Friday, December 12, 2014

Who's Responsible? You--And No One Else

As I write this, the House of Representatives has passed a one-trillion-dollar-plus spending bill to keep the federal government running (almost all of it, anyway) until the end of the current fiscal year, next September 30.  The exception, of course, is for the Department of Homeland Security, which is funded only through the end of next February, to give the new all-Republican Congress a crack at somehow undoing President Obama's executive action on immigration.  I say "somehow," of course, because the president's executive action is going to be funded by the user fees of the applicants trying to take advantage of it, leaving them only the enforcement aspects of immigration to cut.

But I digress.  As inhumane as the GOP's current immigration stance is, the details of the spending bill all by themselves, along with several other end-of-the-year bills, provide a very worthy home for the Devil.  By now, you have all read or seen news about the GOP's plan's to raise the level of individual campaign contributions to $1.5 million, and to repeal the Dodd-Frank provision against using taxpayer-backed accounts to gamble in the markets.  The House bill just passed contains both provisions, and is currently on its way to the Senate, where they may or may not survive.  (The smart money says yes, but the smart money hasn't reckoned with Elizabeth Warren, nor the unlikely pairing of Senators David Vitter and Sherrod Brown joining across party lines to oppose the change in Dodd-Frank.)  A spending bill cannot be filibustered, however, and I suspect that there are enough spineless Democrats to join with the GOP caucus and get the bill to 51 votes.  As for Obama's promise to sign it with these poison pills, I'll leave that for a future post.

Those poison pills, however, are not the only goodies you're getting as a consequence of the Republican Party's expanded power.  Here are a few others:

The freedom for employers to cut payments from pension plans, in the name of "saving" the plans;

The diversion of funding for student loans to student loan lenders, in the name of helping them "service" the loans;

The blatant giveaway of 2400 acres of Apache land to a foreign mining company, a last-minute goodie from John McCain (which can now compete with Sarah Palin for the honor of being the worst decision he's ever made);

Many more, including gutting IRS and EPA funding, a fuller listing of which is provided here.  And this is by no means the end.

I noted a moment ago that this is a consequence of the GOP's expanded power.  It could just as easily be attributed to fecklessness on the part of the Democrats, or President Obama, who seems ready to resort to Clintonism in order to get through the last two years of his presidency.

But, ultimately, it's not about any of them.

It's about you.  And especially, those of you who sat at home on Election Day, thinking that the politicians would be so upset by your absence that they would respond by doing exactly what you wanted.

But politics doesn't work that way.  Not in a democracy, and not even in the plutocratic version of democracy we now have.

It's all about noise.  It's all about presence.  And, before those two things can happen, it's all about not giving up.  Because there's never a reason for giving up.  Not in the values we cherish, and not in the record of history.  If history teaches us anything, as I am fond of saying, it's that all empires crumble--from without, from within, or both.  But your silence and apathy won't make them crumble.

Do you still want change?  You have to change.  If you don't like the Democratic Party, then don't accept either it or the GOP as the status quo.  Give the status quo a good solid kick where it hurts.  Change the Democratic Party.  Form a third party.  Or a fourth one.  But stop crying, and start getting determined to make the bad guys cry.

All of these disasters I've listed are on all of us.  Unless we start doing something about it.  Right now.

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