'Tis the season of resolutions. With the new year comes pledges to quit smoking, get out of debt and spend more time with family. Gym memberships jump. Weight Watchers' profits fatten.
This also happens to be the season of political resolutions. It's that every-fourth-year event featuring presidential candidates in a contest of campaign promise one-upmanship. Ron Paul pledges to legalize marijuana. Michele Bachmann swears she'll cut gasoline prices to $2 a gallon. Newt Gingrich guarantees he'll create millions of jobs "right now." Mitt Romney assures every college graduate a job.
Unfortunately, this also has been, for some time, a season of damned lies. These are deliberate deceptions involving a higher level of scheming. The Contract with America and the more recent Pledge to America are examples. Republicans knew they couldn't fulfill what they led the public to perceive as promises. But the GOP designed these "pledges" specifically so that Republicans couldn't be labeled as failures when what they pseudo-promised never materialized. That's the stuff of damned lies.
Unfulfilled New Year's resolutions are legendary. Low calorie salad fixings fill fridges Jan. 2, and remain there, rotting, on Feb. 2. The victim of this broken promise is also the perpetrator and therefore unlikely to protest the infraction.
These days, political resolutions strewn along the presidential campaign trail are picked up and carefully catalogued on the Internet by reporters and bloggers who hold candidates accountable for every syllable. That's a good exercise, but the public generally recognizes political promise hyperbole and realizes that unexpected events may prevent a president from keeping his word. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for example, pledged not to involve the country in the European war, but then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Mostly, the public shrugs off presidential contenders' inflated political resolutions.
Damned lies, however, are dangerous because they subvert trust in the political system, which needs the faith of the electorate to function. Damned lies may, in fact, be an integral part of Republican strategy since the GOP hates government of the people by the people and hopes to shrink it small enough to drown in a bathtub.
In their 1994 Contract with America, Republicans vowed: "... in this era of official evasion and posturing, we offer instead a detailed agenda for national renewal, a written commitment with no fine print."
That, and calling it a contract, led Americans to believe it was a step above a pledge. It was inviolable, sacrosanct. It was a bond with no double-crossing footnotes.
Except it wasn't.
With the help of the "contract," Republicans took control of the U.S. House of Representatives. And they passed the easy, less controversial parts of the pledge. But they never enacted the most popular, more contentious promises, including a balanced budget amendment and term limits.
They had, however, set up the "contract" so they could never be blamed for those failures. The most insidious aspect of the Contract with America was the fine print escape hatch it provided the GOP.
Republicans never promised to enact their "contract" provisions into law. They only said they'd vote on them:
... within the first 100 days of the 104th Congress, we shall bring to the House Floor the following bills, each to be given full and open debate, each to be given a clear and fair vote and each to be immediately available this day for public inspection and scrutiny.
In the fall of 2010, when Republicans were trying to regain control of the U.S. House, they came up with a "contract" clone that they called "A Pledge to America."
It said: "Our plan puts forth a new governing agenda that reflects the priorities of the American people... and can be implemented today."
Republicans won the majority in the House a year ago and have had nearly 365 "todays" to implement their pledges. Just like with the 1994 "contract," Republicans have failed to fulfill the big promises, the important resolutions that people remember.
For example, the pledge said: "A plan to create jobs, end economic uncertainty, and make America more competitive must be the first and most urgent domestic priority of our government."
Republicans then proceeded to make deficit reduction their priority. When President Obama proposed a jobs plan in September, Republicans blocked it.
Also in the "Pledge," the GOP swore to permanently stop "job-killing tax hikes" so that families would be able "to keep more of their hard-earned money." Then in September when President Obama proposed to extend and enlarge the payroll tax cut for 160 million middle class families, the GOP opposed it.
And there was this pledge: "We offer a plan to repeal and replace the government takeover of health care."
As in the "Contract on America," this is a sleight of hand. It doesn't say Republicans will repeal health care reform. And, in fact, they didn't. But they can't be called failures because they only pledged to "offer a plan to repeal." They didn't promise to actually accomplish it, even though that's what they led voters to believe.
