Three Gripes
One: since when has Labor Day been a celebration of entrepreneurship? So poorly do our Republicans think of America’s workers that they cannot bring themselves any longer to make even cursory reference to labor on Labor day. Instead they refer to it as being a day when we come together to honor those who take the risk of starting up a business. At least that’s what Eric Cantor says. This is nuts. It is also a deep insight into the perverted world of modern Republicanism.
Labor Day was established to honor workers. No one else. To twist that into a celebration of business owners is a sick and nasty trick. I realize that in the fetid imaginations of contemporary Republicanism anyone who doesn’t employ people is a kind of slacker, and that anyone who doesn’t pay income tax is a moocher, and that only high financiers and job creators are worthy of praise, but really.
No. I mean: really?
Second: while America is not as hidebound by class as many European countries, it certainly has them. This may be difficult to admit, but too often the truth hurts. In any case all the recent moaning and groaning about the demise of our middle class has brought an odd response from Rick Santorum, our resident right wing extremist preacher. Given that the Republicans have become defenders of the plutocrats and are bent solely on undoing all the planks upon which our middle class was built by rolling back government and exposing said middle class to the vicissitudes of the free market, their only policy strategy now seems to disavow classes altogether. So Santorum tells us there are no classes, and that talk of such things is socialist nonsense. Happily for him this wave of the hand eliminates his party’s biggest problem: its lack of empathy for anyone or anything in the middle. or at the bottom for that matter.
Now, I am not sure that class play the role that Marxists like to argue it does. That view seems to eradicate any individual role for anyone and simply implies a deterministic, teleological, future for the economy that history has debunked. But I do think class exists and that they are useful to talk about in policy discussions. America has a large underclass, a huge but diminishing middle class, and a tiny elitist ruling class making all the decisions and reaping most of the rewards. Santorum’s cranky dismissal of that class structure is simply a way of avoiding our biggest problem: inequality. After all, no middle class = no problem.
And, third, Ollie Rehn, one of Europe’s most influential bureaucrats and an elitist extraordinaire, is royally annoyed at the French. Who. apparently, didn’t play by his austerity play book nicely. You see, those dastardly French, who have a habit of being a tad ‘contraire’, are solving their government deficit problem in a rather unique way. They raised taxes. Merci! Rehn is unapologetic and apoplectic in his response. How dare they!
In austerity central the proper way to reduce government deficits is to slash social spending. Thus killing two birds with one stone. Such austerity both reduces the deficit and, more importantly, reduces social spending on socialist stuff like health care, pensions, and unemployment assistance. Since austerity advocates cannot abide such spending – after all they constantly remind us about how it all undermines society by making people comfortable and thus unwilling to work for next to nothing during their foreshortened little lives – the true target is both these goals, not just one.
The French didn’t get the memo. Instead they thought – evidently wrongly – that Rehn and his fellow austerity enforcers in the European bureaucracy would be happy to see the government’s deficit decline no matter how that was achieved. So the French have the right answer for the wrong reason, causing Rehn to lose his temper.
It’s that way here too.
Which is why I have a gripe about it. Advocates of austerity here don’t actually give a damn about the deficit. They simply want to get rid of those nasty social programs that are getting in the way of humbling our workers sufficiently so that they will work for less than a living wage and obey our job creator’s every whimsical word. Those programs, naturally, cost a lot of money which requires, also naturally, taxes. And austerity nuts hate taxes. With a passion. By the way, we know our right wingers don’t give a damn about the deficit because it is largely their creation – think those Reagan and Bush deficits. All that their trickle down, and supply side, policies ever did was to blow the deficit sky high. And now, to solve the very problem they created, they tell us we have to get rid of those programs.
To which all I can say is: sacre bleu!
