Republicans, Loaves and Fishes

It's one of the those rare moments when I find myself in (temporary) alignment with Wall Street. A bunch of crazy Republicans with guns want to kill the Government so badly they are willing to take the whole economy down with them.

Wall Street Republicans have always been aligned with Main Street Republicans, but the corporate assault on Main Street thinned the ranks pretty well. At some point Wall Street strategists (of course I'm generalizing here: some, not all of them) and conservative corporate strategists decided they needed reinforcements if they were going to run the nation to their liking. Those reinforcements came mainly in the form of Conservative Christians. This started in the 1960s, and would be more important in the long run that The Beatles or LSD.

The alliance went pretty well (for Wall Street) for a few decades. Wall Street and the corporate elite supplied the money. To the Christians they offered rhetoric about abortions and prayer in public schools. The Christians got to worshipping Free Market Capitalism almost as if it came out of the Bible. Presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and George W. Bush illustrated how well the system could work when it was working.

But as deluded as Christians are, they are not quite unthinking zombies. They have lively egos, and many started thinking they should actually be in charge, not the Wall Street boys. They are pushing economic ideas that would have seemed primitive to Jesus himself, like returning to using Gold as money.

They tend to be Old Testament guys, because the New Testament contains a lot of messages they don't want to here. Like loving people [John 13: 34], paying your taxes [Luke 20: 25], wolves in sheep's clothing [Matthew 7: 15] and holding all things in common [Acts 4, 32].

In short, they forgot the Loaves and Fishes [Luke 9: 12-17]

• But he said to them, "Give them more to eat". They said, "We have no more than five loaves and two fishes." ... For they were about five thousand ... He took the five loaves and two fishes, and looking to the sky, he prayed over them, and broke them, and gave to the disciples to set before the multitude. And they did eat, and were all filled.

Medicare and Social Security are the loaves and fishes of modern America. If you can provide them, you can get by with all kinds of other kinds of business and government folly. You can talk up the Republican God, Free Market Capitalism, all you want, but people want jobs with good pay, homes, and a safe environment. Republican experiments this last decade with free markets have led to homelessness, joblessness, and hopelessness.

Having forgotten to bring out the loaves and fishes, Republican politicians, and particularly Tea Party pea brains, will be abandoned by the crowds, and crucified in the next round of elections. I am guessing they will lose ten seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in California alone in 2012, the way things are heading.

Hopefully the Republican Party will implode. If America remains a two party system, hopefully the new 2nd party will be based on sane, pragmatic, modern thinking. We still have to save the environment, which is going downhill at a rapid pace. We have to make things right for ordinary working people. That means disassembling the corporate security state and the concentrations of wealth that have emerged since President Kennedy started cutting the top tax rates on the wealthy back in 1962. We would not need to tax the rich at such high rates if they used their profits to hire more workers at better pay, but they have shown over and over again that they (as a class) are incapable of behaving responsibly.

Bush and Beyond

I don't like President George W. Bush's politics, but I try to stay away from the kind of emotional Bush-bashing that delights many leftists, Greens, and Democrats. I don't think W. is the worst president ever. Bad in a mediocre way, sure. I can't think of one single ex U.S. President I would put in the "good" category. Certainly not President-for-Life Franklin D. Roosevelt, the closest thing the U.S. has had to a dictator. War crimes? Sure, George W. Bush committed them by bombing and then invading Afghanistan and Iraq, but I doubt even a half dozen U.S. Presidents who had a full term of office failed to commit some sort of war crime or crime against humanity. General Jackson, founder of the Democratic Party, was a model war criminal and destroyer of humanity. President Truman, a Democrat, is the only world leader who has ever used an atomic weapon against people, thus managing to commit both a war crime and a crime against humanity.

Harry Truman also split up Korea with Stalin the same way Hitler and Stalin partitioned Poland. Koreans had been fighting the Japanese and expected to be allowed to form a free and independent nation.

But just because George W. Bush is a model of mediocrity doesn't mean we should not strive for better, or at least try to avoid worse. Mediocrity has its merits at times. You might hate the fact that the President promoted fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity, but it could have been worse. Look at the record. Women can still get abortions and birth control pills and own property. You don't get shot for not going to church on Sunday, or for going to the wrong Church. We still don't force children to say prayers in public schools.

If anyone failed to benefit from the George W. Bush presidency, it was the Christian Right. These guys asked for religion and got tax cuts for the rich. A few of Bush's cronies made out like kidnappers in Baghdad, but very little tax payer money went straight to religious nutcases below the assistant-to-the-secretary-of-the-department level.

On the environment Bush was also a study in mediocrity. The air is still mostly what would pass for breathable, especially if you compare it to what passed for air in 1965. Cleanups of waterways and toxic waste sites continued at the same generally slow pace we saw under Clinton, Carter and Reagan. Anti-environmentalist victories, while occasionally real, tended towards the symbolic. They were more a tool for raising funds for the Republican Party than any real attack on the environment (beyond the general, background attack from industrial civilization). Just like the greenish reforms passed by Democrats tended to give environmental groups symbolic wins that allowed the Democrats to raise money for their partying.

Probably the most important achievement of the Bush administration was the revival of Islam. In Iraq and most Islamic nations people were moving towards a secular society where most people were peace-loving atheists or nominally Islamic. The various sects were more concerned with slowing this secular erosion than they were with fighting each other. Has that ever changed in a big way. Now it is dangerous to not at least to pretend you believe in Islam and Mohammed in Iraq. Fanaticism is rampant. And this rallying around the black flag of the Prophet has spread to almost the entire formerly nominally Muslim population of a world. Osama Bin Laden and Muktar whatever converted a net of about 87 people to Islam (subtracting out the back sliders) before Bush came along. Bush converted about 600 million people to Islam.

Now that is outstanding. So maybe that Yale education and all the helping hands from Dad's friends were not wasted after all.

[find more of William P. Meyers's thoughts at www.iiipublishing.com]