What Shall We Tell The Children?
It is the year 2111, and somewhere thousands of miles on the other side of the globe, a 12-year-old boy in urban China picks up his textbook to learn about a certain empire that once lived in the West and dominated much of the known world.
He opens the first few pages, and it begins to read thus:
“She was a city on a hill. A template for humanity when most men struggled and longed for a symbol of freedom. ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,’ she pleaded, ‘the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-lost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’
Her name was America.
And so, for several decades, men, women, and children migrated from far and near to partake in the American Dream. She prospered immensely and built many a military bases across the seven seas.
She pioneered a thousand and one inventions, and also overcame a thousand and one challenges, amongst which was the harrowing Great Depression.
But then, as often befalls most great civilizations, over-reliant on prowess and success, she became complacent. She planned awfully for wars which she could not readily afford no matter how good-intentioned, abandoning the fiscal discipline and rules of moral justice that made her an indispensable thought in human life. The rich got richer at the expense of the poor; and ethnic minorities became preys to vultures in her corporate offices. And because her politicians needed these same vultures to sustain their campaigns, they ingloriously turned the blind eye as the foxes raided the hen house.
And so came The Great Recession of 2008. Millions of her denizens lost their jobs as the economy hung in the balance and stared into the abyss. Thence, families in Middle America began to scrap bits and pieces together to survive. The elderly saw their retirement savings and investments devastated in one fell swoop; while the rich might have felt a pinch, the general population groaned under the brunt of a deafening blow. The top 400 Americans now had a combined income greater than the bottom 150 million Americans.
But as no nation is ever conquered from without unless it has first destroyed itself from within, the summer of 2011 became a chance for America to mend her wrongs. That is, get back on the righteous path of fiscal discipline and social justice by closing tax loopholes for big corporations, millionaires, and billionaires who don’t need them; easing the burden of healthcare on distressed middle-class and poor Americans; investing in crucial infrastructures and public works (as China was doing); promoting funding for cutting-edge research and scholarships to needy families; and many others.
Alas, it was not to be so. In a bid to raise her debt limit, alarmingly, she was kidnapped by a few of her children who didn’t care whether she defaulted on her debts or not. These sons and daughters, Tea Party Republicans they were called, stalled and stunted every attempt to make relative progress in her welfare. Believing they knew best what she needed, they fought unyieldingly for the rights of millionaires and billionaires to exploit common citizens and promoted ruinous cuts in programs that hitherto had stabilized the millions of lives living in the bottom half of the American society.
They had a divine mandate, they believed, and they would be damned if they compromised on anything – if the heart and soul of America had to be gutted so the richest 1 percent of Americans could keep a few extra pennies in their pockets, so be it!
But through some clever cajoling in the final hours, a default on her debts was averted, albeit with little room for anything else. An opportunity to fix her ballooning federal deficit, which was now a point of national insecurity, had slipped away like a thief into the dark night. The Tea Partiers had successfully barricaded themselves, with America their hostage, into a room where no physicians could dream of getting to her.
And thusly, in the decades that followed, credit markets, spooked by such gross irresponsibility, made a hurried run for more stable and responsible shelters. Her credit worthiness, now questionable, was downgraded by the rating agencies, leading to increased interest rates for businesses and individuals. The anemic recovery from the recession of 2008 was made worse, precipitating an even more calamitous recession. Her erstwhile irrefutable extolments of democracy’s virtues now seem her eventual undoing. Subsequently, the almighty Dollar, once the global currency, soon became a vestige of an empire that was; as nations gradually drifted toward the Chinese renminbi. For the masses trapped within her shores, the American Dream slowly turned into the American Nightmare.
By this point, everyone wanted the heads of the Tea Partiers … but alas, it was too late. They were nowhere to be found. The Great American Decay had begun.”
Dollars and Cents: Making Sense of the Republican Intransigence
In the course of our national discourse, it is always a hard sell to look a fellow citizen in the eye and accuse him of being a traitor; especially when it’s no open-and-shut case of treachery, such as espionage on behalf of a foreign entity. A compatriot who feverishly holds and defends a view one finds so abhorrent does not so negate his patriotism credentials by simply exercising his civil and democratic right. After all, it is the foundation on which the republic was built. As a result, there is always that dicey, inevitable morality question that arises when one then unilaterally labels an opposing view or persons unpatriotic; because one believes it or them corrosive and destructive to national interest.
Nevertheless, that’s exactly what I will be doing in this piece.
No one has the whole truth about everything and anything at any one time, human life is just too complex for such a simplistic assumption. Thus, a society that will prosper does so by constantly taking the temperature of all the parts that make up its sum. In other words, taking bits and pieces from here and there in crafting public policy – a little from the right, a little from the left, so the ensuing graft reflects the rainbow present in society and not just some monochromatic pie. For only then can a nation be centered, stable, and able to readily combat the many challenges life poses; a nation lopsidedly postured manifestly fails at such challenges.
This lesson was well demonstrated by the Founding Fathers of the republic, who at so many times differed on how a young republic should proceed and offered dissimilar views on what the heart and soul of America should be. But as evidenced by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, compromise is what begets a progressive and purposeful nation.
