The US
Government Has Lost Its Reason For Being
8 February 2010By Dave Lindorff
There were two points in President Obama’s State of
the Union address that provoked resounding and
universal applause in the chamber from the assembled
senators and representatives of both parties. One
point was when the president said he wanted to start
his job-creation program “in small businesses,
companies that begin when an entrepreneur takes a
chance on a dream, or a worker decides its time she
became her own boss.” The other point was when he
said, “While we're at it, let's also eliminate all
capital gains taxes on small business investment; and
provide a tax incentive for all businesses, large and
small, to invest in new plants and equipment.”
The lusty cheering and applause were not based upon
some belief on the part of the assembled legislators
that this was about alleviating the pain and suffering
of the one-in-five Americans who is out of work, or
who is struggling to support a family on the income
from some pathetic part-time job paying minimum wage.
It was apparent that this was a cheer for the idea of
giving more money to the capitalist class. Period.
In today’s America, those in power have completely
disavowed one of the key goals--if not the key
goal--of democratic government, as envisioned by the
nation's Enlightenment Era Founders, which was, as the
Constitution they authored put it so admirably in its
opening sentence, to “promote the general welfare, and
secure the blessings of liberty.”
There is nothing in that Preamble about promoting the
welfare of the business classes. The only justifiable
reason for doing so then would have to be in order to
promote the general welfare. And yet decades of
policies aimed at promoting the welfare of the
corporate elite and to a lesser extent promoting the
welfare of the business classes in general (what used
to be called the “trickle-down theory”), have
demonstrably not only not promoted the general
welfare; they have worsened the general welfare.
By every measure, the tax policies, welfare policies,
trade policies, labor law policies, and Wall Street
deregulation policies of the government, whether in
Democratic or Republican hands, have led to a
declining standard of living, a transfer of wealth
from the poor and middle class to the rich, and a
gradual increase in the underlying level of
unemployment (the “acceptable” base level of
unemployment which establishment economists consider
to be “full” employment), not to mention to the
extraordinary current level of unemployment.
“Trickle-down,” it turns out, really means “piss on.”
President Obama’s talk about jobs is bogus. Jobs are
leaching away from the US at a prodigious rate, like
water pouring through the holes of a sieve, thanks to
trade policies that encourage companies to shut down
US operations, move production abroad, and then sell
the once locally-made goods back to increasingly
impoverished Americans. Any new jobs created are lower
wage, and prone to interruption, given that they are
in services, and aren’t linked to any major capital
investment.
Proposed programs like a $5000 tax credit for hiring a
worker or revoking tax breaks for companies that shift
production overseas are a joke, simply a rhetorical
sop to the listening audience not meant to be taken
seriously. (No employer will make a new hire just to
snag a $5000 cut in taxes, and in any event, a credit
is only useful to a company that is making profits and
paying taxes, and such firms have no need of
assistance to get them hiring. It’s the companies that
are in trouble that would need encouragement to hire,
and they aren’t paying any taxes.)
What is clear from the wild applause to these two
lines in the State of the Union address is that
government at this point is not about improving the
general welfare at all (if it ever was). It is
self-evidently about enriching the rich.
And at that point such a government has lost its
reason for being.
This explains why the health “reform” bill has been
such a farce. It was never about improving the health
care of average Americans (something that could have
been easily, quickly and efficiently accomplished by
simply expanding Medicare to cover everyone). It was
always about ensuring the enrichment of the various
players in the health care industry, who already own
`17.5 percent of the entire US economy.
It explains why we aren’t getting any kind of
re-regulation of the predatory financial industry. The
goal of de-regulation was never to make life better
for average Americans. It was to enrich the
financiers, and it did that very well. And no
de-regulation is going to happen, because the goal of
Washington politicians is to continue to enrich those
financiers.
It explains why we’re at war in Afghanistan. There is
no conceivable threat posed by this poorest of nations
located, landlocked, in a part of the globe that is
maximally remote from the US. Yet we are being
committed to an endless war there, costing a nominal
$100 billion a year (times two or three when you add
in the financing of the debt, and the costs of care
for the injured troops over their lifetimes), because
that war enriches the munitions industry, and also
provides justification for an annual $800 billion
military budget--a staggering sum that sucks the very
life out of any program aimed at “improving the
general welfare.”
The whole government enterprise at this point is an
ugly affront to the Preamble of the Constitution.
We will all be better served if and when the whole
thing is brought down.
The way I see it, we’ve pretty much lost our
government, and just voting in new politicians isn’t
going to fix anything (we just demonstrated that!).
Our best hope then is a popular groundswell for a new
Constitutional Convention. Let’s roll the dice and try
over, now that we’ve seen how our government can be
stolen.
I agree it’s a scary idea. Who knows what we Americans
are really like? Maybe we are a nation of selfish
imperialists and racists and such a convention would
lead to a restoration of slavery or apartheid, a mass
deportation of minorities, incarceration of gays and
lesbians, and open endorsement of empire and a police
state. But I like to think that we Americans are
actually as good as our mythology tells us we are, and
that a constitutional convention could lead to a new
government that would really be of the people, by the
people and for the people.
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