John Boehner: A Herbert Hoover for the 21st Century

Speaking to the Economic Club of Washington, DC Speaker John Boehner sounded for all the world like Rush Limbaugh channeling Herbert Hoover.

First, there was the frank acknowledgment our economy is in trouble.

Then, as Limbaugh and all Republicans are so adept at doing, there is the demonization, the creation of the villain and the bogeyman.

Can you guess who is at fault for our economic woes?

Is it those wild, unregulated Wall Street types, who, out from under any kind of government regulation or scrutiny, sold stocks which were essentially mortgage boondogles, which in turn had been created by even more unscrupulous miscreants who bamboozled ignoramuses into mortgages they had no hope of paying? No.

Is it the Republican Congressmen and Senators who have voted the very rich such enormous tax breaks that billionaire pay less income tax than their secretaries? No.

Is it the European Union which had its economy poisoned by the same stockbrokers and mortgage men who poisoned the US economy? Of course not.

No, it's the GOVERNMENT.

It is most certainly, Mr. Boehner hastens to add, not the innocent, hard working American people (whom the Republicans love and who should love the Repbublicans) or those "job creators," (who the Repbulicans really love) the captains of industry, who would hire lots of people and create jobs if only they were not so terrified of those GOVERNMENT regulators!

"Micromanaging, meddling, manipulating" government bureaucrats (and who doesn't hate bureaucrats?) are getting all up in the faces of God fearing good rich job creators.

The perfect example, Mr. Boehner cites, is Boeing aircraft, which got tired of having to pay a living wage to its union employees in the state of Washington, so they opened a plant in South Carolina, where they don't believe in no commie labor unions, and the federal government, those meddling bureaucrats, had the temerity to charge Boeing with attempted union busting.

Why nothing could have been further from the minds of those Boeing job creators!

It's just that Boeing executives looked around the world and decided making airplanes overseas might not be such good press right now, and so they found the closest thing to Hong Kong they could find right there in South Carolina, where people are so uneducated and desperate and Republican it would never enter their minds to form a union. Why, in South Carolina, they don't even know how to spell UNION. Union has been a dirty word in South Carolina since they fired on Fort Sumter.

Boeing did of course consider Arizona, where they have the Maricopa County re incarnation of the Gestapo hunting down all those illegal immigrants who want to work. And of course, Texas was in the running because in Texas they execute all the troublemakers at such a rate you can hardly keep track. But South Carolina will do just fine, for the job creators, the non union kind of jobs Boeing loves to create.

Mr. Boehner knows the government cannot create jobs: "I can tell you the American people--private sector in particular--are rattled by what this town has done over the last few years."

And what has Washington, DC done? Close to nothing, except argue about the debt ceiling.

Just before the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover sounded the same warnings: "Bureaucracy is ever desirous of spreading its influence and its power. You cannot extend the mastery of the government over the daily working life of a people without at the same time making it the master of people's souls and thoughts."

John Boehner and Rush Limbaugh have been channeling Hoover ever since.

"No country can squander itself into prosperity on the ruin of its taxpayers," Hoover told us.

So, Hoover sat on his hands, refusing to interject the government into anything, while the country slid into Depression with 25% unemployment, bread lines, massive internal migrations, until enough people were starving and desperate enough to finally understand what horse manure this Republican line amounted to.

They voted in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR, who said simply, the federal government has to do something when the private sector fails. So he introduced the NRA (National Recovery Act) and a whole alphabet soup of federal government programs, which created "make work jobs," putting people to work building bridges and roads, painting murals, most of which still survive to this day.

The Boehners and Limbaughs of his day all cried this was the end of America, and they were especially outraged over Social Security and they have been trying to kill Social Security and what was left of the New Deal, and trying to kill labor unions and trying to redistribute the wealth from the middle class to the wealthy (with great success) and trying to convince the slow witted American public, ever since, the real villains are those big government, tax and spend, death tax liberal pinko Democrats.

And you have to think of that last scene in Animal Farm, where you look around the room, and you cannot tell the pigs from the rich people who have enough money to control all the animals in the country.

The Tea Party: I Am Become Death

We are still reeling from the epiphany which occurred when Ron Paul was asked at the Tea Party Republican debate what he would do with the 30 year old man who winds up in the hospital, at death's door, without health insurance and the audience, good Tea Party stalwarts all, shouted out, "Let him die!"

That was one of those moments when every day reality, such as I saw daily when I was in training at a city hospital, rubs up against the delusional state induced by people who harbor an absolute Truth which guides every aspect of their life.

If the TRUTH is "Freedom trumps all," including the freedom to die because you were foolish enough to not have a PLAN B for disaster, then your freedom to have no plan, becomes some else's problem.

