The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal has weighed in quite clearly regarding its position on the current controversies over the federal budget, and Obama’s public address concerning it…
Mr. Obama then packaged his poison in the rhetoric of bipartisanship-which ’starts,’ he said, ‘by being honest about what’s causing our deficit.’ The speech he chose to deliver was dishonest even by modern political standards.
Here, the editorial staff of the Wall Street Journal choose to deliver commentary astonishing in its dishonesty and disingenuousness, “even by modern political standards.” It is shameless in its promotion of a neo-liberal economic ideology, the implementation of which has been a “package” of “poison” for the large majority of the American body politic for decades now. It is a piece absent of accountability for the real world effects of those policies, and is removed from the corresponding empirical reality as that which is experienced by the large majority of citizens in this country. It is a piece saturated in hypocrisy, particularly of the moral kind.
Always reliable as one of the prime mouthpieces for the promotion of plutocracy, the WSJ outdoes itself with this one in its inversion of reality in order to maintain a political status quo designed to benefit its true patrons, the constituency that it really serves (hint: that constituency and its operative agenda has little to nothing to do with the protection and promotion of a democratic society). The paper’s editorial allegiance is towards promoting a form of governance the elite few have always craved since the founding of this country, that being one which is designed for maintaining a structure of governance that James Madison described (supportively, as a matter of fact) as one to “protect the opulent minority against the majority.”
The editors of the WSJ seem to be celebrating a system which results in 400 Americans possessing more wealth than the bottom 50% of over 150 million Americans combined, and seems to find nothing wrong with the idea that dozens of hedge fund managers (people who produce nothing but new methods of rearranging the flow of money in the economy in order for them to get more of it), earn more in one hour than a normal middle class household makes in over 47 years.
Rep. Paul Ryan, who is playing point man for the GOP’s hit squad on the social contract, and whom the WSJ lavishes with admiration for, isn’t a principled defender of fiscal responsibility, as he lauded by many to be. He’s simply a coward. If he had any real courage, and if the plutocratic elites driving this policy were serious “deficit hawks,” they would be going after the principle policies and the real players responsible for those policies which have created this dire crisis in the first place, instead of further rewarding those same people and the institutions which they operate from which have driven our nation, and our world, to this point. as the evangelical theologian Rev. Jim Wallis has so aptly described them, Ryan and his sort are simply spoiled “bullies.”
Wallis points out, as do a large contingent of other moral and religious leaders in our country, including the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “a budget is a moral document,” and is a statement of choices. As the USCCB stated regarding the proposed budget:
A central moral measure of any budget proposal is how it affects “the least of these” (Matthew 25). The needs of those who are hungry and homeless, without work or in poverty should come first. Government and other institutions have a shared responsibility to promote the common good of all, especially ordinary workers and families who struggle to live in dignity in difficult economic times.
Wallis himself is currently engaged in a hunger fast to bring focus on the real dimensions, the real issues being raised by this whole budget issue…
We’re on the 18th day now of this hunger fast, because I think the issues around this budget are that serious. And so, about 40,000 people joined this fast, even about 29 members of Congress. And the message is very clear. A budget, whether at a kitchen table or in Washington, D.C., a budget is always a matter of choices. The framework in this debate is just wrong….
They were talking about cutting $8.5 billion from low-income housing, but keeping the same amount of money, $8.4 billion, for deductions on second vacation homes-a different kind of housing. Those are choices. $2.5 billion for cutting home heating oil for poor people, and yet $2.5 billion for offshore drilling subsidies for oil companies-those are choices. Amy, they want to cut, in this budget, 10 million malaria bed nets that keep kids from dying, and yet not one line item of military spending. And so, this is really not scarcity; it’s choices.
In reference to Rep. Ryan’s assertions that continued support of a social safety net is creating “a hammock, which lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency,” and that this is about “depending on bureaucracy to foster innovation, competitiveness and wise consumer choices” is, to borrow a descriptive term from the well-compensated scribes of the WSJ, “ludicrous.” As Wallis points out…
To suggest the safety net has become a hammock shows me Paul Ryan has never been around poor people. I’d like to take him on a journey into the inner cities of his own state and around the world. Paul Ryan is acting like a bully. You know, bullies pick on people who have no clout. He’s not picking on the people who have the real money. He’s not asking his rich friends to sacrifice. He’s acting like a bully. And so, this has to be-this has to be said out loud. You know, if you don’t understand the struggles of ordinary people in this country, and you call their life a hammock, you’ve never been any place where there are poor people.
You know, the faith community, all the time-my brother in Detroit runs an organization that takes care of vulnerable people. His budget is being cut every day by the governor there. He’s losing staff every day. In my hometown of Detroit, the river of pain is rising. He goes home at night to a house, his own house. It’s under water and where the police don’t even come ’til the next day if there’s a burglar alarm. So, men with guns are stripping houses, drinking their Budweiser, while the alarm goes off, and people like my brother live in fear. Paul Ryan doesn’t even know that world. He lives with rich people. You know, bullies pick on poor people. If he’s a budget hawk, he should go to where the money is. But he won’t, because he doesn’t have any courage.
