The Real Republican Domestic Agenda: War on Roosevelt

If you thought the Republicans going back to refight the Vietnam war was bad, you ain't seen nothing yet as they take on Roosevelt.
---BBB

Published on Friday, September 17, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
The Real Republican Domestic Agenda: War on Roosevelt
by Larry Beinhart - Common Dreams

If you watched the Republican Convention I'm sure you understand that we will conquer the world to protect ourselves from terrorists and to give the world the freedom it craves and deserves. And anyone who questions that is a girlie man.

But there is also a domestic agenda . It was expressed in one succinct sentence. George Bush said, "many of our most fundamental systems - the tax code, health coverage, pension plans, worker training, were created for a world of yesterday, not tomorrow. We will transform these systems."

This is fairly explicit. Yet sufficiently vague, that nobody, not our leading newspapers, not CNN, not CBS, not NPR, not even the internet lefties, jumped up and down and freaked out and said "He wants to do what?!"

Granted, it's sort of in code. But the translation is easily available. The Rosetta Stone is the Texas Republican Party Platform. Think of the National Convention as the Playboy Magazine version and the Texas document as the Hustler on-line hardcore version of who wants to do what to whom.

The Texas Republican Party Platform calls for abolishing the income tax, abolishing the IRS, abolishing the 16th Amendment, abolishing the inheritance tax - which they are careful to call the death tax and abolishing corporate income taxes, payroll taxes and the capital gains tax.

These are to be replaced with a national sales tax.

Now just in case you think this is paranoid ranting, the bill has already been introduced in the House. It has 55 co-sponsors and it has the support of House Speaker Dennis Hastert and House Majority Leader Tom Delay.

They will also end social security. It will be privatized. They know we don't like that word. So there's a new word, it is "the ownership society." Instead of making payments to the social security system you can put your money in private funds and you own it.

The sales pitch is based on the boundless optimism that in the long run, the market will always go up. Historically, that's true. Unless George W. Bush is president.

The reality is that company pension funds, which were running a surplus when Bush came into office, are in so much trouble now, that they are threatening the survival of some companies and of the quasi-governmental agency that insures them. State pension funds, which rely in part on investments, now have to use extra tax dollars or borrow in order to pay their pensions.

Imagine if you had given up your social security in order to invest in Halliburton, which was run by Dick Cheney, or Harkness Energy, when George Bush was on the Board of Directors. If you didn't have the insider information to sell some of your stock, like Cheney did, or all your stock in time, like Bush did, you would be pretty well broke now.

Bush mentioned health coverage in that crucial sentence. But there is no known Republican Plan for Health Coverage. So what's he talking about? What fundamental system was created for the world of yesterday, that works very well, just like social security and income tax do, that could be torn down and looted through privatization? Medicare.

The thing about job training baffled me. There is no big New Deal or New Frontier or Great Society job training program to destroy. What there is, is unemployment insurance. Here's the deal: if you lose your job, you will get a block grant for job training. Three thousand dollars is the number being floated. And if you get a new job in a week or two weeks, well, hell, you can keep the money as a "re-employment bonus." The job training will instead of unemployment insurance.

These guys can't stand to see a pile of money around without being able to grab it and get rich. Even worse is money that just goes to people who work, goes right to them for retirement, or to pay their medical bills, or to carry them between jobs, without a brokerage firm, or an insurance company, or the private education industry, sucking the cream off the top.

There's more. Lot's more. Including significant evangelical and anti-gay agendas. But those are the basics.

George Bush has made it perfectly clear his plan for the next four years is to tear down the New Deal. It's not forward to the 21st Century It's back to the 19th.