The problem is actually no longer your problem, when you are comatose. The problem become the problem of the doctors at the hospital when your panicked family brings you in, desperate.

Can the doctor at the hospital say, "Well, actually, he had the freedom to choose not to have health insurance, and he chose that, so now we are going to just let him die" ?

That's the way it happens, time and time again, every day, at every hospital in the land. Lots of tough guys who chose freedom, and their families present the problem to the hospital, which is to say, ultimately, the government.

It's very much the parental role: You have this stupid child who cannot be bothered to be inhibited by caution or prudent planning now you have to pick up the pieces and solve his problem.

Of course, that is much of what motivates members of the Tea Party: They simply do not like their neighbors or even their own family enough to be willing to spend their own money or time or effort to save them from their own fecklessness. The Tea Party faithful loathe welfare because the undeserving poor are helped by taxes coming from the hard working Tea Party folk.

Even if you give them the choice: Okay, you and your parents and your children will be taken care of, but to do this, we will also take care of the unworthy, slothful, shiftless poor who refuse to work, well then the TP folk say, "NO! I'd rather have my parents and children and myself go down the tubes than help those reprobates."

And that's why they hate the mandatory part of the new health insurance bill--because the heedless unworthies will be forced to take care of themselves.

Actually, what really bugs the TP folk is this punctures the fantasy that we can each decide to live off the grid and not be part of the larger community, as we drive down government built roads, talking on government invented internet based phones, across government built bridges, running by clear lakes and streams which were cleaned up by government environmental protection laws after free market private sector industry poisoned the waters.

And those fantasies are so important. Michele Bachmann doesn't want to have young girls vaccinated against sexually transmitted diseases because this means we are planning ahead for the day when at least some of those girls will become sexually active (maybe even before marriage, Heaven For fend) or maybe some of those innocent young girls will be virginal at marriage, but their husbands have had sex before marriage and they bring their brides this gift of HPV, which causes cervical cancer which kills the woman Michele thought was too frail, innocent and pure to have a vaccine. And Michele says the vaccine causes mental retardation because some mother in a crowd told her so.

Just how ignorant and clueless is Michele Bachmann?

Oh, there is splendid science. I heard it from the mother. So now it's true and that means, as President, no girls will get the vaccine.

She heard, of course, what she wanted to hear, and she endorsed this fantasy, this nightmare fantasy to support her underlying resentment against premarital sex.

Of course, maybe she was just trying to distinguish herself from Rick Perry, who approved of giving Texas girls this vaccine to prevent them from getting cervical cancer.

But then again, Rick Perry is on record as opposing telling boys about condoms.

So just how enlightened is Rick Perry?

Heaven forbid little boys use condoms, because if they don't use condoms they'll give HPV to little girls who will then die of cervical cancer.

And if these girls do not have health insurance, well they had it coming to them, according to the Tea Party Republicans.

Is this a great party, or what?

Republican Death Panels

Great Moment in the Republican debate the other night. Hope you saw it.
They asked Ron Paul the question I've been dying to ask him, Rick Perry and all the Republican candidates who are screeching about how requiring free born red blooded American citizens to buy health insurance when they may not want to buy health insurance.

Suppose a 30 year old doesn't want to buy health insurance. He's healthy and he doesn't want to spend $250 a month on health insurance he doesn't think he needs. Then he gets in a motorcycle accident, and winds up in the hospital, in a coma, uninsured. What would you have us do? Let him die?

And the audience, hand picked Tea Party faithful all, screamed out, "Yes!"

And that's the essence of the problem. You have people who want to take a risk, as Ron Paul says, and that's their right. But their right to not plan ahead and to take a risk runs up against our right to not have to pay for their mistake when things go bad.

And the thing is, as Americans, we find it difficult if not impossible to simply leave that guy on the street or say to him, "Well, if you're not insured, I'll just let you die."

That's the problem for the rest of us, your bravado turns into our burden.

We, once upon a time, had charity hospitals where the uninsured could go, but those have pretty much disappeared.

The myth of the man who can live his life off the grid, unbeholdened to the rest of the community is so starkly exposed by this need for the community to do something when that rugged individualist gets into trouble.

What happens is the family shows up, all pathetic and you have to do something or you cannot live with yourself.

We used to try to send people home to die, with their family, and the family would bring them back within a day or two, completely panicked, unable to watch their loved one die at home. (This was in the days before hospice.)

Ron Paul was a GYN, and never had to deal with these sorts of problems--so he's all strident about just allowing people to suffer, to live or die with the consequences of their own decisions.

Just another instance of the Republican delusional state.