You can read and watch the full interview roundtable discussion on the Obama budget plan and the state of the U.S. economy with Rev. Wallis, along with author Thomas Frank, and activist/philosopher Grace Lee Boggs.
The fact is the Wall Street Journal editorialists and their allies of concentrated wealth and power are not series about “waste and abuse” in our nation’s budget, at least as most Americans would understand the what the term “waste and abuse” denotes. After all, some of the most enthusiastic patrons of the WSJ ideological line are the biggest beneficiaries of that “waste and abuse.” Through vast levels of unaccountable and uncontrollable corporate welfare, these entities are recipients of often staggering quantities of appropriated wealth, accomplished through the manipulation of the government as a tool of leverage for financial and political advantage and gain.
The corporate welfare queens, for which the WSJ serves as a standard bearer for, talk about the need for budget restraint, yet they adamantly refuse to allow for any discussion within the budget process regarding such things as the nearly $40 billion dollars a year in public welfare subsidies to oil and gas corporations, or that of the tax breaks given to corporations that move domestic jobs to overseas locations to be performed in near slave-labor conditions. There is no discussion regarding the billions passed along in subsidies to corporations for a whole range of things, including the private commodification of products and research originally developed through tax payer funded research and development (including the internet, or prescription drugs which are sold for private profit, after being developed from federal research, and so forth).
There is, of course, no reference to these corporation’s free use of the public airwaves for their own private profit without any return to the public, nor to the the tax write-offs they are granted for advertising expenditures, often the same advertising they use to propagandize for yet more tax breaks. No mention is made in regards to the subsidies for huge multi-national agribusiness firms in the name of supporting “the family farm,”and on and on. There simply are no proposed cuts to taxpayer-funded programs which are on the table that lobbyists and corporations do not allow to go on that table.
Of particular note regarding both Ryan’s GOP budget plans as well as that of Obama administration, is that there is no mention within any proposal to reduce military spending by even a single dollar. Arguments coming from Rep. Ryan and his supporters, as well as lawmakers from the Democratic party, that somehow the military budget is sacrosanct, due to the inviolable need for American “national security,” is laughable on its face. Obama, Ryan, and their cohorts represent the same interests that have been promoting and benefiting from the ongoing litany of so-called economic “free trade” policies. These are the same policies which have led to the infrastructure of American financial and industrial security being transferred from the U.S. and placed into the hands of foreign interests.
Most notable among these foreign parties is China, whom as the location for the present bulk of American industrial capacity, and the largest direct investor in the U.S., is currently propping up our economy through its possession of over 2 trillion dollars of foreign exchange assets, of which 1.6 trillion of that is in U.S. dollars. American politicians, and Republicans in particular, like to talk tough about the sanctity of spending untold billions upon billions in the name “American freedom,” yet totalitarian China would simply need to put those 2 trillion dollars it holds onto the international market, and the U.S. economy would collapse overnight. No million-dollar-a-piece Tomahawk cruise missile, or billion dollar B-2 bomber would be able to do a thing about it.
As for serious budgetary alternatives to our Tweedledee and Tweedledum debates taking place between the GOP and the Obama administration, there is the (somewhat unfortunately named) “People’s Budget” proposal from the congressional progressive caucus, the largest caucus in congress. It addresses much more thoroughly the marked and ethically-challenged discrepancies currently incorporated (no pun intended) into the GOP and Obama administration’s budgetary priorities.
This is an explanatory editorial on the proposal from the budget’s co-sponsor Rep. Keith Ellison, referencing how it “shuts down corporate giveaways that put small businesses and workers on an uneven playing field.”
You can also Read and watch and interview with the budget’s co-sponsor Rep. Raúl Grijalva regarding this proposal.
Here is another piece by Rep. Mike Honda and Rep. Grijalva on A Real Democratic Budget that Serves the Interests of the American People.
One thing that does resonate as an intellectually honest statement from the WSJ, however, is their concern regarding different spending priorities bringing about “a fundamentally different America than the one we’ve known throughout most of our history.” The history of this nation has always been marked by struggle between the rule of “the opulent minority over the majority” and the dynamics of class control, which the good “Marxists” that the scions of the WSJ truly are. And yes, they are adherents of a Marxist world view, in that they continually reiterate their belief in the tenets of dialectic materialism and the class dynamics of economic theory that Marx proposed, though simply in a thoroughly inverted way. It is rather analogous to that of a Satanist being an inverted Christian, buying into the ontological premise of the Christian faith, but simply asserting allegiance for a different side in the struggle. Thus, to claim that the ideology of Marxism is bunk, which so many on the spectrum of the Greenspan-Friedman laissez fairyland right like to so passionately do, is to also claim that the ideology promoted by the likes of the editors of the Wall Street Journal and their cheerleaders is also bunk. But we digress.
