Politics-An American Tragedy

We all share in the politics of this Republic, and we do it at the voting booth. A symbolic little space where the fate of our lives is determined. A space where we have struggled since the beginning of this country to disenfranchise one another. A struggle that continues to this day with the voter I.D. Laws. A struggle that epitomizes the immorality of our political system.

There is another immorality where dedication to one's political party, and the reelection process takes precedence over the welfare of the nation's people that elected them. Another facet of the American political tragedy.

The politics of today have become extremely sophisticated, with psychological messaging and polling, the social medias, radio, television, advertisements and paid campaigners. all of which costs large sums of donated money, and the donors want something in return for their donations. This has always been a part of our political system, however today wealth has become so concentrated, it is a danger to our freedoms, this is the coup d grace of the American political tragedy...WEALTH.

How did this happen? Lets go back to the Great Depression of the 1930's, there are many parallels. A runaway stock market that crashed, A concentration of wealth, where the richest one percent owned over a third of all American assets, stagnant wages, debt capacities by the middle class stretched to their limits, creation of the Smoot Hawley Tariff to protect American companies. drought conditions and bank failures.

All of these events have either happened now, or are currently in process based on campaign promises by our president, and the Republican elected congress. It took a long time to reach a point where it came back to a similar set of events prior to the Great Depression. And it sadly took a tenacious Republican Party steeped in years of successfully fighting to repeal the regulations and taxes, that they considered bad for business, all of which were designed to prevent another great depression, and the horrors of hunger, homelessness, and poverty from striking Americans once again.

The banking laws and Glass Steagall were enacted. Social Security was established. The G.I. Bill was installed and in the sixties Medicare and the Civil Rights legislation became law, The government funded higher education, and enacted legislation that contributed to the welfare of all Americans. And most of it was opposed by the Republicans, even as the country and the middle class thrived.

Life continued to get better for everyone beginning in the late forties, through the fifties, sixties and seventies, then came the eighties. And the reversal of those good years began, very slowly at first. The Republicans won the presidency with Ronald Reagan. He took on the labor unions, and started a slide in membership that is continuing to this day. He reduced aid to education, something he began as governor of California, where the charter of state run universities prohibited tuition, he initiated the change, claiming that an education was not a right. He reduced taxes, cut welfare programs, and rebooted Nixon's infamous war on drugs.

The war on drugs was unique in that it created another class of American citizens, The Felons. Prior to the war on drugs the United States had a little over half a million people incarcerated, today we have over two and a quarter million people in jail, the largest prison population in the world. There are sixty eight million Americans with criminal records, and there are over six million Americans that have been disenfranchised due to a felony conviction.

Half of the United States prison population is there due to a drug conviction. We are the only industrialized nation that incarcerates drug addicts. Other countries send them to rehab. As a result they have no criminal record, recidivism is low and they can compete in the work force without the stigma of a crime attached to them.

President Trump must like putting people in jail, he recently instructed Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General, to vigorously pursue all criminal cases to their maximum punishment. You would think Republicans would approve of other methods than prison for these people, as over the last forty years this type of criminal justice has cost the government over a trillion dollars, and created the felony class, which will continue to grow, to cost billions of dollars, and to endanger the citizenry, due to their inability to join the work force and provide for themselves.

Ronald Reagan's renewed war on drugs was just the beginning for Republicans. Reaganomics was the pedestal of their deception. They began the long road convincing Americans that their mantra of reduced taxes and less government would provide a better life for everyone, and a better America for the world. That pathway has culminated in the highest concentration of wealth in our history, stagnant wages for forty years for the middle class, the very very weird gift of Donald Trump as president of the United States, and a Republican house and senate dedicated to reducing taxes, that cover health, education and welfare, while increasing spending on Defense.

Everything that the Republicans want is wrapped up in their tax bill. A bill that will exacerbate the social ills that plague this country. There is an estimated forty-eight million people living at the poverty level, sixteen million of which are children that lack the means to get enough nutritious food on a regular basis. Children who live in this environment experience changes in their brain architecture, interfering with learning, social, and emotional development, and cognitive skills.

