The Principle Of Favoring Wealth Over Work

This morning, Democrats used some of their time on the floor of the Senate to plead with Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY) to drop his objection to extending unemployment benefits and COBRA assistance, fixing a 21% cut in Medicare payments, and continuing funding for numerous federal transportation projects whose suspension has left 2,000 workers on furlough. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) put the number of unemployed workers affected at around 400,000 nationwide and said the COBRA assistance would affect 500,000.

The Democrats were joined by Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) in making the case for helping their constituents. While they made a lot of good points, I'm going to have to disagree with Sen. Whitehouse's comments:

... [Rhode Islanders like] Margaret, Gretchen and Richard, and all those across the country who are facing similar situations are wondering why they have to pay the price for Republicans to make this point about the deficit. When it was Halliburton's no-bid contracts in Iraq for which money was borrowed to fund them, Where was the concern about the deficit then? For Halliburton's no-bid contracts, the deficit is no problem, evidently.

... When it was the tax cuts for CEOs, big tax cuts for CEOs, for big bankers, for derivatives traders, for hedge fund managers -- where then was the concern about the deficit, when those tax cuts were passed unfunded?

When the Bush administration inherited from the last Democratic president a balanced budget predicted to yield a zero national debt during the course of the Bush administration, and instead the republicans left us with $12 trillion in national debt, where then was concern about the deficit.

As one of my colleagues has said, 'This has been described as a point of principle?' The way a principle is defined is that you always stand by it. If it is just a sometime thing, it may be a lot of things. It may be an opinion. It may be a maneuver. It may be even an honestly held opinion, but it's not a principle if you only follow it selectively. If the only time you follow it is when struggling, working people are in the cross-hairs, but when it's Halliburton's no-bid contracts, when it's tax cuts for ceos and big bankers and fancy derivatives traders, and when it's the pharmaceutical industry, then it's all fine--well, that's not a principle. It may be a lot of things, but it is no principle. ...

- Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), this morning

See, I think this is actually a matter of principle: the principle that the US' governing elites favor wealth over work, almost every time.

They don't say it like that, sure, so they sound like hypocrites. But if you watch what Congress does, if you watch what employers are allowed to get away with, if you watch how contracts only seem binding when they screw over people of little means, the principle on which this nation is governed is plain to see.

For example:

--- Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is being hailed as a conservative genius for proposing a 'healthcare' plan that would tax employment-based health insurance, replace Medicare with chintzy vouchers and privatize Social Security.

--- In one of the worst economic downturns in living memory, a jobless recovery that follows on the jobless recovery of the previous recession, when consumer debt is at an all-time high and wages have been stagnant for three decades, employers are allowed to check your credit and reject you for employment based on your credit rating.

--- The Blue Dog caucus in the US House of Representatives is holding up passage of the pathetically tiny Senate jobs bill over $2 billion in funding, on the same 'deficit concerns' bothering Sen. Bunning. Like Bunning, the Blue Dogs also didn't have a problem with tax cuts for CEOs or coming up with money to pay Halliburton.

--- There are Democrats in Congress this year, when Bush's unfunded tax cuts for the wealthy are set to expire, calling to extend these outrageous giveaways and apparently, Obama's wavering on letting them expire, also. Over 10 years, the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy would represent $1.2 trillion in lost government revenue.

--- Sen. John Kyl (R-AZ) isn't embarrassed to say right out loud that unemployment insurance is bad economic policy, a position that seems widely popular in the GOP, everywhere from economically destroyed states like Michigan and California to the Commonwealth of Virginia.

--- Employers are also allowed to force employees to agree to have silicon tracking chips implanted in their bodies, in addition to having the right to: spy on employees in the restroom, fire people for social drinking outside work, fire people for personal blog postings or other political speech in their personal lives, fire people for trying to join or organize a union, force people to submit to personality testing, and insist on employees signing away their right to sue their employers in court by agreeing to binding mandatory arbitration in their contracts.

There's no hypocrisy in these actions, only the principle that the Paris Hiltons and Jamie Dimons of the world can be assumed to be entitled to as much money and protection as they can get their hands on. In the meantime, people who have to work for a living, or live in dire poverty due to chronic joblessness, illness or old age, must constantly justify even the tiniest scraps thrown their way under all circumstances and have virtually no inalienable rights.

It doesn't sound pretty, so lots of public relations spin about deficit worries are deployed to cover it.

Often, the government budget is compared to a family budget, and politicians righteously intone that in tough times, the government has to tighten its belt just like any household must. Except that because the government loses tax revenue when unemployment goes up, and because it provides the safety net against unemployment turning into homelessness and starvation, government spending needs to go up in recessions so that ordinary households can make it through those hard times. No one would tell you otherwise, unless they were trying to convince the public that it's all ethical and dandy to abandon our fellow citizens in hard times.

It's not hypocrisy that needs to stop, it's the not giving a damn that needs to stop. Right now, Congress collectively acts like it doesn't give a damn, and it's acted like that for a long time. It's the enforcement arm of the 'screw you, I've got mine' class.

You know who I think is responsible for Bunning's obstructionist grandstanding today? All the Democrats who insist on upholding a principle of requiring 60 votes to pass anything in the Senate, something they never cared about when Republicans were in charge of screwing over ordinary citizens, something they never used to protect us, anyhow.

If you'd like to join us in asking Congress to act as though they care about hardworking Americans, you can Tweet as follows: petition @Senate_GOPs & Jim Bunning: stop holding unemployed Americans hostage to your obstruction agenda http://act.ly/1qo RT to sign #p2

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future