The founding fathers who wrote our Constitution created a federal republic, a nation of laws, with the Constitution the bedrock of those laws. They were all white, most well educated, property owners, prosperous, some slave owners, and most were deists.
deism: a movement or system of thought advocating natural religion, emphasizing morality, and in the 18th century denying the interference of the Creator with the laws of the universe.
The separation of church and state is enshrined in our Constitution, for good reasons. Many settlers fled Europe to escape religious persecution. Millions of people were killed in the Inquisitions and Thirty Years Wars in Europe. Spanish conquistadors and priests brought the Inquisition to the New World.
All but three of the important founding fathers were Protestant, although at least one became an atheist. Three wealthy Catholic cousins were supporters of the Revolution, Charles, John, and Daniel Carroll. At the time Charles signed the Declaration of Independence Catholics were not allowed to vote or hold office in his home state of Maryland. John was a Jesuit priest and became the first Catholic bishop in the U.S. The “no religious test” clause in our Constitution was attributed to them.
The founders of our country feared demagogues and democracy for the masses. They warned against political division and two major political parties, yet Hamilton and Jefferson created the beginnings of the parties we have now, greatly changed several times.
demagogue: a leader who makes use of popular predudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power.
I’ve covered the First U.S. Civil War and our current “culture war” in other essays.
There is a serious lack of understanding how our government works. The Constitution created three branches of government, the presidency and administration, congress as the legislative branch, and the Supreme Court. The three are supposed to be checks and balances. The Supreme Court is supposed to be non-partisan, but as we’ve seen that is no longer true.
Presidents get credit or blamed for everything, but they don’t write legislation, congress does. The president has veto power, but it can be overridden by congress.
If you know anyone who needs to understand how our government is supposed to work:
There have been five presidents since WW II that represented all Americans, Eisenhower, JFK, Johnson, Carter and Obama. Notice I left out Clinton. He was a major cause of the 2000 and 2008 economic collapses and the following recessions, second only to Reagan and perhaps GW, and their congresses. Democrats lost both houses after Clinton’s first term, but he signed without complaint Phil Gramm‘s disastrous legislation, and his budgets helped create the disasters.
Eisenhower was a great general and a great president. He supported unions and working classes, warned against the Military Industrial Complex, but led us into the insane war in Vietnam, which was a windfall for the MIC. More than 50,000 U.S. and allied soldiers died. Many Americans may know that, but not know or care about the 3 million Vietnamese our country killed, many of them innocent civilians. It was part of the war against “godless communism“, as were Nixon’s and Reagan’s policies in Central America and elsewhere.
Democrats had control of congress under Obama for only four months. They passed the ACA, which gave healthcare to millions of Americans, and his economic recovery act that brought us out of the recession caused by Reagan, Clinton and GW.
There have been fourteen economic collapses and recessions in the U.S. since 1900. All could arguably have been avoided.
The causes of all the economic collapses and recessions were the same, with one exception: greed, deregulation or lack of it, and corporate irresponsibility and/or malfeasance. The exception was the OPEC caused crisis that began in 1973, made much worse by Nixon’s idiotic price controls. I was an oil trader in the 1970s. Nixon’s actions helped drive petroleum product prices higher, which created huge opportunities for people who could and did take advantage. That’s another essay.
FDR’s efforts helped alleviate the impact of the Great Depression, but it was ended only by the massive government funded war effort.
After every recession there has been a growth period. The greatest were under Eisenhower and Obama. After WW II the GI bill gave veterans college educations and housing, auto manufacturers went back to making cars, there was a boom in consumer spending.
GW Bush’s TARP and auto bailout after the Republican caused collapse of 2007 bailed out corporations and financial institutions. The Obama administration and congress made them pay it back. One unforeseen event, Fiat bought Chrysler, more on that later.
Obama’s economic recovery act, passed during the four months Democrats held the Senate, kicked off more than ten years of economic growth. As did the FDR and Eisenhower policies, it targeted working people, not just corporations and the wealthy people who own most of the stocks. Note that Forbes is “right leaning”.
Upper income and wealthy households gained the most from recoveries. They suffered the least from recessions, much of the greatest wealth was inherited.
Some of those very wealthy individuals and corporations were part of the alliance of the religious right and business interests. The first funders included tobacco companies, now it‘s mostly fossil fuel corporations, financial institutions, drug and health insurance companies, real estate developers…
With the exception of Charles Koch, all of the most influential of those wealthy people, and the founders of the religious right, are deceased, but they left behind their families and foundations.
Reagan’s tax cuts for the very wealthy created a huge deficit. It was unsustainable, so he and his congress raised taxes on everyone, including taxing social security benefits. They knew they couldn’t get away with cutting benefits, so they back doored it, which was worse because social security balances were reduced with the money (our money) going into general funds. Republicans and Joe Manchin don’t want to pay back the $3 trillion in excess cash receipts congress spent.
Privatizing social security has been a long term goal of the Kochs and friends. They don’t want to pay fair taxes, and today’s Republicans can’t stand seeing so much money changing hands without some of it going to their donors. Some of it comes to them in campaign donations and lobbying entertainment. That‘s the only “trickle down” in “libertarian”/Republican economic fallacies. The same applies to the USPS, Medicaid and Medicare, and public education.
“That’s the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital."
