The GOP has always been somewhat non-democratic in that it elevates the rights of property owners over the rights of all other constituencies. The Tea Party has made that impulse even stronger, in a number of instances elevating the rights of property owners over voting rights, minority rights, marriage rights and the rights of choice for women. This Tea Party view was America up to suffrage in 1920, when women got the right to vote. Although that was an important turning point, it took the Depression to put the regulatory clamps down on speculative abuse of capital and install unemployment insurance, another 20-25 years after that to get things like the Voting Rights Act, minimum wage, Medicare and Medicaid. Since 2010, this nostalgia over the good old days when white patriarchs ruled unquestioned has successfully rolled back anti-trust laws, voting laws, and laws limiting the power of corporate treasuries to fix campaigns. The thrust is now to defund programs aimed at helping the elderly, women and children, the poor and minorities. Meanwhile, State programs aimed at boosting corporate welfare are increased. Raise the stars and bars down south, more subsidies to oil millionaires and big farmer millionaires, and keep intact an expensive health care system that still manages to exclude million of Americans from accessing health care.
Posted on: Sat, 03 Aug 2013 16:11:13 +0000
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