Beware Democrats: The Right Wing Conspiracy Can also Cite Liberal Scripture
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| Image by ashish choudhary from Pixabay |
"The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
An evil soul producing holy witness
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the heart.
O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!”
—William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice“Burisma Joe Biden.”
“Kamala is a cop.”
“Wall Street Pete.”
“Netflix Obama living large on Martha’s Vineyard with the One Percenters.”
*These public service announcements brought to you by your friendly Right Wing Conspiracy.
And yes, this is the same “vast right wing conspiracy” that Hillary Clinton warned us about in the 1990’s – when her husband was facing constant, vicious attacks for eight years straight – except now it’s on steroids.
And in 2016 it was only too happy to use cutouts and trolls to attack Hillary from the Left and smear this brilliant, tough, experienced and accomplished woman — who devoted her life to public service and social justice — as a war-monger, a whore for Wall Street and crony capitalists, and a phony, entitled, calculating, rich out-of-touch politician, in an effort to get disillusioned and disappointed Democrats and liberals to stay away from the polls on Election Day 2016.
And meanwhile, out of the other side of their mouths, they turned to their right-wing base and revived all the slanders from the politics of personal destruction from the Bill Clinton era, and additionally smeared Hillary as nothing less than a third Obama term promising little more than a continuation of out-of-control spending and reparations for unproductive black moochers and “illegal aliens,” crushing job-killing regulations, and endless apology tours and defenseless open borders for the benefit of terrorists and America’s enemies.
They went after her record of integrity and public service by falsely accusing her of corruptly using the Clinton Foundation as a personal slush fund, and undermined her standing with women by accusing her of viciously attacking the women who accused her husband of sexually assaulting them.
They were able to attack President Obama from the left as well, cynically mischaracterizing historic healthcare reform as nothing more than a corrupt backroom deal with insurers and pharmaceutical companies meant to foreclose on the chimera of a single payer plan that has no parallel in the world, one which features zero co-pays, zero deductibles, and zero monthly premiums and all paid for through taxes on the “fat cats.”
They similarly demagogued from the left against Dodd-Frank – the most significant and far-reaching banking regulation passed in 75 years – by decrying President Obama’s “failure” to break up the big banks and jail the Wall Street “banksters,” never mind that Dodd-Frank does authorize the government to unwind failing banks at no cost to the public if they are big enough that their collapse could damage the broader economy.
And never mind that, according to the Office of the Inspector General of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) set up in the aftermath of the Crash of 2008, as of January 4, 2017, the government under President Obama charged 374 individuals in the finance sector – including 88 bankers who were criminally charged with fraud – secured 269 convictions, and sentenced 192 to prison, and recovered billions of dollars.
And due to the politically independent nature of the TARP Office of the Inspector General, investigative work into the abuses that led to the Crash of 2008 has continued into the Trump administration.
And because of these ongoing investigations, the total now stands at 428 individuals in the finance sector who were criminally charged with fraud, 369 who were convicted, and 283 who were sentenced to prison, as of July 12, 2019.
Others are either awaiting trial or awaiting sentencing.
And so, while prosecution of these complicated crimes has been difficult – partly because three decades of financial deregulation have legalized much of the activities relating to mortgage-backed derivatives that led up to the Crash – progress has been made in the area of fraud.
Over $100 billion in fines and penalties were levied against corrupt and predatory financial institutions as well as ratings agencies that corruptly rubber-stamped toxic financial products as triple-AAA rated investments and enabled them to be sold to an unsuspecting global public which included pension funds, government agencies, and private and institutional investors.
Also under President Obama, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was established to root out fraud and abuse and stood up by the brilliant banking reform advocate Elizabeth Warren, who then passed off administrative duties to the bulldog prosecutor Richard Cordray, a former Ohio Attorney General.
The pretend Left ratf*ckers also denigrate President Obama’s record on climate action in their quixotic quest for some vague Green New Deal, mischaracterizing his historic achievements on renewable energy and transit.
But let’s look at his record.
President Obama, elected in the middle of a calamitous economic collapse, marshaled tremendous resources through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act – better known as the stimulus program. As part of this massive effort, we committed $90 billion into clean energy – an unprecedented amount of funding into wind, solar, and other renewables – energy efficiency in every form; advanced biofuels; and electric vehicles, of which there are now more than one million on America’s roadways.
