Democrats can’t seem to find their ‘message.’ Should they guarantee jobs? How about health care? I’m astounded. It shouldn’t be even slightly tough to see what will work. Even if you position yourself as ‘not a Republican,’ the direction is easy to see. We’re tired of seeing industrialists angrily trash another piece of our common community. We’re losing America, and it’s making us sick. What’s taking Democrats so long to admit what we all see?
Republicans have always been the party of the rich and powerful: billionaires, favored sons, big corporations, and monopolies. At the same time, the GOP wraps itself in layers of distraction to obscure what they’re doing.
Patriotism! The Flag! Strong families! Abortion! Gun Rights! Support our Troops! Freedom!! Trump is following the Republican playbook wonderfully. He pounds out so much chaff and nonsense; you can’t see anything but the noise. Arm teachers! Spies! Witch Hunt! Wiretapping!
Mostly they suck at the big lies, mainly because they don’t give a fig about poor people. Yes, some rebel Republicans seem more compassionate, but as a party, the GOP can’t even be bothered to pretend they’re trying.
But Republicans have mastered one argument. It’s become their big moneymaker, and they lean on it endlessly. They’re experts at creating hate. I don’t mean they’re just good at fomenting hate; I mean that the GOP adores hate. They’ve been building their hate toolkit for decades. Today, racism and hate work so well for them, the Republican party spreads it on every problem like hate is the all-purpose solution to everything.
In America, GOP hate has been an easy sell. Liberals, they insist, hate you. Fox spends every day digging for examples. Democrats, they tell us all, think working people are morons and inbred yokels. City elites (a perfect dog-whistle) disparage you for your honest, small-town ways (another dog-whistle). Those city people want to raise your taxes, take away your guns, give birth control to your infant daughter so she can become a slut while forcing your sons gay and your grandkids trans. That was the liberal goal all along.
I hear normal adults talking about ‘takers’ who don’t want to work hard, propped up by government payments into easy indolence. Not like when we were kids! (Pressed for details, my friends describe those takers as somewhere else far away and not anyone they know.) Why would they think that? Because Republicans have been spouting it since Ronald Reagan sneered out “Welfare Queen.” No dog-whistle there, either, no siree!
I said this is easy. How? Tap into the bigger trends that everyone can see. Big corporations control us. How many times do you have to sign a new End-User License Agreement (EULA) in an average week? We all stopped reading them years ago because we all know we have no choice. And it doesn’t matter; every large corporation will have the same conditions. No liability for them and no promises, but total responsibility and endless conditions on you. No promise of fairness in the arbitration we would have to go through, alone and isolated.
Here’s a personal example. My brokerage company added a ‘notepad’ function to their website. To use it, I had to sign off on a 43 page EULA. Endless clauses, many in ALL CAPS, eliminating any possibility of liability or functionality, along with so many pointless disclaimers it was insane. And arbitration for any dispute. It was obvious they’d just copied clauses from every other EULA out there. All that for a poorly written notepad. Their interests were paramount, and they didn’t consider what I might think.
Here’s an imbalance that bugs me because it’s so obvious: copyrights. Copyrights used to be a deal between the public and creative people. It’s a big deal. The founders thought copyrights were important enough to write them into the Constitution.
The basic exchange was simple: in return for giving us, the public, a copy of whatever creative thing you made, you, the creator, got a limited-time, exclusive right to perform, distribute, and control your work. Because we got a copy, things weren’t lost, and creators got their 14-year monopoly. It was a decent balance between profit and the common good. The government provided robust protections before copyright expired, and in return, the creative work became part of the vast body of the public domain afterward. We all build on the work of people before us, so getting the balance right is critical.
Anyway, the deal didn’t hold. Businesses hate the public domain and reneged. In 1831, Congress extended copyrights to 28 years with a 14-year renewal if you apply. In 1909, Congress pushed that out to 28 years with a 28-year renewal. The biggie was the Copyright Act of 1976. Driven by movies, television, music companies, corporations got copyrights pushed out to 75 years or the life of the author plus 50 years. The Copyright Renewal Act of 1992 got rid of the renewal requirement and automatically renewed every older copyright held by a large company. In return, you didn’t have to give the government a copy of anything. The 1998 Sonny Bono Act (also called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act) extended that to the life of the author plus 75 years with a special 120-year extension if the work was corporate property. Wowsa.
No, it wasn’t an accident they extended copyrights to include Mickey’s 1928 creation date. And they didn’t care if it hurt the rest of us. (They’re corporations; they don’t have feelings.)
