Lowering The Costs Of Political Defeat
If The War Against Terrah (TWAT), Iraq edition, was going as it was intended, we would be seeing and hearing all sorts of verifiable evidence to support those claims. But it’s not. Not even close.
Instead, any independent assessment of the situation in Iraq has been shut down, most recently the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. This committee, chaired by Republican lawyer Stuart Bowen, “is widely respected by Democrats and Republicans for the quality of its investigations and reports.”
We can’t have the public really know
what is really going on in Iraq,
now can we?
That’s why the staff of Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, inserted an operations deadline into a huge military authorization bill to limit the damage to that already revealed.
With the midterm election upon us, there isn’t time to do much about using Iraq as the reason voters should return a Republican Congress for more of the same except to attempt to turn the voter’s attention to the “booming” economy. Bush himself is exhorting us to notice “The tax cuts have led to a strong and growing economy” while Congressional Republicans campaigning for re-election make wild claims about a Democratic victory “jeopardizing prosperity”.
But this strategy is doomed to failure because
This Time, It’s Not the Economy.
“[C]oncerned by weak wage growth, costly health care and eroding benefits, many middle-class voters do not see the economy improving for them.
“[M]any voters are worried about the wages of ordinary workers, which have just started to improve after several years of falling short or barely keeping up with inflation. The tens of millions of people lacking health insurance and the steady shrinkage in traditional pensions have also added to the sense of personal insecurity.”
So, despite all the Happy Talk exuberance over lower unemployment claims, the voters still worry that they aren’t making enough to get by, especially if they only make minimum wages. They want such rates increased and no longer believe all the hype that higher minimum-wages will produce all sorts of dire consequences that will affect every wage-earner.
Even the economic experts don’t espouse this canard. Alan S. Blinder, a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, authored a college textbook which once instructed students that, “The primary consequence of the minimum wage law is not an increase in the incomes of the least skilled workers but a restriction of their employment opportunities.” Newer editions of the text do not include that line.
But despite all of the hype emanating from the White House about how well the economy is doing, that economy doesn’t seem to include the average American.
Since 2001, when the current cabal connived their way into power,
most working families are no better off now than they were in 2001.
The problem yet to be faced is that the only options open to any government to deal with the growing issues of the coming economic travails - lowering taxes and interest rates - have already been exhausted. Mother Bush-Hubbard’s cupboard is bare. Any further cuts in taxes or interest rates, and the foreign investors who have been propping up this Potemkin prosperity will rush to the exits as fast as they can. And down will come the American prosperity, Wall Street Indices and all.
That is why such Republican stalwarts as the Waltons of Bentonville, Arkansas have already altered the way they run their family business, starting up holiday discount pricing well in advance of the traditional opening of the holiday shopping season. They know they have to get it while they can before the piper arrives to collect his due. It is expected that their business rivals will follow suit, a move which will adversely affect their profitability across the board.
As Wal-Mart is already looking at “its weakest performance in nearly a decade”, this development doesn’t strike this observer as a sign of a “booming” economy that incumbent Republicans can brag about to their constituents.
More importantly for Wal-Mart’s employees, that company is struggling to maintain the growth rates it enjoyed for 40 years. Everytime a company sinks into a period of lower growth, it is the employees who take it in the shorts as the execs watch out for themselves, and most execs will still have their jobs when the current round of employee dumping concludes.
Don’t believe me about this. Ask the employees of the airlines and the automakers who have endured layoffs, deep pay cuts, outsourcing, offshoring, plant closings, and lost retirement benefits. They can tell you - and the Waltons, and the Republicans - why they don’t believe in the American Prosperity Fairy Tales any more.
You might heed their words, for when the layoff bell next tolls, it might well be tolling for you.
November 6th, 2006 at 2:25 pm
Most of our poorly performing business’s problems have unions and union contracts getting in the way of adjusting the way they do business. Why is it that union membership has fallen to a low of roughly 8.8 million? Its hard to by flexible when you have to go in front of a union rep to ask an employee to pick something up. Clean something up. A friend of mine, a manager at a hotel asked the ‘wrong’ person to pick something up and got yelled at for asking him from the union rep. Great hospitality there.
Wal-Mart, weren’t the Clinton’s board members there? What other company has 1.5 million workers? The US military? Ask them how quickly raises come.
Standard union dues, 1000 employees equal a million union dollars! Taken away from the worker for what, two union reps at the facility. The rest goes for the unions political activity.