sworn into office as a senator of the United States of America. This is in addition to his changing views on federal spending where Mr. Miller had held that Alaska should gain control of lands currently run by the federal government, which would have allowed the state to receive fewer federal funds. In an about face typical of his views on every other issue, Mr. Miller changed his position saying in a press statement that he rejects the notion that his election would result in an end to federal spending in Alaska. Talk about eating your cake and having it.

The Republican Party also has nominees like Christine O’Donnell from Delaware who holds beliefs as far fetched as being anti masturbation. In an MTV interview that Ms. O’Donnell gave some years back, she had advised that people stay away from masturbation because it’s ungodly and unchristian like. This, in itself, is not such a bad advice, but given that the tea party keeps touting its Christian roots, this next candidate is a bit hard to explain and that brings me to the nominee for New York state gubernatorial election, Mr. Carl Paladino. Mr. Paladino has been known to send emails of people having sex with animals to his friends with notes like “Take it easy big fella”. Now, isn’t that something that the “Christian” tea party is so large and diverse that it can deliver two candidates with one being anti masturbation and the other being pro bestiality? Such a wonderfully large tent they have, indeed.

Seeing all these brings me to this pertinent question, what is going on in the Republican Party? I can proffer some answers here but I can’t vouch for the correctness or otherwise of them. One answer is that the rich owners of the party have become discontented with the pace of the establishment Republicans in advancing their (the rich’s) programs and want to replace them with these radicals with whom they feel they can get their agendas passed into law no matter how outlandish they might be.

Another possible answer is that the Republican Party has succeeded in creating a monster that is now on the verge of devouring it. Explanation being that the tea party which was created as a means to fight the policies of the government controlled by the Democratic Party has now grown a mind of its own and has turned into a cancer that is threatening the very life of the same thing it was supposed to save.

You only need to hear some of the sentiments expressed by some of that party’s leadership on many of the tea party candidates to realize that all is not well in the Grand Old Party. A ready example is the recent outburst on Christine O’Donnell by Carl Rove while speaking on Sean Hannity’s Fox news program. In the outburst, Mr. Rove described Ms. O’Donnell in very unsavory terms and ended up by calling her a liar who cannot win in the general elections.

So what does the future hold for the Republican Party and its favorite son the tea party? That’s a hard question to answer right now because we won’t know until after November when the ballots will have been counted and the elections concluded. Only then can we know, for sure, the direction in which that party is headed and whether its favorite child will still be along for the ride.