Here’s the most recent one. Neal Gorsuch just wrote the opinion for the Supreme Court’s quick little 5-4 decision favoring corporations over employees on arbitration. Businesses can now require you to sign away any right to justice under the law. Instead, bosses can now force every employee to sign away almost any legal recourse you used to have. Don’t like it? It’s a non-negotiable condition of employment. And that’s not just arbitration; they block class-action status or any legal groupings. You’re alone now. Your employer can fire every non-white, non-male worker, but when they fire you, you’ll have to show to the arbitrator they fire that your bosses discriminated against you personally. And you’ll have to do that all by yourself, under arbitrary rules, not in a court of law, and not subject to legal review.
Big corporations get to impose their ‘religion’ on their employees, overriding individual rights. This, even though corporations don’t have morals or ideas.
Rich people and big corporations have been whittling away at working-class protections for decades, using the Republican party as their bespoke political instrument. Every month we’re told about something else we used to have that’s gone. Sick leave? (Does anyone still get that?) Secure employment? Maybe you remember having protection from capricious firing or open retaliation?
Under the Citizens United decision, the rich and powerful finally got the system bent enough to allow corporations to purchase their politicians directly. They argued that Corporations are people too. (No, they’re not.) We all felt the change as the airplane of our lives shifted from a gentle glide to a steeper decline. We all feel helpless before these powerful interests who control the levers of power. The New York Times writes a long series on how landlords use the courts as their corporate eviction machines; nobody cares because we already knew that. Most states use their courts as profit centers, indifferent they drive ordinary people into a criminal justice system that never lets them go. When did Republicans start admitting that voter suppression was a tactic and not an accident?
A tactic in what? The Republican Southern Strategy? (Hint: pretend to be offended I brought it up.)
College today costs as much as homes. Hell, a year of private school now costs more than my entire college career. Rich people get special privileges, which they use to pry out more privileges for themselves, and Republicans help them at every turn. Air pollution? Not a problem here. Lead in the water? Poor people don’t deserve better. Yes for aid to Texas and Florida, but no to Puerto Rico? Still??
Democrats have pushed back in the past. They recreated the American health care model in the ACA. Republicans do everything they can to destroy it. Democrats created the Consumer Financial Protection Commission; Republicans decapitate it and work to cripple any existing work. Democrats create Dodd-Frank reforms, trying to reign in powerful financial groups that crashed the economy in 2007, 2000, and earlier. Remember the S&L Scandal?) Even though banks are earning record profits, Republicans strip out every part of Dodd-Frank act they can crowbar free because of the poor little rich banks.
Americans by the tens of thousands lost their jobs, their homes, their wealth and stability to fraud and abuse during the Great Recession. Republicans panicked when President Bush let Bear Sterns fail, and big stockholders lost money on their bad, risky bets. That wasn’t supposed to happen! The GOP machine sprang into action, ensuring that big banks and institutional investors would never suffer again. Poor babies. And Republicans pushed for a faster foreclosure process with fewer protections.
Yeah, there’s another Republican pattern. Big banks are earning record profits, but Republicans are cutting regulation and protections because of… something or other. Big Pharma pulls in 25% returns on investment – an almost criminal profit ratio – and Republicans insist that consumer protections are throttling innovation. And then the GOP cuts federal research money. (And any money for poor people, of course. Can’t afford food for the hungry when rich people need higher stock prices.)
Democrats: we need you to help us. None of us as individual citizens are powerful enough to push back against Microsoft and Ford and Wells Fargo and AT&T and Comcast and all the others. The Republican Criminal Enterprise rigged it against us. The Democratic party has managed to protect people before, and you seem to want to do it again.
If the Democratic party stands for a balance between individuals and the big powers that control us now, then for god’s sake, say so! Stand up! Take a position besides “We’re not Republicans.” Have goals and ideas. Outside of a few progressives, the modern Democratic party seems content-free and completely hapless. Republicans are obviously and gleefully recreating the gilded age. If you think income inequality is bad, what do you want to do about it? Most families can’t afford higher education at a time when our nation depends on a highly educated workforce for our continued prosperity. Do Democrats want to lower college tuition for most people? Good idea! Tell me more about that.
People feel helpless because we are. It’s not an illusion. We all see the decline of America both economically and as that crazy idea about cooperation, citizenship, with a mix of different cultures that can co-exist or merge as we choose, all while cross-pollinating ideas, foods, and styles. Fight for the America that Republicans are tearing down. We all see it. We’re losing America, and we need your help.
