Sequestration nation

By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com

MIAMI – Even President Obama didn’t believe they would go through with it. The administration was convinced that sequestration – across-the-board cuts in government expenditures that went into effect last Friday – wouldn’t happen.

Obama stated as much in a 2012 campaign speech. The president reasoned that even today’s Tea Party infected Republicans weren’t crazy enough to take a hatchet to the budget that would extract a pound of flesh even from the GOP’s holiest of holies, the military. Republicans would be forced to meet Obama half way and agree to attack the deficit with a mix of tax increases on the rich and cuts to government programs.

It didn’t happen. Obama was wrong; the Republicans are just that crazy. Their fanaticism about taxes is boundless. To paraphrase an old song, when it comes to the GOP class of 2013, what’s reason got to do with it? After dealing with Republican intransigence for over four years, a good question is: What part of the invariant Republican nay the president still doesn’t understand.

The GOP zeal for cutting any part of government that gets in the way of business doing exactly what it wants, from fouling the air and water to the kind of financial chicanery that created the 2008 meltdown, is exceeded only by their hatred of any program that transfers money from the obscenely opulent to the desperately needy or even to the struggling middle class.                                                     

That hatred has a long history: the Republicans opposed every progressive measure over the last century, from FDR’s New Deal and its flagship program, Social Security, to LBJ’s creation of Medicare and his other Great Society initiatives, to Obama’s health reform law.

Their problem was that for decades they were impotent to translate that hatred into policy. Herbert Hoover (HH), the Republican President on whose watch the 1929 stock market crash took place, and which triggered the Great Depression, made the party’s core ideology so unpopular it was unable to fully take up its reactionary bent until the rise of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

How Hoover accomplished this dubious feat should be an object lesson for today’s fire-breathing Republican ideologues, yet it is completely lost on them. Hoover responded to the Depression by cutting government spending, exactly what today’s GOP proposes. It was a disaster, and it has been clear since then that cutting public spending at a time when private spending is inadequate to drive the economy is a formula for depression.

The austerity policy was a debacle in the 1930s and set the stage for the rise of Hitler, fascism, and WWII. Today, the same austerity policy is devastating Spain, Ireland, Greece, and Portugal and seriously hampering the economies of Italy and Britain, among many others.

Blinded by their market fundamentalism, unable to accept evidence that contradicts their beliefs, from climate science to evolution to Keynesian economics, with the sequestration the GOP has made it clear that it is willing to drive the nation’s ailing economy deeper into the ground in order to honor their dogma.

The exact cost of this lunacy is difficult even for Nobel Prize-winning economists to calculate. What is clear is that, while the full adverse effects will not be immediately experienced, the loss to the country’s economy will be significant and that those who will bear the ill effects will be the 99 percent, not the 1 percent who pay ridiculously low tax rates the Republicans are ready to inflict widespread pain in order to protect.

One might think that, if nothing else, sheer political pragmatism might persuade the Republicans to alter their course. After all, every poll has found that more Americans favor Obama’s balanced approach for dealing with the deficit than the GOP’s scorched earth strategy. But that is not the way American politics is played, especially today. Today, Congressional Republicans are more scared of their tax-loathing base and the possibility of an intra-party primary challenge from the extreme right than they are of the disapproval of the average citizen.
  
Moreover, the hard-right-wing that now controls the Republican Party has a larger, long term project: the transformation of American society into something like the savage, social-Darwinist capitalism of the nineteenth century.

This is ironic because, even in the glory days of the alleged welfare state, the U.S. social safety net was pretty pathetic compared to that of virtually every other rich nation on Earth. It was riven with gaping holes, such the lack of universal health coverage. Government income support, “welfare,” given to single mothers was never enough for them to provide even a barely decent standard of living for their families.

Moreover, the cost of this miserly help was high. People on welfare were automatically marked with a wounding, vicious stigma and subject to condescending attitudes and regular surveillance by government workers charged with making sure they were not supplementing the princely sums provided by the state with a little cash on the side from a low-paying part-time job or a boyfriend’s rare generosity, the kind of thing that might make possible a few Christmas toys for the kids.

But even this was too magnanimous for the legion of Scrooges in this country who allegedly believe in self-reliance, except when it comes to subsidies and giveaways to really worthy cases, like Exxon and the military-industrial complex in its entirety.

They began by demonizing the most vulnerable, the “welfare queens,” who got a government check and drove around in expensive cars. It didn’t matter that such characters were one in a million. The Scrooges wanted to believe it. So, with the shameful assistance of some Democrats, notably Bill Clinton, they came first for the welfare mothers. Much of the working and middle class applauded; they weren’t welfare mothers.

But the Republicans didn’t stop there. They went after unions and low-wage workers by letting the real value of the minimum wage erode through inflation. Soccer moms and dads didn’t object; they didn’t belong to unions or make the minimum wage.

But now, middle class, the Republicans are coming for you, for your Medicare and your Social Security. They have already used the scalpel, the carving knife, and the butcher knife to cut into the flesh of the less privileged. And you did…almost nothing.

At last they are coming for you. For that they need a bigger weapon. Sequestration is the axe they are swinging at your entitlements. Is it not, finally, time to rise up?