Beautiful People

It warms my heart to look at these two lovely ladies. I can just imagine living next door to them, seeing them in their kitchens, cooking cookies for the kids, getting the carpools organized and handing out treats on Holloween.

They just look so wholesome and, well, American, especially with the flags in the background.

But the really sweet looking one on the right voted to kill Medicare the first chance she got.

Yes, she had a son in uniform and she loves New Hampshire and the US of A, but she voted to kill Medicare.

And the lady on the left is in the unfortunate position of finding herself on the left of Rick Perry as well, which she is very angry about and she is working hard to never find herself to the left of anyone.

But Rick Perry is saying Soical Security is a Ponzi scheme and has to be killed.

Oh, well, Soical Security and Medicare are for the old folks, and that shouldn't bother me, not yet being 65.

But, the thing is, if my parents lose Medicare, they will wind up bankrupt the first time they need hospitalization and guess who they will move in with if that happens? For a while, I thought, well, at least I'd have somebody home to walk the dog, and their Social Security checks will help out with the grocery bills.

But, wait a minute, there will be no more Social Security checks.

The thing is, I have a picture of Rick Perry somewhere, and he looks just as nice as these other two Republicans.

They all look so nice. And they sound so nice.

But they do such awful things.

It's like, what can you depend on nowadays, if you can't depend on how folks look, whether they have a nice smile and nice kids?

It just hurts my brain, to have to think about it.

It's a Beautiful Life

Okay, you have to admit, these are beautiful people.
Well, mostly.
And they tell such a beautiful story, you could read your kids to sleep with it: There once was this wonderful, beautiful country, where even the poorest child could grow up to be a princess or a prince.
And all that child had to do was to work hard and play by the rules and think clean thoughts and it would all happen: You will be rich some day, and live in a beautiful house and drive a beautiful car and have a beautiful mate and have beautiful children.

But there's this bad monster called The Government, which tries to give away everything you earn to the undeserving thugs who won't work for a living, the welfare queens and immigrants and godless communists, socialists and atheists and other unwholesome types. And the bad Government, which has black helicopters and bad taxes, tries to take everything from the hard working boys and girls and give it to the lazy, shiftless, unworthy, undeserving poor.

And you can tell these people who tell such stories are good people who would never tell a lie because they are so pretty and believable and they sound so nice.

And they say Social Security is just a big Ponzi scheme and they will kill it with their wonderful clean swift swords of righteousness. And they will kill Medicare too, already tried and voted for the law which would have done it, but the bad Democrats in the Senate stopped them.

And they say the most important job in the world right now is not to provide health care, or to get people jobs, or to help people who are poor and want to work to catch a break, or to protect the rivers and lakes from pollution.

No. The most important job is to prevent the re election of President Barack Obama, who has a nasty foreign sounding name. His middle name is Hussein, you know. And he wasn't even born in America. And he didn't want to wear the American flag lapel pin because he really doesn't love this great country the way you and I do.

But just remember, and keep believing this: You're not going to be poor for long. The Republican Party will see to that.

Why over the eight years they had the White House and the Congress, they made the rich so rich that the top 1% of the richest people in the country now own 40% of all the wealth of this country and they are never going to give that up as long as the good Republicans have any thing to say about it.

It's just so beautiful.

And when you die, you might be reborn into a rich family and then you'll be glad you voted for these nice, pretty people.

Disloyal Opposition: Rick Perry, Mitch McConnell and the GOP

It is true that people often accuse others of what they are most guilty of themselves. So, when Rick Perry accuses Ben Bernanke of "Treason" he knows of what he speaks. He has suggested, more than once, he would like Texas to secede from the union if the federal government does not change its tax policy.

Perry is not an anomaly in the Republican party on this line--Mitch McConnell announced, forthrightly his top priority in the just finished Congressional session was to ensure the defeat of Barack Obama. Eric Cantor and John Boehner chimed in.

The remarkable thing is nobody in the press or even in the Democratic Party batted an eye, or expressed any outrage that the Republican leader of the Senate would say that his main purpose, his main job was preventing President Obama's re election. Nobody said, "Wait a minute, is that why the voters of Kentucky sent you to the Senate? Did they not want you to create jobs, improve the national economy, improve the security of the nation, prevent terrorist attacks, make the country stronger, the people healthier and create opportunities for the nation to flourish?"

The whole concept of a loyal opposition is what makes a government of a democracy work: You can disagree with the approach of the majority party, but you put the nation first, and you work to make things better for the four years between elections, not work to make things worse so you can blame the ruling party for the mess you helped create.

Of course, the Republicans have a problem in that their tax code has resulted in the staggering statistics which keep coming out about wealth distribution in America: The top 1 percent of the population now receive 1/4 of all income every year; that top 1 percent controls 40% of all the wealth--an even greater percentage than the income they control. This is the result of GOP tax policy, pure and simple. They whine about "Death taxes" but that is only because they are bought and paid for by people with estates.

