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View Full Version : Kevin Carson's Take On the Democratic & Republican Party




Flash
02-11-2011, 08:01 PM
Kevin Carson from C4SS (c4ss.org) discusses the party of small-government:


People who vote Republican in the belief that the GOP is the party of small government need to get out of their codependent relationship.

Republicans claim to be the party of the head rather than the heart, the party that never lets wishful thinking trump the law of unintended consequences — unless, of course, proper reverence for the Flag or Fatherland is involved. And recognizing that actions have consequences, in the realm of foreign policy, is just a fancy way of saying “defeatism.”

Come to think of it, there really seems to be a lot of messy Freudian stuff lurking beneath that Republican facade of stern common sense, doesn’t there? Just consider how prominently accusations of being “soft” on this or that, or “getting tough” on something or other, or “showing them” or “teaching them a lesson,” figure in their rhetoric. The Republicans: party of penis envy?

Republican claims to be the party of small government are equally nonsensical.

First of all, it’s a rather odd conception of “small government” that doesn’t count the military and police as part of “the government.” It’s hard to believe that conservatism in this country was once identified with an opposition to foreign entanglements and large military establishments, or that the perpetual warfare state was originally created by liberals. In fact, the legal precedents and constitutional arguments that the neocons appeal to in order to justify their wet dream National Security State all come from paragons of conservatism like Lincoln, Wilson and FDR.

Today, we’re constantly reminded by self-described “conservatives” that loyal Americans rally around their “Commander-in-Chief” in wartime, and “politics stops at the water’s edge.” Sean Hannity got his knickers in a twist because some Democratic senator accused “our Commander-in-Chief” of lying–in (gasp) WARTIME! Not only does “politics stop at the water’s edge” for Republicans, but apparently Acton’s Law stops there as well. Seems to me that if patriotic Americans are required to suspend their normal distrust of government in wartime “for the duration,” that’s a mighty powerful incentive for the “Commander-in-Chief” to STAY at war as much as possible. As Dubya said some time or other, it’s a lot easier when you’re a dictator.

(Ever notice, by the way, that the same people so outraged that Pelosi would accuse the “heroes” in the CIA of lying were themselves making the same accusation back when it involved Valerie Plame and Doug Feith?)

It’s also an odd conception of “small government” that tasks it with making sure no two people with the same kinds of pee-pee get married, that nobody sees Janet Jackson’s tit or hears one of George Carlin’s “seven words,” and that everybody “Just Says No” to drugs (other than Ritalin and Gardasil).

But even stipulating that “small government” principles only refer to domestic economic and regulatory policies that don’t involve drugs or genitalia, the Republicans’ “free market” rhetoric is a bunch of buncombe. The Reaganite agenda of fake “deregulation” and “privatization” usually involves, in actual practice, the same kind of kleptocratic insider dealing that characterized Yeltsin’s Russia. The GOP’s “small government” economic policy, when you get right down to it, is even more corporatist than that of the Democrats–and you’ve got to go a ways to beat them.

What about the Republicans as the party of “strict constitutionalism” and “original understanding”? What that translates into in plain English, Jeffrey Toobin says, is “a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society.” Chief Justice Roberts, in every major case, “has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff.” And come to think of it, I don’t recall Madison and Jefferson advocating a set of Executive “national security” prerogatives as unbounded as those of Charles I.

(Did you notice, by the way, that these enemies of “judicial activism” were pressuring Sotomayor to discover a new fundamental right–the right to keep and bear arms–among those incorporated in the Fourteenth Amendment?)

You folks out there with “Democrats Care” bumper stickers shouldn’t be enjoying this overmuch. Behind all the crap about “America’s working families,” the Democrats are really just the other corporatist party. Democrats need to get over their own codependent relationship. But that’s another column.

http://c4ss.org/content/798

Flash
02-11-2011, 08:02 PM
The Democrats: Fake Party of Compassion


Last week, we examined the Republican Party’s claims to be the party of small government, personal responsibility, free markets, and strict constitutionalism–and found it wanting.

