I was listening to Thom Hartmann today and he was going through this discussion of what to call the effort by the GOP to stop any law that would help the US and its people recover from the economic damage wrought by the Bush adminstration. He was throwing out terms like sedition, treason, sabotage, etc.
The whole discussion was regarding a recent book by Draper on the Congress called "Do Not Ask What Good We Do". In it Draper describes a meeting held in a Washington DC restaurant attended by several members of the GOP congress including: Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, Sen Kyle, Sen Coburn, Sen DeMint and some 7 others along with Newt Gingrich and, last but not least, Frank Luntz who called the meeting and is the closest thing we have to Joseph Goebbels here in the US. The meeting was held on the evening of January 20th, 2009, the same day that Barack Obama was inaugurated into the Office of President. The topic of the meeting? How to prevent the administration from doing anything that might benefit the country in order to prolong the economic disaster as long as possible with the goal of making sure that Obama was blamed for the continuing problems and was rendered unelectable in 2012.
We know that since that time there has been a record number of filibusters by the Republican Senate preventing any job creation initiatives up until the 2010 elections, and most recently the new GOP House has undertaken anything but legislation that will do anything good for the American people or the economy.
I will cite the most recent flap about the private vs. public sector growth where Obama has been accused of implying that the private sector was fine, but was actually pointing out the fact that in comparison to the public sector, the private sector is doing fine. Corporate profits are up, the market is up, there is some growth, albeit sluggish. In the meantime, we have lost over 700,000 public sector jobs. Instead of coming right out and bashing the GOP for not passing legislation that was previously routine and would put perhaps a million teachers, firefighters, first responders back to work, and dropping the unemployment rate a full point, Obama was soft pedaling the situation. Of course, he should have hung it around their necks but instead got nailed in the press.
Here is my main point. What do you think that the Bushes and Reagan did when faced with recessions in 1982, 1992 and the 2002 dotcom bust? They pumped money into the states to keep them from firing public employees. It is a relatively quick, easy and effective means of stopping the bleeding. And what is important here is that previous GOP Presidents and the Congresses knew this and passed legislation to make it happen and thus prevented worse outcomes during their tenures. In fact, public employment increased substantially in each of these cases.
You don’t have to guess what is going on now. I already told you. Obama has called for months now for Congress to pass similar legislation that would help the states out of their messes, and has been rebuffed in favor of stupid stuff around contraception, and other relatively meaningless issues. Of course, with the crazy Governers in some states (think Walker, Daniels, Rick Scott, Brewer et al.) that doesn’t mean they would take the money making them complicit in the whatever conspiracy exists.
The takeaway here is that since early 2009, the GOP has conspired to trash the economy and was completely aware of what they were doing. And, this has nothing to do with the tea party. The people in that meeting were not influenced by the tea party since it didn’t exist.
What do you think would happen to members of a corporate board who had such a meeting and then followed up with policies that designed to ensure as much as possible the demise of the firm to whom they have by law a fudiciary responsibility? They not only would be canned, but are prosecutable for violation of state and federal laws.
By the same token, these legislators at the minimum are guilty of violating their oath of office which calls for them to uphold the Constitution which states among other things “promote the general welfare”. Remember this when you are discussing issues with your GOP friends. Regardless of what we call it, be it treason or something else, the GOP is supporting a criminal cabal of people who are devoted to the economic disintegration of the country who need to be indicted and brought to trial.