Let the sacrifice begin. What's left of the American economy is about to be slaughtered on the altar of Republican ideology. Last night, enough Republicans in the US Senate voted against the already-shrunken Big Three auto bridge loans to scuttle them. Why? Union-busting, plain and simple. GOP senators, mostly the ones from Southern states filled with foreign auto non-union manufacturing plants, insisted the United Auto Workers accept wage cuts before the end of 2009 that the union was willing to accept by 2011 (the end of its current contracts). Wage cuts that amounted to only a few dollars an hour according to the figures I saw on the news last night--and after the UAW had already conceded more on other issues, such as health care and pensions.
Oh, the GOP senators had lots of "justifications" for their actions. Some claimed the bridge loans were just too expensive. Like giving $15 billion IN LOANS to American auto makers--with a whole slew of conditions--is going to break the budget after giving $700 billion to the banks with no strings attached . . . even when the banks still aren't using the money to loosen up the economy.
[Which leads me to an another observation: all the news reports I heard this morning said the upside of the present situation is that it's a very, very good time to buy a car. I say "Sure it is. IF you can get the credit to do so." And that's the rub, isn't it? We're back to the banks hoarding--or spending on their CEOs and their perks--the money the government shoveled at them supposedly to help us. All the banks are interested in doing is helping themselves. When are we collectively going to realize that the only thing that trickles down when you employ "trickle-down" economics is pee?--Ed.]
Some of the GOP senators claimed the Big Three had no one to blame but themselves. They got themselves into their present mess; the US Senate had nothing to do with it; let the Big Three get themselves out, or go under. I say: if that is such a sound bit of reasoning, why didn't they apply it to the $700 billion banking giveaway?
Some things are just too big for political ideology. The Senate GOP members who voted against the already-severely-reduced-bridge-loans bill are going to find they've won only a Pyrrhic victory if something isn't done to salvage even part of this mess. The fallout from their irresponsibility is going to hit their states' people just as hard as it hits everyone else in the USA once the ripple effects of failing to prop up the Big Three swamp the 2.5 million US workers in related industries . . . and then the rest of us whose livelihoods are connected to theirs.
It will make The Great Depression look like a cake walk. I just hope that enough of the country can hang on until President-elect Obama is inaugurated and effective measures will be taken. Heaven knows Dubya won't do anything. Keith Olbermann asked in all seriousness last night on MSNBC's Countdown With Keith Olbermann whether anyone besides him has wondered if Dubya's whole purpose in getting elected was to screw up the government as much as possible. Heck! I've been saying that for years. GOP right-wing ideologues are so determined to go back to the Gilded Age, when there was no income tax, the federal government was small, and they held all the money and all the power, that they are willing to run the whole country into the ground to get what they think they want. If they succeed, they are going to find themselves presiding only over the ashes of what once was America.
2 comments:
The current GOP selfishness and shortsightedness is not truely representive of traditional conservative values. It is, instead, a warped caricature painted with broad, strokes of misleading oratory. In the past (can you believe it) forty years, Nixon's evil campaign have morphed into the republican idea of leadership. It looks like it will be a very long time before voting a split ticket between the "Big Two" will bring the balance this country needs to find again.
I do not disagree with you at all. I have to add, however, that it just occurred to me that what's really going on with the Southern Republican fanatacism about union busting is this: if they can't have actual slaves anymore, they're bound and determined to have wage slaves, and to keep those uppity workers of every color and creed "in their place."
I just want to scream at them sometimes that the Civil War has been over for 144 years and they lost--they need to get over it already.
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