State of disunion
By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com
By the time this column is posted, President Barack Obama will have officially reported on the state of the nation to Congress and the American people. As behooves the nature of this annual ritual, the president will have struck a note of optimism, stated his hope for a bipartisan approach to tackling the great challenges facing the country, and laid out an outline of his priorities, including long-term economic growth and job creation.
In tune with the current emphasis on “civility” (in reaction to the Tucson massacre and revulsion against the poisonous Tea Party/Sarah Palin-led climate of right-wing incitement that preceded it) some lawmakers in the audience will have broken with the usual practice of sitting together with members of one’s own party only and instead would have sat with a friend of the opposite party.
Alas, all the State of the Union rhetoric and symbolism about inter-party comity, national unity, and brisk economic growth will sound hollow by the time the Ides of March come around. For the reality is that our politics are as polarized as ever, not only along party lines but also within each party. “Moderate Republican” is today an oxymoron or an extinct species. The GOP is now divided between a very conservative wing and a rabid right-wing. The Democrats are dominated by a liberal to centrist majority frequently vexed by a large minority of “blue dog” Democrats who vote with the Republicans a great deal of the time.
Meanwhile, economically the country is divided between a miniscule elite comprising about one percent of the population that enjoys fabulous wealth and sky-high incomes and the bottom 90 percent of the people who are caught on a runaway treadmill that keeps picking up speed while arriving nowhere. They are the shrinking and increasingly insecure middle class and the poor, who have grown in number since the Great Recession of 2008-2009. In between the superrich and the rest of us is a thin sliver of the population, about 10 percent, who have done relatively well during the last two decades, although not nearly as well as the CEOs and the financiers who make up the top one percent.
Regarding economic growth, the prospects for transitioning from the current jobless, anemic recovery to a robust, employment-generating one are grim. It is now crystal clear that the Obama stimulus was only big enough to stop the economy from plunging into a much deeper hole. While some consumers have begun spending again, it is mostly the very rich, who are the only ones who can afford it. Thus private demand is insufficient to keep the economy from continuing to flat-line. What is needed to kick start the economy is major government spending in infrastructure, education, and research and development.
Unfortunately, the political winds are blowing in exactly the wrong direction. The Republicans who have gained control of the House of Representatives and increased their power in the Senate represent themselves as radical opponents of the deficit, threatening to slash the budgets of virtually all departments of government except Defense and Homeland Security by as much as 30 to 40 percent.
In fact, these pseudo deficit hawks are interested in balancing the budget only by cutting programs that serve the middle class and the poor. These include vital entitlements like Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid that have greatly reduced poverty and suffering among the elderly and the disadvantaged. In contrast, they are all in favor of an expansive (and expensive) foreign policy, including support for various budget-busting wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, terrorism, drugs, and illegal immigration). They also are great defenders of the grotesquely bloated defense budget, vast profiteering, unnecessary weapons systems, and huge inefficiency notwithstanding. Finally, these deficit hawks are willing to stop the business of the Congress dead in its tracks so that no millionaire is left behind when it comes to juicy tax cuts that swell the deficit they have pledged to cut.
Regardless of what Obama proposes to do in his State of the Union speech, the question is what he will be able to do in the next two years in the face of a right-wing Republican onslaught. Already in the last Congress, the GOP was able to blackmail the president into caving in on tax cuts for the rich in return for a limited extension of unemployment compensation.
In order to extort draconian spending cuts and emboldened by their increased numbers in both houses, Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell and Eric Cantor have already stated their intention to blackmail the president one more time by threatening to vote against increasing the debt ceiling. Failure to raise the debt ceiling will result in a default of the U.S. government, with consequences that could well resemble those of a financial hydrogen bomb.
How will Obama respond when faced with Republican zealots holding the trigger of a weapon that might wreck the global economy to such an extent as to make the Great Recession look like a mere bump in the road?
