I'm lucky tonight, sitting at home in Wisconsin, watching the terrible, terrible aftermath of the enormous storm that has wreaked havoc on the Eastern seaboard from North Carolina up through Connecticut. Literally millions of people on the East Coast--and people as far inland as Pittsburgh, and Youngstown, Ohio (and elsewhere, as far south as West Virginia, as far north as upstate New York in the Adirondacks) are not nearly so lucky.
I work for a company that is headquartered in Manhattan. I've been working as I usually do, from my office in Wisconsin. Normally I would be on the phone and emailing with people in the New York headquarters. But nobody has been able to work in our headquarters, because of the flooding in Manhattan, the loss of electrical power to the building, and who knows what else they have had to deal with. It is difficult to encompass the scale of the destruction in New York, New Jersey, and everywhere else affected by the storm.
But even as the mind reels from the vast scope of this monster storm's effects, which even now continue to be felt as the floodwaters still cover large tracts of land, I also see and hear people in the affected areas talking about the recovery efforts, and how determined they and the tens of thousands of people working to get the water back where it should be and repair what has been destroyed or damaged are to get this fixed. Some of them are even talking about making this disaster into an opportunity to improve the infrastructure of affected areas so that the next time a huge storm hits, the country will be better able to deal with something like this.
Someone--I believe it was Connecticut's Governor Dannel P. Malloy--said that in the past year, more or less, his state has had to deal with not one but three major natural disasters in the form of storms. He, or someone else who was interviewed tonight, said that we are now seeing storms that we would have thought of as once-in-a-lifetime storms are becoming a once-every-couple-of-years storms. "The new normal," one said. The reason for such storms can be debated, though one meteorological scientist said that it really is connected to global warming. i don't doubt that, because for several decades it has been apparent to climate scientists who aren't in the pay of the fossil-fuel industry that carbon emissions have vastly increased the "greenhouse effect" that retains heat in the atmosphere, raising the overall temperature of the planet. The rising temperature of the planet extends to the temperature of the oceans as well as the rest of the world, and as snow and ice melt--exposing previously snowbound mountains, greatly reducing the size of the world's glaciers, shrinking the arctic icecap and visibly melting large chunks of antarctic ice and snow that were solid for at least ten thousand years if not longer. And this liberates more water and water vapor, as well as providing storms with more energy when they are over warmer ocean waters. Extreme weather events have long been predicted by climatologists who have studied weather patterns and the logical results of global warming.
But for right now, whether we can somehow manage to persuade congress that dealing with the problem of global warming is a clear and present necessity that will before very long save the country an enormous amount of money in smaller disaster-relief costs, we are faced with dealing with the current crisis. And that is something that is done by many local and state agencies, and by FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency that failed so terribly during Hurricane Katrina, but which before the George W. Bush administration, and during the current administration, has been extremely effective in helping communities all over the country deal with disasters of all sorts.
There has been some discussion about the need for an agency like FEMA. At one point during the long series of Republican Presidential debates Mitt Romney stated that what FEMA did would be better done by the states--and even better if it was done by the private sector.
I understand that Mr. Romney feels that business is better suited to deal with a lot of what the federal government does. And he spoke of the federal deficit as a reason for taking money spent on something like FEMA and instead having private business deal with what FEMA does.
He misses the point completely. First of all, the federal deficit is driven not by services like FEMA, but by the tax policy under which we have struggled since George W. Bush cut the tax rate for the wealthiest people in the country, and led us into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq at the same time. Back in 2003 when we went into Iraq it was noted by some news media, most particularly Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, that never in the history of the United States had an administration reduced taxes while the country was engaged in a war. But putting aside the question of deficits and their cause there is a bigger issue.
The issue I refer to is a very basic one. What is government for, after all? Thom Hartmann talks about the purpose of government on his daily show. He talks about the basic mandate set forth in the constitution, in the words, in the very first sentence of the Preamble: . . . provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity . . .
Those goals: promote the general welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity--not our personal welfare, not the welfare of various individuals, but the general welfare--they are all about the social contract between the government and the individual. As citizens we give up certain things so that we can get the benefits of things the government can do, which would be literally impossible for any single business or individual to accomplish.
This is where the progressive idea comes from. Living in Wisconsin, it was striking to me in the past two years to see how literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people came together when Governor Scott Walker began his assault on rights that the people of Wisconsin had fought to gain, rights that were inspired by the progressive movement that saw its birth in this stat and gave us: the forty-hour work week; the right to belong to a labor union; the right of fee assembly --guaranteed by the Bill of Rights but often challenged by those who would discourage protest when the government over-reaches--and protections that the progressive movement has encouraged or sponsored, such as protection of people in the workplace from hazardous conditions, and other governmental oversight that protects the people against exploitation or worse by private commercial interests.
Mr. Romney is supported by the vast contributions of businesses that stand to benefit hugely if he is elected President. His big backers seem to care not one whit about the general welfare, whenever it threatens the welfare of their business's bottom line profits. James Inhofe, senator from Oklahoma, can deny global warming until he is blue in the face, but his patently false argument against global warming are simply nothing more than that: lies. He says these things in the service of the oil interests in Oklahoma that provide huge contributions to his re-election campaigns (and doubtless, large amounts of money to advertising by Super-PACS in opposition to his opponents and Democratic candidates in general.
