The old man, the GOP, and the DINOS (Democrats in Name Only)
In Hemingway’s last novel, ‘The Old Man and the Sea,’ (1952), Santiago, a veteran Cuban fisherman who has been mired on a long streak of bad luck finally hooks the big one, a magnificent marlin. Santiago and the marlin wage an epic battle for three days. Finally, Santiago manages to overcome the marlin’s fierce fight for survival and brings it alongside the boat only to realize the fish is too big to load into his small skiff.
He is forced to tow the marlin back to shore. Soon the sharks start circling. Before long, they begin taking big bites out of the exhausted fish. Santiago throws in all he’s got—harpoon, oar, a knife, even the tiller—to fight off the shark. It’s a futile struggle. The sharks are too many and too ferocious. By the time Santiago gets his boat back to land, the marlin has been consumed down to the bones.
I think of that story as I watch what the Congressional sharks are doing to Joe Biden’s proposal to transform the United States into a twenty-first century country with a decent physical and social infrastructure and a fairer distribution of financial burdens and benefits. It’s not quantum physics, not even rocket science, as Sheldon, a theoretical physicist and the main character in tv’s ‘The Big Bang Theory’ indignantly protests when he is called a rocket scientist. Every other rich nation achieved this decades ago. Technically, it’s a walk in the park. Politically, uniquely in the United States, it’s climbing Himalaya without oxygen.
That’s because the Republicans and a few renegade Democrats are dismembering the ambitious and much-needed proposal put forth by Biden, tearing it apart bite by bite, hoping they can cut it back from the original $6 trillion proposed, first to $3.5 trillion and now to barely over $1 trillion, leaving only the bones, the hard infrastructure of bridges and roads that Republican states desperately need.
Why the carnage? New York Times editorial board member Bynjamin Applebaum gets it almost right in his October 25 opinion column in the New York Times:
“Resistance to taxation is the rotten core of the modern Republican Party. Republicans in recent decades have sharply reduced the federal income tax rates imposed on wealthy people and big companies, but their opposition to taxation goes beyond that. They are aiding and abetting tax evasion.”
It’s a sharp insight but it conflates the shadow and the prey. The rotten core of the GOP combines class and race, privileges the rich over everybody else, and favors whites over other races. The tax system is the primary means to certain ends, not a principle but a precision tool to achieve plutocratic power and privilege for a few mostly white rich people and a sink or swim society for the rest.
By refusing to tax, even moderately, those who have an obscene amount of money, the Republicans and the DINOS (a handful of Democrats in Name Only) achieve several purposes. One, they keep the bosses in the driver’s seat by preventing any monetary support not determined by the market (an allegedly neutral mechanism that is rigged from start to end in favor of employers). The market leaves countless workers with a Hobson’s choice: (a) take this job with a lousy salary, dangerous and deplorable working conditions and no benefits or (b) go to the government and it will give you nothing if you have refused even the worst job in the world.
Two, by giving employers all the bargaining power, they assure maximum profits for business. Corporations and wealthy individuals are grateful for the GOP largesse and reward the party through campaign contributions and plenty of “free enterprise” propaganda filtered through a plethora of “think tanks.” Politics directs money to the rich and the rich direct money to those politicians that serve their interests. It’s geometrically perfect, a circle, well-suited to the plutocracy we have and antithetical to the democracy we think we have.
Finally, by refusing to collect taxes, the Republican party creates an artificial deficit which is only a problem when Democrats are in power and which is used to justify the pathetic nature of our social safety net and the mercenary, criminal nature of our health care system; criminal, yes, because many people die for lack of money to pay for primary care, surgery, medicines, and whatever other astronomical costs some doctors and almost every hospital includes in the bill they hand patients (or their survivors) at the end.
Many of those who cannot subsist without food stamps or cannot afford medical care are Black or Latino. Conveniently, they make up a good proportion of those the GOP demonizes as the “undeserving poor.” No need to divert any tax dollars toward such people and away from the beneficiaries of the U.S. tax code, the Pandora plan, and other schemes to evade or avoid taxes. It’s a perfect system for the haves who are fighting like hell to keep it but malignant for the rest, although many don’t get it, so they hardly fight.
Many who would benefit from any kind of new deal of the cards do not even know that it is possible to have the sorts of things other countries have — like free childcare, long maternity leave, free college, and medical care based on need. They have been bamboozled with questions like “Who is going to pay for it?” Who pays for it everywhere else? Everybody. They have been scared with slogans like “that would be socialism.” Democratic socialism at most, and there is a big difference between that and Stalinism, or our plutocracy, an undemocratic capitalism in which money talks and is the measure of all things.
Like sharks gone wild biting into their own flesh, too many in Congress are biting to bits policies that would help many of the people they are supposed to represent. Unfortunately for Biden and for progressives, Republicans have inserted certain prejudices and preconceptions so deep in the American psyche it will be very tough to root them out. And there is no vaccine yet for outdated ideas and sheer ignorance.