The “fundamentally different America” that the scions of the Wall Street Journal are afraid of seeing is one in which real, meaningful democratic accountability and control comes to the fore in the governance of American society. One in which truly democratic structures are enabled, in which people are free and equal participants in controlling the institutions in which they live and work. A society in which they are meaningful participants, where they can decide on real policy priorities, and not just on what personal qualities they prefer in their rulers. It is a system where political activity isn’t simply an arm of the public relations wings of corporate power, organized in order to keep people distracted enough so that the “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” (to use the description of the populace by the American liberal intellectual and public relations pioneer Walter Lippmann ), won’t get involved in any real decision making. Go ahead and give them power to make individual consumer choice (and brand it as “democracy”), but keep their involvement as marginalized as possible from effective organized impact upon the actual realm of social and civic policy.
The historical America that the WSJ wants to preserve is the one in which power is accrued by the “opulent minority,” particularly through the financial sectors of the American economy. This is an America replete with the layers of legal protections, bound up within the history of American jurisprudence and insulated with a protective layer of stare decisis, developed in order to prevent real challenge to the validity of these precedents from just and logically coherent arguments. These layers of law, often formulated simply by the actions of a few judicial interpretations, are designed to protect that process of unaccountable accumulation of power and wealth (read: political control, since wealth converts to political influence, thus concentrated wealth converts to concentrated political power). This is the vision of American governance which stands upon the bedrock principle underlying the ideology promoted by the Wall Street Journal, and which was proclaimed by America’s first chief justice of the Supreme Court John Jay: “Those who own the country ought to govern it.”
This goes to the heart of truly understanding what the issue really is and what the stakes really are regarding the current battles now raging around the America’s economic crisis. The arguments have effectively little to do with the mechanics of fiscal restraint and responsibility, and pretty much everything to do with want kind of country this is, and what kind of country (and world) this is going to be.
One thing that most everyone can agree on, though, is that things are not sustainable as they are, and that change is essential (if not inevitable). The question is what will the nature of that change be? What kind of society are we collectively interested in seeing sustained within which we all must live? And do we want to see democratic structures governance be the governing platform for creating a civic society of responsible accountability? Or should we cede effective decision making power to oligarchic of control?
Perhaps we will promote a structure of governance that believes in the absolute primacy of the individual, where the notion of society itself is treated as an abstract that can only serve as a source of oppression and control? Margaret Thatcher’s proposition that there is no such thing as society, only individuals acting in that society, comes to mind. In such a society, we pretend that we are wholly independent actors, and that our actions and the results of them are all individually and independently earned. This view limits the recognition the role that the existing societal structures have enabled these individual accomplishments to flourish.
In such a society, protection from the most devastating effects of old age, poverty, or unforeseen illness and depravation from circumstances beyond our control, are our individual responsibility to address and compensate for, regardless of how much responsibility for them may lie within factors resulting from conditions within the society in which the individual lives. Conditions for which is asserted that there is no collective responsibility for. In essence, this is living by a code which says, “I’ve got mine, sorry about your luck.”
Or are we going to collectively organize how we live with and amongst each other upon the principles of mutual understanding and the provision of justice, equality and human dignity? Will our actions be animated by such principles as those asserted by the likes of Jesus and so many of the great spiritual teachers throughout the ages, who reiterated again and again about how our moral and spiritual character is defined by how we treat and care for the least among us, not by how materially successful we are.
Bill Moyers, in a speech from 2003 and one well-worth recalling today ( ), brought to succinct clarity what the deep-rooted, shared principles of the large majority of Americans are…
“That a Social Security card is not a private portfolio statement but a membership ticket in a society where we all contribute to a common treasury so that none need face the indignities of poverty in old age without that help. That tax evasion is not a form of conserving investment capital but a brazen abandonment of responsibility to the country. That income inequality is not a sign of freedom-of-opportunity at work, because if it persists and grows, then unless you believe that some people are naturally born to ride and some to wear saddles, it’s a sign that opportunity is less than equal. That self-interest is a great motivator for production and progress, but is amoral unless contained within the framework of community. That the rich have the right to buy more cars than anyone else, more homes, vacations, gadgets and gizmos, but they do not have the right to buy more democracy than anyone else. That public services, when privatized, serve only those who can afford them and weaken the sense that we all rise and fall together as “one nation, indivisible.” That concentration in the production of goods may sometimes be useful and efficient, but monopoly over the dissemination of ideas is evil. That prosperity requires good wages and benefits for workers. And that our nation can no more survive as half democracy and half oligarchy than it could survive ‘half slave and half free…’ ”
Are we going to organize the processes of governance upon the foundational principles laid out in our original Declaration of Independence, which asserted the right of the people to organize government in such a form as to most likely “effect their Safety and Happiness”? Or are we going to allow for a government that is, in the words of the Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stigliz, of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%?
Who will it be that will decide this? Those who want to see themselves as an elite class of decision makers, a oligarchic society of what are effectively plutocrats, whose prime directive is the ensure that those who govern society are the ones who own it? Or will these decisions be made by the demos, the people collectively, in a process of true demokratia, where we insist on a society that provides for the social, economic, and cultural conditions which are essential for a truly free and just practice of living lives of authentic self-determination?
That is what we have to decide.
- Andy Valeri; USTV Media