This tax bill only helps the wealthy, at the expense of everyone else in America. It is nothing more than a continuation of Republican deceit. Yes, our base corporate tax is one of the highest in the world, however the effective tax rate for the corporations ranges from twelve percent to nineteen percent depending on how good the lobbyist was for the company that hired him. This makes our corporations competitive, which is why profits are at an all time high for many U.S. corporations. There are also many corporations making a profit that pay no taxes and in some cases actually get money from the government due to tax lobbied loopholes and subsidies.

What needs to be done with the U.S. corporate world is to review their status relative to our anti-trust laws. They are in the oligarchy state merging towards the monopoly state. Some are more than likely already there. This is what happens in mature capitalism, only a few companies remain in a particular area of business, eliminating product and labor competition. The public suffers dramatically. When the monopolies are broken up, competition for labor and sales increases and everyone benefits.

As to the debt, eliminate corporate loopholes, and raise the taxes of the wealthy. This was the remedy many years ago. Also the best economic times for the middle class and business was during periods of higher taxes for the wealthy and corporations, where the wealth was less concentrated, more evenly distributed. There is nothing wrong with achieving great wealth, however when that concentration of wealth negatively affects others, then action needs to be taken. The Republicans have again deceived many of the electorate that any action taken to alleviate a situation like that is socialistic, it's not, it is merely keeping the business machine engaged and profitable, just as the Fed does by controlling interest rates, something the Republicans don't believe is socialistic because it provides business with cheap money when it is most needed.

So here we are literally sitting on a catastrophe. We have a president who lost the popular vote and who suffers from a narcissistic personality disorder. And that disorder, along with his absolute lack of political knowledge makes him unfit to be president. He is accepted by the Republican congress because they see a way through him to achieve their goals of lower taxes and less government, even though they know he is unfit for the job. Another insight into the immorality of today's Republican Party.

The Republican House of Representatives has sent two of the most incredibly cruel bills to the Senate for approval, the health care bill and the tax plan. They are inexplicably cruel, akin to a mystery with a horrific ending in that they successfully attack and further diminish the life's of the most needy among us, while benefiting a seemingly silent ghoulish approval of the wealthy beneficiaries.

The health care package will eliminate over twenty-five million from their health care over the next ten years, and the increasing costs will drive other millions from the program, while providing the wealthy with a windfall. The tax plan is more insidious, it reduces billions of dollars that aid the half a million homeless, thirty-seven thousand of which are children, forty-seven thousand are veterans and over two hundred thousand are families.It reduces aid to many of the forty-five million that live below the poverty level and face hunger on a daily basis. It reduces the funding for every cabinet department that assists Americans and America, form education to a sell off of government parks for business development.

The senate will mitigate the health and tax plans, but their Republican DNA will still enable them to overlook the misery in America. and the economic collapse from their speculative folly of believing their tax reductions will be covered by a three percent, or more economic growth year after year, along with the more hazardous part of their plan, eliminating most regulatory laws which were established to maintain social and economic stability.

Unless there are some dramatic changes to the economic plans for our country, things look bleak. However, there is another fear among many Americans of a developing police state. ICE looks like a Gestapo organization, grabbing parents while dropping their children off at school, or arresting people from a hospital, while dressed in combat gear. Unarmed people are getting shot and killed by police with no consequences to them. Some of our prisons are being turned over to private companies to run. Who knows what happens in them. And we have a president that pays tribute to the world's dictators.

There is so much misery in our country and I wonder why? There is hunger, yet we have enough food to feed everyone. There are people who are homeless, yet we can provide shelter for everyone. There are illnesses, yet we have enough facilities to treat everyone. There is an abundance of ignorance, yet we have enough institutions to educate everyone. Maybe one day we will use our resources for all of us, rather than a few. However, I don't see it with this administration and congress, if anything we will be much worse off after they leave office.

One closing thought about the hungry, the homeless, the mentally ill, the sick and disabled, they are real people. They may have needs, but that doesn't make them any less significant than any other person on the planet, for it is our treatment of them that makes us human.