Conservative voices have a valuable role in any country. They make people think about what they are planning, but the Tea Party faction in the Congress has been working, since President Obama’s first day in office, to abolish the many institutions that have helped the middle class.
True patriotic conservatives have seen their role distorted.
The nefarious ultra conservative Koch brothers, aided I am sure by other extremely wealthy people, have poured millions of dollars into a campaign to undermine our economy. They have used their money to influence elections, to mount advertising campaigns against much that the middle class values. Their most recent target has been the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare (one and the same).
The lies that they have managed to inject have confused and undermined the act.
The law has been passed, the individual mandate has been validated by the Supreme Court, has already affected some parts of our population, people under the age of 26, people who were uninsurable because of pre-existing conditions, those who will benefit from preventive care, the catastrophically ill whose lifetime payment limit has been reached, etc.
The president won a second term, partly because of the signature law. Forty-five attempts to repeal it failed.
But the sore losers would not give up. A small minority in the House intimidate their fellow Republicans into voting all this time to repeal. Unsuccessful, they used it to threaten shutting down the government.
This is just one of many other goals of the Tea Party. They want to privatize the Veterans Administration, kill Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, destroy the Department of Education, abolish the Environmental Protection Administration.
In actuality, they have succeeded in freezing constructive action by Congress. They want freedom for their class to do whatever it wants, while the needs of the rest of the country are ignored.
They have succeeded in changing public opinion against everything that makes us a democracy. Extremely conservative groups have managed to denigrate many public servants and unions. They use the media to point to the mistakes and abuses, which occurred as they grew too powerful at some point. They publicize misbehavior by elected officials who misuse their power. But such things happen everywhere.
Unions, when they included a much higher percentage of workers, could marshal votes for very important programs. But ironically, law makers never budget enough money for inspectors, auditors and regulations that would prevent or catch misdeeds. You don’t throw out the baby with the bath water. Corruption happens everywhere that it is not monitored.
So admittedly, we find misbehavior everywhere.
But because big money has prevented the passage of laws that could curb or prevent the kinds of misbehavior in the financial sector that has brought our economy to its current state, wouldn’t we love to see the rich guys behind bars? Perhaps some huge fines recently imposed are a glimmer of light. That still does not induce enough of our anger to make our representatives do something about it.
Why not? Because the “Big Lie” is alive and well. Making businesses with billions of dollars of profit pay more taxes, pay better wages, and remove subsidies to businesses that help make them even more profitable cannot pass. We are being induced to think that this would cause prices to rise.
When the middle class had more voting power, their wages rose regularly, the very wealthy had marginal tax rates as high as 90 percent (earnings above a certain amount were that heavily taxed) and the world did not come to an end.
The Big Lie, repeated long and widely, is making the middle class its own worst enemy. What happens to governments when we forget to take responsibility for each other?
Esther Confino
New Hyde Park
