Republicans, acting as America’s royalist party, long have advocated and enacted policies designed to benefit only a small, affluent class of citizens and major businesses, even though their propaganda dressed this behavior as the more marketable anti-tax, small government pitch . Misleading, cynical and criminally disingenuous without doubt, but yet the key to their sustainability as a political party.
Since Obama’s election, their stated principal goal of reducing the nation to failure in pursuit of the hoped for rejection of President Obama by the body politic has proceeded apace, increasingly unconcealed, unashamed and brazen, sabotaging any and all measures designed to improve the economic life of the nation and the individual lives of Americans.
But even by the standards of knee-capping stimulus initiatives, fighting jobs programs, opposing relief to state governments, killing extension of benefits to the unemployed and retaining the deficit they created by refusing to impose even minimally fair taxation on the rich, and preserve programs the middle class and most Americans want, interfering with the workings of the Federal Reserve is slightly breathtaking in its level of hostility to the well-being of the American people, having the singular goal of keeping the economy sluggish and unemployment high.
The willingness to provoke full-blown economic havoc by refusing a simple procedural vote to increase the debt ceiling was revelatory enough about the disregard Republicans have for the safety and security of all Americans, and their willingness to put them at economic or other risk if political advantage is seen to be gained by crisis. Likewise, Republican members of congress writing a letter to the Chairman of the independent Federal Reserve (even presidents aren’t supposed to tell it what to do, though they’ve certainly made their wishes known at times), largely unprecedented in and of itself, is another remarkable public action conspicuously at odds with the best interests of America’s citizens. I don’t find it remarkable Republican leaders would engage in action detrimental to the economic health of Americans, since such is their standard modus operandi. I do find it remarkable that they have begun to do so in such conspicuous fashion.
The letter cannot be interpreted in any way as an expression of any known “conservative” economic agenda, but simply as an unseemly interference that exhibits rankly political and direct hostility to the nation’s economy. One would refrain from stimulating the American economy only when such stimulation would be unnecessary or counterproductive, and the current economic stagnation cannot by any remotely sane measure be considered such a circumstance. Overheated growth can produce inflation; but the currently plodding economy couldn’t be farther from inflationary if it were sent by a rocket to Saturn.
This afternoon the Fed in fact announced actions designed to stimulate the American economy, eschewing the horrid and mendacious suggestions by Republicans it do otherwise. Still, the question remains, just how much more loudly are Republicans willing to cheer for a failed economy and a failed country, how much harm and hurt to the American people are they willing to inflict for their perceived political advantage? At this point, there seems to be no limit.
