I was watching NBC Nightly News last night with ol’ Lester Holt who was talking about the upcoming election for Speaker of the House. And ol’ Lester was saying that the GOP needed to settle the issue of Speaker in order to start working on their ‘agenda.’
Which made me start thinking about whether the GOP actually has an agenda, insofar as the word ‘agenda’ usually means a plan to get something done. And as far as I can tell, the GOP has had the same agenda now for the past 90 years which is to get rid of the New Deal.
It was back in 1933 that FDR responded to the near wipeout of the American economy by proposing a series of bills which pushed the Federal Government into managing the national economy for the first time. This didn’t mean Socialism, despite what Trump says and other Republicans have said over the past 90 years, because Socialism is a system in which private property is eliminated and everything is owned by the national state.
Now it turns out that the United States government does own a lot of property, most of which is where weapons systems are tested, nuclear bombs are made, poor people live in those disgusting ‘projects’ as they are called, and otherwise the real estate is used for national forests and national parks.
The government doesn’t own the factories which produce cars, or the kitchens which heat up all those potato chips. The government sometimes regulates how products are made and how they are sold so that if you buy a container with the word ‘milk’ printed on the side of the carton, what you get is a liquid which came out of a cow.
That wasn’t true before 1933. Before 1933, the only thing the government regulated was who could come into the country legally and who had to say out, the first immigration restrictions put into effect in 1923 thanks to the GOP. When Roosevelt and his advisers started working on a plan to pull America out of the Great Depression, they didn’t even know how many people were unemployed, how many banks were closed, how much industrial production was still going on, how many people were living in the street.
I love how that schmuck Rand Paul says that we should shut down the Federal Reserve. Has anyone ever told that asshole about the fact that without the Federal Reserve, nobody would be able to cash a check? That entire banking system, which we all take for granted every time we punch our code into the machine that reads our ATM card, was created by the New Deal, and of course was opposed by the GOP.
The GOP’s idea for how to fix a banking system which had totally collapsed was to let anyone who wanted to open a bank, go right ahead, and open a bank. Their idea for what to help people eat who were too old to work was to let them starve. The social security act was passed in 1934 and the last GOP challenge to the law was thrown out of the courts in – ready? - `1949.
Remember how far George Bush got with his crazy idea to privatize social security? About as far as Mitt Romney got with the idea that 47% of the country’s population were a bunch of freeloaders who just ‘took’ without giving anything ‘back.’
So now that being against poverty and being against racism doesn’t seem to work, the GOP has a new one. They’re against something called ‘woke,’ which means anything which doesn’t promote the virtues and values of all those White guys driving around in their F-150’s with a MAGA flag fluttering out the back.
And by the way, let’s not forget the scientific ‘fact’ that immunizations will give the kids autism or worse. My wife is a pediatrician, and she has mothers who actually make that comment to her with a straight face.
Unfortunately, the bell curve more or less guarantees that half the human species will be born dumb as sh*t. And you don’t have to be a rocket scientist in this country to earn a good living or even wind up, financially speaking, in the top five percent.
Which is why the GOP will continue to win elections even when we forget to steal the votes. Oh well, oh well, at least we can get some comic relief from George Santos and Marjorie Taylor Greene.