The stimulus produced the world’s largest wind farm, a half dozen of the world’s largest solar arrays, and America’s first refineries for advanced biofuels. It created a battery-manufacturing industry for electric vehicles almost entirely from scratch. It financed net-zero border stations and visitors’ centers, an eco-friendly new Coast Guard headquarters, and jump-started three long-awaited transit mega-projects in Manhattan alone – the Moynihan Station, the Second Avenue Subway, and the Long Island Railroad connection to the East Side.
And it would have jump-started a multibillion-dollar rail tunnel to New Jersey and a high-speed rail system in Florida as well if Republican Governors Chris Christie and Rick Scott hadn’t killed those projects, and it would have pumped billions into modernizing and rebuilding aging public schools if not for the adamant objections of Republican Senator Susan Collins, a crucial vote for the stimulus bill.
Also thanks to the stimulus, we built power lines, water treatment plants, sewage plants and fire stations; we weatherized government buildings, refurbished parks, libraries, aging pipe systems and train stations; made 22,000 miles of roadway improvements, repaired 2,700 bridges, brought water to Central California farms and plumbing to rural Alaska villages, and committed $7 billion to bringing broadband internet service to isolated underserved areas – a modern version of FDR’s rural electrification project.
Other components of the stimulus made crucial investments in health care – $27 billion to computerize our antiquated paper-and-ink based medical records system – as well as in transportation, medical and scientific research and the safety net, in addition to addressing the immediate needs of the cratering economy.
And despite the controversy over the historic size of the stimulus package, the Obama administration met every spending deadline, and it kept costs so far under budget that it was able to finance over 3,000 additional projects with the savings.
But for some, these massive efforts, accomplished in the aftermath of the worst financial collapse of our lifetimes and against massive resistance and obstruction from Republicans, were not enough.
And while Republican base voters are ready to crawl through barbed wire and broken glass to get to the polls next year, too many of us dither and fret about our lack of perfectly perfect candidates, as we wistfully await the return of some mythical FDR – but not the actual one, who refused to enact an anti-lynching law in an effort to mollify racist southern Democrats, who at times eased enforcement of antitrust statutes to mollify Big Business interests, whose original Social Security program shut out many African Americans from eligibility, who interred Japanese-Americans during World War II, and who didn't do much in the way of jailing “banksters” – who will then unleash thunderbolts of righteous fire and brimstone on behalf of his “woke” constituents.
And in contrast with a disillusioned and disaffected Left, these people can be counted on to enthusiastically vote for the Republican candidate, because they’ve been spoon-fed so much hate, bitterness and resentment that they fully support:
- caging the children of refugees and asylum seekers and detaining them in inhumane conditions without the benefit of emergency medical care,
- withdrawing from an historic U.S.-led arms control agreement reached between Iran and the world powers, even though this withdrawal can mean an inevitable slide toward war,
- obstructing an investigation into the possible coordination between Trump’s presidential campaign and agents of our adversary Russia,
- arming public school teachers as a response to mass shootings,
- anti-choice politicians who call for “heartbeat” bills, death certificates for stillborn babies under penalty of law, and medically impossible procedures such as surgically re-implanting ectopic pregnancies,
- politicians who prioritized the failure of America’s first black president,
- taking hostages and shutting down the government as a means for accomplishing things that they cannot enact legislatively,
- domestic terrorists who point semi-automatic weapons at government agents seeking to collect long-overdue fines from a scofflaw rancher in arrears of more than $1 million in grazing fees on federal lands,
- police officers who gun down unarmed black men and boys with impunity,
- a Christian Identity preacher who publicly and provocatively burned a Koran which led to the death of our soldiers in overseas missions,
- radio talk show hosts who slut-shame women who defend the provision of medical contraceptives in insurance plans,
- citizens who demonize a black boy gunned down for jaywalking and left on the street by police,
- mocking the choke-hold used on a black man who was killed by police for selling loose cigarettes on the street, and
- right-wing candidates who pose fully armed in their campaign literature and who casually resort to violent language.
Who?
Who is the candidate we feel we should get behind? Who is going to challenge Trump and the Republicans in 2020? Who can check all the boxes, pass all the litmus tests, and single-handedly lead us into the Promised Land?
Or, rather, will we examine the pro’s and con’s of each candidate and unite behind an admittedly imperfect presidential candidate and a slate of Congressional and state candidates – and yes, heaven forbid, accept the lesser of two evils – as part of an effective, coherent campaign to loosen the death grip of the Reactionary Right?
Or will we continue to eat our own and allow ourselves to be divided and demoralized?