But the same is true of the Democratic Party’s claims to be the “party of compassion” or to have a special regard for the welfare of “America’s working families.”

The Democratic Party, historically, has represented one faction of the corporate ruling elite. As described by sociologist G. William Domhoff and historian Thomas Ferguson, its primary constituency is large-scale, capital-intensive, high-tech, and export-oriented business. Far from being a “constraint” or “countervailing power” against Big Business, the twentieth century regulatory-welfare state was created primarily to serve corporate capital. As Murray Rothbard put it, “our corporate state uses the coercive taxing power either to accumulate corporate capital or to lower corporate costs.” Or in the equally apropos words of Roy Childs, “liberal intellectuals” have been “the ‘running dogs’ of big businessmen.”

That FDR was hardly the “traitor to his class” of official mythology is suggested by the role of General Electric CEO Gerard Swope in the New Deal economic agenda, and by the army of corporate lawyers and investment bankers in the Roosevelt “brain trust.”

Take, for example, the National Labor Relations (or Wagner) Act. The sectors of the corporate economy that supported FDR were capital-intensive, with long planning horizons that required stability and predictability, and hence extremely vulnerable to disruption. But labor costs were a modest part of the total cost structure of such capital-intensive industry. So the leaders of heavy industry were willing to offer workers significantly improved wages and benefits, in return for coopting the leadership of the labor movement and creating a class of union bureaucrats that would stamp out wildcat strikes and enforce contracts against the rank and file.

If the Republicans were originally the party of protectionism, the Democrats were historically the party of what William Appleman Williams called “Open Door Empire.” That policy led to the creation of a de facto corporate world government under the Bretton Woods institutions, after WWII, with the U.S. military as enforcer. Open Door Empire was the basis for the system of global corporate-state collusion popularly (and wrongly) known today as “free trade,” and more accurately as neoliberalism. The only thing it has in common with genuine free trade is the removal of tariff barriers. But in its reliance on “intellectual property” and other statist measures, it is if anything more genuinely protectionist than anything the GOP was doing a century ago.

The National Security State and permanent war economy were created by good liberal Democrats: FDR and Truman. The archipelago of military bases and garrisons around the world, and the grand tradition of CIA-engineered coups (who was President when Diem and Sukarno were overthrown, I wonder?) , are very much a bipartisan creation.

Much of the legal framework for neoliberalism was constructed in Bill Clinton’s watch (y0u know, that “peace and prosperity” Carville is so partial to). NAFTA, the Uruguay Round of GATT, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act–you’d almost get the idea global corporate rule didn’t start with Bush.

And if that’s not enough to get your head around, the Bush police state didn’t start with Bush, either. Some of Bush’s most objectional dictatorial powers resulted, not from the USA PATRIOT Act, but from “counter-terror” legislation passed under Clinton after the Oklahoma City bombing. A good example is the power to declare organizations “terrorist” by executive fiat and seize their assets without due process–thank Clinton for that. And some of the worst stuff in USA PATRIOT was originally proposed–unsuccessfully–in the Clinton legislation. That Chuck Schumer played a major role in crafting both pieces of legislation bears more than passing significance as well, I think.

Today, despite all the soccer mom rhetoric about “working families,” the leopard hasn’t changed its spots. The role of Robert Rubin (he of Goldman-Sachs and Citigroup) in Democratic policy circles should tell you as much. Nancy Pelosi, whose family net worth is $18 million thanks to her marriage to an investment banker, is only the 17th richest member of Congress; that should tell you something.

The Obama-Geithner TARP policy, despite some symbolic tinkering with executive compensation, is in its essentials a direct continuation of the Bush-Paulson version. It’s the ultimate in neo-Hamiltonianism, saddling taxpayers with interest-bearing debt in order to buy up the banks’ bad assets and reinflate them to something approximating their pre-collapse face value, so that just maybe the banks will use some of the resulting liquidity to start lending money back to the public at interest.

The Democrats, if anything, are more in collusion with the Copyright Nazis of the RIAA, MPAA and Microsoft than are the Republicans–and that’s saying a lot.

http://c4ss.org/content/819