Noam Chomsky
Most people don’t make the connection between federal spending cuts and their own higher taxes. Cutting social security benefits was just the beginning.
Federal cuts push necessary expenses down to states and local authorities. State spending cuts push them down to cities, counties, school districts and universities. They issue bonds, at relatively high interest rates, which is tax exempt income to the same people who benefit the most from tax cuts.
Property taxes have to be raised to pay back those bonds. The freeze in Texas caused $billions in damages and killed more than 700 people. The legislature and officials did nothing to fix the problems, but authorized issuance of $billions in bonds to pay the excess fuel costs incurred by utility companies. Everyone in Texas and some other states will pay higher utility bills to repay them.
The results of those tax cuts for the wealthy and increased taxes for everyone else include underfunded schools, police and fire departments and other public services. The high costs of college reduce opportunities for lower and middle income people to improve their standard of living.
We live in a consumer based economy. When working people have money they spend it, boosting the economy. Oil and defense industry states like Texas, Oklahoma and others are economically successful in part due to high wages. Republicans take credit for healthy economies, which is a lie. Those wages are high due to strong unions, as in the countries with the healthiest economies and happiest people, social democracies, where more people vote, and the governments represent all the people. Today’s Republicans call them “socialist”, another lie.
The very wealthy buy stocks, bonds, and real estate including businesses, inflating the markets. That includes $billions from foreign investors. Corporations use windfalls for stock buybacks and buying other businesses, which lessens competition, furthering the creation of monopolies or oligopolies.
oligopoly: a state of limited competition, in which a market is shared by a small number of producers or sellers.
Look at the labels of everything you buy, clothes, tools, cars, groceries, especially drugs, prescription and OTC.
If you see “marketed by” or ”made for” google where they’re made. Lilly is a U.S. company that is a major supplier of insulin, which was discovered by two Canadian scientists, who gave the patent to their university so insulin would be available to all.
Lilly’s insulin for the U.S. is manufactured in Puerto Rico, which has price controls on drugs, as do all developed countries except the U.S.
We pay higher prices than people in other countries for the same goods. We pay their manufacturing costs, which includes their taxes, which pay for their universal healthcare.
Some people claim that other countries have higher taxes than we do. Those other countries all have some form of universal healthcare, better healthcare and education than much of the U.S., and their taxes pay for it. If you add the per capita cost of our healthcare, about twice that of all other developed countries except Switzerland, we pay more.
In the 1970s economists were aware of and reported on the consequences of globalization, jobs lost in the U.S. By the late 1980s wages had stagnated. Real wages haven’t kept up with inflation, more importantly the greatly increased costs of higher education. A college degree is a significant factor in higher incomes.
In 1979 I was in a group of students in a graduate economics class that wrote a paper on the expected impact of globalization. The predictions were dire, another Great Depression.
The difference between those predictions and what happened was the technological revolution, computers, the internet, GPS, cell phones, telecommunications systems, NASA spin-off…. all funded by government research and development. Public access to the internet and GPS were afterthoughts. Millions of jobs were created, and economies boomed.
Elon Musk is Time magazine‘s Person of the Year. He’s an immigrant from South Africa and Canada.
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian immigrant.
Six of the top twelve vehicles with the most U.S. made parts are made by Honda and Toyota, two are Teslas. Jeep made the list, the company owned by Italian Fiat. The most popular truck in the U.S is the Ford F-150. It’s not one of the top twelve. Those assembled in Canada are $thousands less than those assembled in the U.S. No other developed country has employer/employee health insurance, now more than $22,000/yr for families, almost $8,000 for single employees.
Swiss Nestle is the largest food and beverage company in the world. They sell us water produced in public funded water plants. Their partnership with U.S. Starbucks is good for the U.S., they sell Starbucks coffee all over the world. However, their coffee beans come from Latin America, Africa and Asia.
The largest pork producer in the U.S. is Smithfield. It’s been owned by a Chinese company since 2013. They export tons of pork to China, and the profits go to China.
Mitch McConnell became much more wealthy due to his wife’s family ownership of her Taiwanese father’s shipping company. Their ships were built in China and Japan, they’re flagged in other countries, and ship mostly between the U.S., other countries, and China. They received more than $350,000 in COVID funds.
The largest petroleum refinery in the western hemisphere is in Port Arthur, Texas. It’s owned by Saudi Aramco, as is one of the largest petroleum distribution systems in the country and hundreds of gas stations.
Citgo is the sixth largest petroleum refiner in the U.S. It’s owned by PDVSA, a Venezuelan government company. Russia was a major investor, and may take over soon.
7-Eleven Inc. is owned by a Japanese company.
Anheuser-Busch, Budweiser, is owned by Belgian/Brazilian InBev.
Handguns sold in the U.S. are made by Austrian Glock, German Sig Sauer, and Brazilian Taurus.
The far right wing Wilks brothers in Texas, fracking $billionaires and major far right organization donors, sold their company to an investment entity in Singapore.
More jobs have been lost to automation. The COVID pandemic will increase that.
The solutions are government spending, creating jobs, retraining, financial support for the less fortunate; healthcare system reform, ending the institutionalized corruption in politics, ending unconstitutional voter suppression, and fair tax reform that raises taxes on the very wealthy.
Buggy manufacturers that started making auto parts survived and grew.
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