The general welfare is something that Rachel Maddow talks about when she does promotional spots for MSBC, and also when she discusses such issues on her nightly show. And she is exactly correct: when she stands in front of what I believe is the Hoover Dam, and talks about how such massive public-works projects are the sort of thing that only the federal government can accomplish, that is a conversation about the common welfare. It is one of the things government is supposed to do. The idea that we should stop maintaining the nation's infrastructure, or outsource FEMA's job to the private sector to reduce the deficit is simply wrong. It is a wrong-headed argument.
In fact, if we did hire some for-profit company to manage disaster relief, it would cost the cocuntry far more than it costs to have the federal government's non-profit agency do the job.
Instead of advocating privatizing disaster relief--and other federal agencies-- people who already benefit from what the government can offer all its citizens--the people who currently benefit the most should contribute a more reasonable, fair share toward supporting the general welfare. As many progressives have pointed out, as President Obama has said many times in the course of the current election campaign. those who earn a hugely disproportionate amount of money and yet contribute a smaller percentage of their income to the general welfare than those at the top of the income scale have contributed in more than fifty years, are simply not contributing their fair share. They, like everyone else, benefit from the services of the government. And yet, the percentage of their contributions in the form of income tax has shrunk because of the George W. Bush tax cuts. No matter the rationale for this: call them "job creators"--they have not been creating jobs since their taxes went down. And their corporate profits have soared . . . while income for most people in the country has actually declined.
The tax cuts for the wealthy have been absorbed by the middle class and poor people, who pay a higher percentage of their income on taxes. Not just income tax, but also sales tax and gasoline tax and other taxes they can't avoid. So let's not kid ourselves about who pays taxes. When Mr. Romney says that forty-seven percent of the people in the country don't pay tax, he was utterly wrong. Even if someone doesn't earn enough money to pay income tax, he or she still pays all those other taxes, and payroll and social security and medicare taxes.
But my point is that the common welfare is really what government is al about. And FEMA is an agency that benefits everyone who needs it. Not just businesses; not just the wealthy, but everyone, the wealthy and the poor; the healthy and the ill; the able and the disabled. It is the epitome of the promise government implicitly makes to its citizens when we agree to be citizens. Give up your autonomy to dot things that benefit you but might adversely affect others . . . in return for the benefits the government provides for all.
I fear that Mitt Romney, and his fellows on the Conservative Republican side of the aisle, especially his running-mate Paul Ryan, whose role model, Ayn Rand's "Objectivism" preaches that we should do first for ourselves, and that a government that in any way inhibits the free enterprise of individual entrepreneurs is evil, simply don't get it. Ayn Rand, born and raised in the repressive, totalitarian Soviet Russia after its revolution, understandably was leery of any government that threatened individual rights. But the federal government of the U.S., when it acts to restrain the unbridled greed of businesses that exploit their workers by trying to prevent them from bargaining through unions or by imposing unsafe working conditions . . . or when it acts to limit the power of Wall Street by keeping investment banks separate from consumer banks . . . is merely fulfilling its mandate to promote the general welfare of the people.
Romney, Ryan and others on the far right seem to have forgotten what government is supposed to do, and have confused corporate welfare with the general welfare of the nation's people.
Big projects, like those achieved by FEMA when it deals with disaster relieve, and other governmental agencies that enable the country to build and maintain infrastructure, or to provide education, fire-protection and police protection that affect all of us, are very properly the province of government, and to suggest that for-profit business should instead deal with such matters is simply a disingenuous claim designed to steer resources to the private sector because they would benefit some business. And whether or not Mitt Romney has a direct interest in a potential disaster-relief company (as Dick Cheney had in Halliburton when he, as Vice-President, recommended that company as the "perfect fit" to perform the kind of support services the army needed in Iraq and Afghanistan), it has been shown time and again that the government can manage such matters just as well if not better than private agencies.
I don't know for sure what Mitt Romney really believes. What I do know is that his rhetoric about the federal deficit simply won't hold water as long as he refuses to acknowledge that the tax policy that he espouses is one of the biggest causes of the growing deficit. But more importantly, he does not seem to understand that when he talks about leadership, the real question for Mr. Romney remains: when he says we need leadership, does he mean the kind of leadership that shows its colors by being selfless and acting in the interests of all the people, or does he mean the kind of leadership that really seeks to benefit the few at the expense of the many? Until I see Mr. Romney clearly advocate policies that don't merely claim to benefit the whole country but demonstrably actually would do that, I cannot have any faith in his blithely optimistic claims about creating millions of new jobs and lowering middle-class taxes.
And when he--the man who was a pioneer in out-sourcing, and who, having said that you can tell where a man's heart is by where he puts his money, turns out to put tens of millions of dollars of his money in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland--approves an ad that claims Chrysler is sending all their manufacturing to China, when in fact they are increasing their workforce in Ohio and merely manufacturing cars for China in China . . . I don't see why anyone should trust his charmingly endearing but fact-free ads.
His actions do not bespeak someone seriously invested in promoting the general welfare.
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