Burying Movement Conservatism: Impeachment is a Good Place to Start

(Rochester & Genesee Valley Area Labor Federation)            It is time again to bury movement conservatism and to bury it even deeper than the New Deal buried it. The question now is will an impeachment process be necessary to accomplish a return to democracy, equal opportunity, and an America as the beacon of hope for the rest of the world? In numerous polls taken, about 45% of Americans favor the impeachment of Bush, Cheney or both. About half that percentage is against impeachment, with the rest undecided. Interestingly, these are higher numbers than those that were calling for the impeachment of Clinton, and even higher than those who called for the impeachment of Nixon. An overwhelming majority favored the impeachment of Nixon only after the Watergate hearings began, which was necessary to turn over the rock on Nixon’s administration, as they were stonewalling on information.

            In spite of all we know, Congress and the fourth estate have been stonewalled and refused the facts on everything from the war in Iraq, to energy policy that is a giveaway to big oil, to torture as policy, to the theft of billions of taxpayer dollars that only begins with Jack Abramoff and continues with contractors for Katrina, Iraq, Walter Reed, Homeland Security, etc. The crimes in the Justice Department alone, if they saw the light of day, would justify impeachment.

            Now our president, after knowing the Intelligence consensus is that Iran stopped its nuclear program 4 years ago still says he will not take bombing Iran off the table. This shouldn’t be a surprise since we now know the Italian secret service supplied us copies of the obviously forged documents on Niger yellow cake in December 2002, 6 weeks before that allegation was used in the state of the union speech in the rush to war with Iraq. Under Bush/Cheney Iraq is a war without end because for an end there must be a political solution and that involves oil revenues. They don’t wish to tell you they cannot achieve a political solution because Bush and Cheney are demanding 60% of Iraq’s oil be privitized by American oil companies who will take that 60%. Of course this is unacceptable to the Shiites, Sunni’s, and Kurds. This is a war without end in spite of the fact that 7 out of ten families of those serving are now against the war; slightly higher opposition than the American population. Our country and the world cannot afford even another year of Bush/Cheney. I believe that impeachment proceedings will reveal criminality to such an extent that justice could only be served with criminal convictions and jail time for both.

            But this is not all movement conservatives, in an unholy alliance with the religious right, have given us. They have given us a Supreme Court that stole an election, weakened civil and voting rights, and equated education policies designed to promote diversity, civil rights and equal opportunity with the racism of Jim Crow. We have the first Italian American Supreme Court Justice who is closer to Mussolini than the great anti-fascist Labor leader Carlo Tresca. I’d be happy if he were closer to Fiorello LaGuardia. The second African American Supreme Court Justice after the legendary Thurgood Marshall doesn’t seem to like black people very much. They have given us the deification of Ronald Reagan who ran up deficits after cutting taxes for the rich, which exceeded the combined deficits of all previous presidents. He realized this mistake before he left office and raised the highest rate to 50% in the midst of a recession. He was part of Senator Joe McCarthy’s pack when he turned in his own union members to HUAC during the witch hunts and blacklisting, and whose administration broke the record for executive branch criminal convictions set by Nixon’s Watergate administration.

This movement has given us religious dogma over science, and maybe at the expense of cures for crippling disabilities and disease. The people I’ve worked with in the Labor Religious coalition, regardless of their particular faith, are engaged in feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and sheltering the homeless while always finding time to stand for peace, tolerance and justice. Pat Robertson and his kind. No, thank you.

Recent reports from PEW Charitable Trusts continue to outline the legacy of movement conservatives. One half of American families are now downwardly mobile with a lower standard of living than their parents. Men’s real income has fallen over 30 years with household income holding its own because of smaller families with more people working in a household. Equal opportunity suffers as average children of high income families are much more likely to complete college than above average children of middle income and poor families. The income gap between white and black families that was closing has been frozen since Ronal Reagan was president. Horatio Alger has evidently moved to Canada or Europe.

The economic policies of movement conservatives from the playbook of Milton Friedman as first implemented by his protégé, the Chilean dictator Pinochet, have included the redistribution of the wealth upward, declining living standards for everyone else, and privatization of everything including social security. After years of suffering, the people of Chile have rejected these so-called reforms. Friedman economics needs to be entombed with his remains.

Other first and third world countries maintain or return to the economies of John Maynard Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith. These New Deal policies, with progressive taxes and strong worker rights, distribute more of the wealth to those who produce it, expanding democracy based on the principle that government intervention in a market economy was not for the few, but must be for the greater good of all participants. Now, our government does the most for those who need it the least.

We must now reverse this course and obtain trade, tax and other economic policies that build good jobs rather than export them. We must fight for health care for all that sustains our wealth and our society rather than drains it.

Just as movement conservatism, with its deference to authority over democracy, its assault on the Bill of Rights, and belief in the rich elite to know what’s best for our economy led us to this place, New Deal policies led to more democracy, and history establishes they worked. Social security, worker rights, and progressive taxes had no choice but to evolve into Medicare, a growing middle class and the civil and political rights of the 1960’s. Baby Boomers such as myself, fast becoming the Geezer Boomers, cannot leave movement conservatism and George W. as our legacy.

John Stuart Mill, the English political scientist, philosopher and journalist said about a century and a half ago after an extensive tour of America, “Not all conservatives are stupid, but all stupid people are conservative.” Led by the Geezer Boomers, we will begin the burial of movement conservatism in the 2008 election cycle. Only then will we begin the process of leaving our children and grandchildren a legacy of hope, justice and equal opportunity that they can build on and get back to the democratic promise that may one day be fulfilled. This is the hope that is the American experiment. Impeachment would be a good start.

Happy New Year,

Jim Bertolone