November 16, 2006


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


ADIOS TO SANCTIMONIOUS HYPOCRITES

Let's be clear. I wouldn't like Tom DeLay, Newt Gingrich, and their ilk under any circumstances. Their Social Darwinist philosophy is repugnant. But what makes these guys even worse is their unbounded hypocrisy. As the author points out, Gingrich and DeLay are gung-ho for the free market, but they've never achieved anything themselves in the free market. They are gung-ho for a big military and military intervention, but they haven't been in the military themselves. They were on their high and mighty pulpits condemning Bill Clinton and other Democrats for corruption or immorality, while wallowing in corruption themselves. This article by Dick Meyer is at www.cbsnews.com:

Politicians in this country get a bad rap. For the most part, they are like any high-achieving group in America, with roughly the same distribution of pathologies and virtues. But the leaders of the GOP House didn't fit the personality profile of American politicians, and they didn't deviate in a good way. It was the Chess Club on steroids.

The iconic figures of this era were Newt Gingrich, Richard Armey and Tom Delay. They were zealous advocates of free markets, low taxes and the pursuit of wealth; they were hawks and often bellicose; they were brutal critics of big government.

Yet none of these guys had success in capitalism. None made any real money before coming to Congress. None of them spent a day in uniform. And they all spent the bulk of their adult careers getting paychecks from the big government they claimed to despise. Two resigned in disgrace.

Having these guys in charge of a radical conservative agenda was like, well, putting Mark Foley in charge of the Missing and Exploited Children Caucus. Indeed, Foley was elected in the Class of '94 and is not an inappropriate symbol of their regime.

OUR OBSCENELY UNFAIR SYSTEM

Right-wingers will howl about "class envy" or "class warfare" if you point out the gross and growing inequalities in our economic system. They have no problem with a very few rich people owning most of the wealth of the country. They have no problem with a despicable minimum wage of $5.15 an hour (although they'd like to abolish the minimum wage altogether). They have no problem with jobs getting sent to cheaper labor markets abroad, or with illegal immigrants getting jobs that pay below decent wages. You're told in this country that if you work hard and play by the rules you can get ahead. But the system is totally stacked against working people now. Even when your productivity surges, your wages remain stagnant. In the meantime, everything else gets more expensive. This is a good article by Senator-elect Jim Webb at www.opinionjournal.com:

The most important--and unfortunately the least debated--issue in politics today is our society's steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century. America's top tier has grown infinitely richer and more removed over the past 25 years. It is not unfair to say that they are literally living in a different country. Few among them send their children to public schools; fewer still send their loved ones to fight our wars. They own most of our stocks, making the stock market an unreliable indicator of the economic health of working people. The top 1% now takes in an astounding 16% of national income, up from 8% in 1980. The tax codes protect them, just as they protect corporate America, through a vast system of loopholes.

Incestuous corporate boards regularly approve compensation packages for chief executives and others that are out of logic's range. As this newspaper has reported, the average CEO of a sizeable corporation makes more than $10 million a year, while the minimum wage for workers amounts to about $10,000 a year, and has not been raised in nearly a decade. When I graduated from college in the 1960s, the average CEO made 20 times what the average worker made. Today, that CEO makes 400 times as much.

In the age of globalization and outsourcing, and with a vast underground labor pool from illegal immigration, the average American worker is seeing a different life and a troubling future. Trickle-down economics didn't happen. Despite the vaunted all-time highs of the stock market, wages and salaries are at all-time lows as a percentage of the national wealth. At the same time, medical costs have risen 73% in the last six years alone. Half of that increase comes from wage-earners' pockets rather than from insurance, and 47 million Americans have no medical insurance at all.