What they can be labeled as failures for, however, is neglecting to produce their promised plan to replace health care reform.
Democrats called the latest formal list of Republican promises the "Pledge to Destroy America." The destruction was done by the damned lies that denigrated trust in political institutions. It was deliberately done to diminish America's democratic government.
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People have been scrambling to try and name the new kind of government the corporatist elite is currently running, when the name has been under our noses all along. It's capitalism. They've replaced democracy as a form of government with capitalism as a form of government. And to try and make democracy look bad, they've taken to calling it "socialism."
Everything government tries to do for the public good is "socialism." The decisions the government makes are instead properly governed by "capitalism"--those who control the capital make the decisions, the decisions are made so as to increase the amount of capital held by those who control the capital, with no other considerations such as human decency, honesty, the public good, or the environment. Capitalism.
Our democratic government has been replaced by a capitalistic government.
Obama had the right idea - pass a jobs bill.
Actually the problem with Term Limits on Congress is that you have to change the U.S. Constitution to put them in effect, just like they did to limit the President to 10 years I believe, but for practical terms it is two terms in office.
The entirety of politics is a damnable lie and – to the extent that government responds to the political – government itself is a damnable lie.
Moreover, both have always been and will always be.
The very nature of politics is corruption – usually rent seeking corruption as evidenced by public employee unions – but corruption in every event. Neither politics, politicians, nor government will deserve trust of any kind until the size and scope of government is reduced to its primary roles – protecting freedom for all and provision of pubic goods, narrowly defined.
Politics is the sewer into which man’s most venal ambitions flow and to expect anything more of it is self delusional or blatantly disingenuous.
The GOP blocked Obama's latest Jobs Now Act - even though our infrastructure is falling to pieces. Global climate change will inflict serious damage to our infrastructure and we will need to spend a lot more on infrastructure - not less. But the GOP is not telling us that.
My only complaint with Obama is that his proposals are way too modest, especially if you consider the 2009 report published by the American Society of Civil Engineers.
My solution. First of all, let's eliminate all the tax loop holes the rich have enjoyed, including tax breaks to off-shore American jobs. Let's follow the Herman Cain proposal and impose a 9 % sales tax on day trades, commodity trades, hedge fund transactions and the sale of derivatives. None of these stock market manipulations create jobs - and I dare any one Wall Street to explain to me how a "derivative" works.
Then we need an automatic trigger. When the unemployment rate drops below 6 % - let's slap a tax surcharge on the incomes of the top 1 % - With all these proceeds, we can rebuild our infrastructure, fund schools, provide scholarships and/or lower tuition.
Let's tax the greedy to fund jobs for the needy.
$800 billion given to states to "shore up unions???" WTF I assume you are talking about public sector unions. First of all, these don't even exist in some states. Second of all, any money spent on public sector salaries resulted in services to the public.
Don't even start on the national debt in an attempt to attack Democrats after what Bush did by starting a war with Iraq under false pretenses and what the Republicans did by creating Medicare Part D without paying for it.
Study after study has shown regulation does not affect job growth and if you want to live in an unregulated country -- go to China where air pollution kills, where workers are enslaved and where the Yangtze River is so polluted it can't be used for drinking water.
I'll tell you what you conservatives told the hippies in the 60s -- if you don't love America, and you don't sound like you do - leave it.
''Congress is profoundly broken. The people in it cannot fix the problem they are creating.
There are a few brave souls in congress who have attempted to retain the powers they were given-- Sanders, Kucinich, Paul. But I say that we-the-people must take whatever steps are necessary to end the current life career system that congressional jobs are based on. It will probably take a revolution of some sort to do it. Let's hope it's more like what happened in Tunisia. The non-violent Occupy Movement could do it. We'll see. But there's no doubt in my mind that America needs big changes, much bigger than the gutless, corporate sell-outs in congress are willing or able to do.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/A-Congress-of-Cowards-by-Rob-Kall-111220-272.html