Carib News 7/30/16
There is much reference in American politics regarding the United States constitution. Aspiring presidential candidates like Senator Ted Cruz of Texas argue that adherence to the constitution is the panacea to the nation’s problems. There is no question that the American constitution has served the American people well but the literal interpretation of some aspects of the constitution, like the Second Amendment, has become an albatross around the necks of the American people.
One would presume that a reverence for the constitution would mean an appreciation of history both in the long and in the short term. It is mindboggling that at the Republican Party’s national convention in 2016, there was no mention of the debacle of the Iraqi War and the Great Recession that began in 2008.
These events should remain indelible in the psyche of the American people. The Iraqi War in 2003 was a skillfully concocted fear mongering “trumped” by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al. The intelligence data was “doctored” to convey to elected officials and the American people that Saddam Hussein was involved in the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001 that resulted in the death of almost 3,000 Americans and that Saddam still possessed weapons of mass destruction.
The U.N. inspectors including Americans knew that Saddam’s capacity to manufacture weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed after the First Iraqi War. But the neo-conservative posse of the Republican Party presumed that the display of America’s military might in the Middle East would send a clear signal to the world that America was the sole super power and should not be challenged.
The lesson of the Iraqi War is that military might is not sufficient to reconstruct a religiously divided nation. U.S. policymakers knew little about the age-old conflict between Sunni and Shia and the overthrow of secular leader like Saddam, paved the way for the rise of the Islamic State. ISIS has emerged as the principal terrorist threat to the world community. The Iraqi War that began in 2003 cost Americans over 5,000 sacrosanct lives and trillions of dollars in treasury bills.
Despite the folly of the Iraqi War, the Republican Party nominated a presidential candidate who naively presumes that military might used in an unrestricted manner can settle age-old religious disputes in Iraq and in the Middle East will put an end to raging civil wars, the same mistake of the Bush neo-conservatives.
America has dug itself out of the Great Recession of 2008. What occurred in 2008 is a classical example of what happens to an unbridled capitalist system. The Bill Clinton administration and the U.S. Congress urged by Wall Street rescinded the Glass Seagal legislation that was adopted from the 1930s depression that separated investment companies from commercial banks and from insurance companies. The elimination of this firewall enabled investment companies to embark on reckless speculation.
The Recession of 2008 reflected the danger of de-regulation, and that the oligopolistic investment banks had become pre-occupied with the maximization of profits to the detriment of the larger society. Once the real estate market collapsed, the financial system tottered on bankruptcy and had to be rescued by the Federal government with a rescue package of over $700 billion.
The economy in 2008 was losing over 800,000 jobs per month and millions of homeowners found themselves in foreclosure bankruptcy. Millions of homeowners had lost their equity and were marooned in homes that were under water. There was no zeal in Congress to rescue battered homeowners.
President Obama put together a stimulus package to ensure that the American economy would avert a depression. Much of the stimulus package entailed tax cuts to satisfy Republicans. The stimulus package and the wars that President Bush did not pay for led to an exponential increase in America’s debt.
Last month, the economy generated over 230,000 jobs. The unemployment rate is below 5 percent but household income when compared to 2000 is down by $4,000. Many folks thrown out of jobs have had to settle for jobs that pay less than their previous employment. High school graduates and high school dropouts have been displaced by the turn to a more technocratic and service oriented economy. Even in manufacturing, the capital intensive nature of production means that there is a need for fewer workers despite the increase production.
In the Obama years, there is much more that could have been done to make the lives of displaced workers less wretched. But the conservative Republican Congress, which has lost control of its base, refused to embark on major infra-structure spending that could have created good paying jobs for the workers who have been left behind. Instead they sought not to deal with the serious problem of income inequality and hollowed out industrial centers. The congressional deadlock has created a certain dissatisfaction with conventional politicians and created the pathway for a political neophyte like Donald Trump to capture the Republican presidential nomination.
The idea that an outsider with no knowledge of the American constitution, no knowledge of the problems confronting the American people will be able to find solutions is an experiment that could be more than disastrous.
A classical example of this naiveté and demagoguery is abundantly clear when one analyzes Donald Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. Trump quotes a Department of Justice report that homicide rates in 56 cities in 2015 had increased by 16.8 percent. What Trump failed to say is that homicide rates from the middle of the 1990s had plummeted from 24,000 to approximately 13,000 in 2013. While homicides have been decreasing, suicides in America have been increasing. There are approximately over 36,000 suicides per year. The mounting suicide problem is an outgrowth of widespread depression, inadequate mental health facilities, the prevalence of firearms and the epidemic of heroin, alcoholism and prescription drug addiction that is afflicting the white working class.
Nothing of this new epidemic was pinpointed at the Republican National Convention. Let’s hope that the Democratic Party will not make the same mistake. We cannot allow the lunatics to be in charge of the asylum.
