Gop: Rich Man’s Party Run Amok

As it unfolds, the impressive thing about the Republican congressional agenda is how ambitiously broad it is and how deep it is in its selective concern for the afflicted.

Whether it’s relief for oil companies that want to drill in environmentally sensitive areas, relief for casino owners alarmed by growing competition from untaxed Indian gambling halls, relief for people with capital gains, relief for families with taxable incomes of more than $100,000, relief for coal companies that don’t want to pay for health care for their retirees, relief for resort owners who want to get their hands on federally owned ski slopes, relief for corporations that want to raid the pension funds of their employees, relief for manufacturers who are tired of being sued for making defective products, relief for doctors who want to be exempted from antitrust laws or relief for polluters who find the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency tiresome, Congress seems to groan with a sympathy that is truly staggering in its generosity.

But as Republicans lumber toward the end of their first congressional session in the majority in eons, try to find anywhere in their agenda anything that in a credible way gives genuine targeted relief to the most aggrieved and numerous constituency: wage-earning America.

Really, it’s as if these people, given their big chance, blew it and deliberately set out to create a caricature of a rich man’s party run amok.

Either that or it’s the history professor in House Speaker Newt Gingrich playing a game of re-creating the Bourbon restoration.

Or perhaps the Republicans are just naive and thought nobody would notice the perverse lopsidedness of this “revolution” they are undertaking.

Meanwhile, there is more confirmation of the lopsidedness of the current upswing in the business cycle.

In the face of a relentlessly expanding economy, a roaring stock market, strong corporate profits, rising productivity, soaring executive compensation, growing income disparities and astonishing growth in the billionaire population, the U.S. Labor Department has just reported that in the 12 months ending in September, wages rose at the slowest pace on record and probably the slowest pace since World War II.

This is half of a double whammy that also includes a frightening decline in job security as major companies continue to boost share value by butchering their payrolls and turning increasingly toward disposable temporary workers.

America shows every sign of going into the next millennium with the most dynamic economy and the most demoralized labor force in the world.

“What is occurring is a huge transfer of wealth from lower-skilled middle-class American workers to the owners of capital and a new technological aristocracy with a large element of compensation tied to stock values,” financier Felix Rohatyn noted in a recent speech.

With such a process so visible, how long do you suppose the Republicans can go on pretending to voters that government is the enemy and that butchering it is the solution?

They can go on pretending until Americans begin to realize that in a capitalist society, government - imperfect, clumsy, bureaucracy-driven government - is the only instrument we have for inserting a degree of fairness into a system that inherently does not value it.