Of course, you can't blame the Republicans for trying. If they can sell this notion that you are poor now but there's pie in the sky--one day you'll be rich and then you'll be happy we have made things so good for you, well, then more power to them. If the American public is so tied to that delusion, well they get what they deserve.

And the deficit, which the GOP wails and gnashes teeth over--it's just the hammer of our national undoing, until you start talking about reducing that deficit with taxes on millionaires, then you hear the worse thing you can do would be to alienate the "job creators," who have held on to their huge profits and not hired any body much.

These are the real traitors. They are loyal to only their class--the country, that is the other 99% or the other 80%, however you want to slice it, well, they are not really deserving. The nation ought to belong to those who own it. That's the capitalist way.

And if our fellow Americans are stupid enough to vote for Kelly Ayotte and Guinta and Rick Perry and John Boehner and Eric Cantor and yes, even Scott Brown and Susan Collins and Olympia Snow, for any Republican, then they have embraced the Cyborgs and all those who care more for the riches of the few than for their country or their countrymen.

And in a democracy, or actually in a plutocracy, a nation governed by the privilege few, well all's fair.

The Undeserving

How do you explain the "What's the Matter With Kansas?" phenomenon? This question, the title of the famous and insightful book, asked how it could be so many people vote against their own self interest, vote Republican, when the Republican party, clearly, is dedicated to keeping the rich rich and the poor in their place.

The two most likely explanations are: One, Joe Sixpack, who works hard to make $40,000 a year believes, has to believe, someday he will be rich. He believes he is only temporarily poor.. That is his pipe dream and he gets nasty and hostile when you try to disabuse him of this delusion.

The second explanation is the Republicans simply fool enough of the people enough of the time. They tell you you are not making it because the Democrats are spending your money, and it's not your fault: It's the Democrats robbing you blind.

Of course, the truth is just the opposite: it is the Republicans who are robbing you blind, who always have, who have stacked the tax code to keep the rich rich and the poor poor. It is the Republicans who want to destroy public education because they don't want to pay to educate the poor, especially if the poor might learn to be critical thinkers, in which case the Republican party is really cooked.

If the poor realized the Republican tax code means Warren Buffet pays less income tax than his own secretary, they might get pretty angry at the Republicans. But all the Republicans have to do is say, "No, it's the Democrats who have screwed you with taxes.

It's the old truth that a person often accuses others of the sin of which he himself is most guilty.

The Republicans can propose killing Medicare by turning it into Coupon Care, where you get a fixed amount, say $6,000 a year, to cover your medical expenses and then you find out your coronary by pass surgery will cost $250,000.

Tough luck, sucker.

But the real hard core of Joe Sixpack's resentment against the Democrats is his bitterness about how hard he works and how the Democrats are willing, and have always been willing, to give away money to slackers who simply will not work and who live on welfare, or depend on Medicare or Social Security.

Somehow, the message that Democrats, under President Clinton, and guided by Daniel Patrick Moynahan, changed welfare. There are no more welfare queens, driving Cadillacs, dripping in diamonds, sitting at home collecting welfare checks.

Actually, there never were such queens--the Welfare Queen was the most potent fictional character ever invented by the Republican party.

But there was, once, a very toxic welfare culture, a culture of dependency.

I saw it first hand in a clinic I did in Washington, DC, when a fourteen year old girl came in pregnant and I asked her how she intended to support this baby.

She shrugged her shoulders, looking at the floor and said, "Welfare."

It was a pattern I saw all the time in that clinic: Have the baby, hand it off to grandma, who was herself on welfare, sitting at home at age 40, taking care of her grand daughter's baby and taking care of her daughter's baby, and the daughter was working as a part time clerk and as a part time prostitute. The grand daughter went back to school,l where she got pregnant by three different boys, three more times before she finally left school. And all this depended on the arrival of the welfare checks.

That toxicity poisoned those it supported, but more important, it poisoned a generation of Joe Sixpacks who hated the Democrats for being so soft hearted as to give away the dollars Joe paid in payroll taxes and income taxes and gas taxes to these free loaders.

Democrats have to face this legacy of bitterness head on. We have to say, "We are against taking your money and giving it to people who don't deserve it."

On the other hand, when I asked people, "Suppose you had only two choices: Number One, you get all the healthcare and retirement money you need, but some people who are not working, who refuse to work will also get the same or, Number Two, you do not get any of that healthcare or retirement money, but the people who refuse to work get nothing."

Amazingly, there are people who chose number two.

That is a truth Democrats have to face.