And yet, according to a recent Gallup poll, 20 percent of Americans find compromise an inexcusable form of weakness. And it is this 20 percent that the Republican Party now represents, damning the remaining 80 percent of Americans. Which, without doubt, must come as a surprise to the many Independents who voted for Republicans in the Midterm Elections of 2010; giving them control of the House of Representatives via the Tea Party Express.
In this past fall, Republicans had touted themselves as custodians of the nation’s economy and berated the big government agenda of the Democratic leadership, which passed one stimulus package after the other with little dent in the lives of millions of jobless and under-paid Americans. “Government needs to be on a workout regime and get lean,” was the mantra of the Republican caucus. It was told over and again; Republicans were just the right public servants to bring fiscal discipline to a house run amok and stymie the runaway national deficit in its tracks.
After the elections, the already heated national conversation about dollars and cents went into overdrive; not necessarily in the way you will imagine (that is, about creating jobs and all) but more so toward “deficit hawkishness”; which, if you were a hawk, purportedly showcased you as a hardcore patriot. We were ostensibly now in the business of nickel-and-diming government. And God bless the soul that dared steer the national consciousness from the subject.
As evidenced by the debate to extend the Bush tax cuts last December, and the recently concluded budget battle for the remainder of fiscal year 2011, Democrats found themselves repeatedly capitulating to a Republican caucus bent on slashing one government program after the other.
The verdict was in; somehow the political elite had managed to convince themselves and the media that the national deficit was our utmost concern. Okay, that’s all good and dandy: Now, we can all agree on one thing and get the ball rolling. But just in case you haven’t been following my flow so far, here it is once again: Hitherto, to be a deficit hawk is now chic.
Although he strongly discouraged Congress from attaching any deficit talks to his request to raise the national debt ceiling, which currently stands at $14.2 trillion; President Obama soon got notice from Republicans in Congress that this was yet another “Christmas wish” of his that wasn’t going to be coming true. And maybe so as not to look irresponsible in an ever-hawkish world (or maybe he now truly believes the deficit is too dreadful a monster), the President acquiesced to Republicans’ effort to attach deficit talks to raising the debt limit.
“Let’s do it,” he said in his news conference of the other day. According to reports, proposing up to $4 trillion in cuts to the national deficit over a span of 10 years; and placing sacred Democratic cows like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security on the table for butcher.
But wait, the Republican caucus suddenly finds itself in the deer lights. This is not how the script goes: they were supposed to argue, growl, and fight for up to $4 trillion in national deficit as they did during the budget talks, and Mr. Obama’s part was to buck them all the way – not buy an ownership stake in the talks; at best, he was supposed to be a minority owner! Now, the hunter has become the hunted; the president was taking away the “Custodian of Economy” title from them, and this is so untenable.
But thank God for the Tea Party, as it has shown, if everything else fails, there’s always demagoguery. And so, this Republican Party decides ideology will be the turf on which the battle is fought. All the talk of cutting government to size by any means necessary now seem a ruse from the very start. Republicans were never serious, as the conflict between rhetoric and action now clearly shows. Republicans came to a fork in the road and took the road oft travelled; the road being greed and self-preservation. Political expediency no longer sojourned with national interest, and they’d be damned if the former suffers.
Republicans’ abject refusal to have constructive dialogue in dealing with the debt crisis and forestalling a looming default reeks to high heavens of unadulterated egocentricity. Plugging tax loopholes that favor millionaires and billionaires is so sacrilegious that some in the party would rather the nation default on its debt than saddle millionaires and billionaires with additional pennies in taxes.
How can we seek a stable and centered state if the Right, Republicans, believe they have all the answers to our present economic quagmire and no other fixture on the spectrum counts. No one has the whole truth at any one time, yet, the Republican Party believes it has all the answers to this fiscal crisis, and nowhere in that manual is a provision for tax increase on folks who can best afford them. The United States has never defaulted on its debt, but these Republican patriots are readily willing to find out what happens if it does.
Significant efforts have been made by this president – had the present negotiations been so lopsided that Mr. Obama gave no grounds, Republicans would have an argument that shames any attempt at opposition. But with a ratio of $3 of spending cut for every $1 in tax hike, the Republican Party has never had it so good in bleeding such drastic concessions from a Democratic president.
I believe come August 2nd, there still will be no deal due to the many elements in the Republican Party who deem inflexibility a desirable trait, coupled with the president’s refusal to sign any short-term deal. As a result, Mr. Obama will have to unilaterally bypass Congressional authorization on the debt limit, since the 14th Amendment expressly states “the validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law … shall not be questioned.” And such action by the president, then made necessary, is a sheer condemnation of ideologues who seek to hijack government.
No reasonable person will fault a Republican member of Congress for being principled and having ideals – a man must stand for something, otherwise, he falls for everything and anything. But the desertion of reason in the search for the ideal becomes the problem here. To be so recalcitrant as to not give faithful negotiations a chance in the face of pending national crisis is by all means unreasonable, irresponsible, and an act of disservice to the nation. An act unpatriotic to its core.
About
I’m passionate about issues that affect the status quo. I believe the consciousness that political events of all variations affect diverse facets of humans’ existence is very true. Hence, the need to shed light on these issues, and through this medium, provide the eager reader polished, refreshing, and independent news analysis as these events unfold.
I can be reached at restlesschronicles@gmail.com
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