I just read, “Green is the New Red” by Mark Newgent posted at the “Red Maryland” blog (http://redmaryland.blogspot.com/2007/10/green-is-new-red.html) and found Mr. Newgent’s critique of the Green Party and Baltimore city council presidential candidate Maria Allwine (http://www.takebackbge.org/) predictably alarmist. As I understand it, the central tenant of Newgent’s piece is that governments are by their nature coercive, incompetent and corrupt while corporations represent freedom, sagacity and efficiency.
Newgent’s apologia to unfettered corporate capitalism ignores at least two crucial facts: corporations (especially the larger ones) are already the biggest beneficiaries of government largess and because of this corporate socialism, in the past few decades the U.S. has experienced a dramatic consolidation of wealth (and power) into the hands of a relatively few elites.
Point one: The US economic model is now one in which the government socializes the risks and expenses of doing business (e.g. wars of empire, industry subsidies, government underwriting, research grants, corporate bailouts, payment in lieu of taxes [PILOTs], etc.) and privatizes the rewards (the average CEO of a large U.S. corporation made roughly $10.8 million in 2006, or 364 times that of average U.S. workers, who made $29,544.) As with most so-called conservatives, Mr. Newgent’s professed distaste for “socialism” would be more convincing if it extended to denunciations of corporate socialism for the fat cat CEOs who pay the lobbyists who write our laws and who sponsor the campaigns of our (“Republicrat”) elected leaders. Aren’t so-called conservatives like Newgent enablers and proponents of our current revolving-door system of government in Baltimore, Annapolis and Washington?
Point two: The top 1 percent of US taxpayers received 21.8 percent of all reported income in 2005, up significantly from 19.8 percent the year before and more than double their share of income in 1980. The peak was in 1928, when the top 1 percent reported 23.9 percent of all income. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, writing when fascism was a growing threat, reminded us that “We can have a democratic society or we can have great concentrated wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both." Are so-called conservatives like Newgent even concerned about the inevitable erosion of democracy brought about by an unrestrained consolidation of wealth and power?
As to Newgent’s specific charges, I will address a few of the more outrageous claims. As I understand it Maria Allwine does not promote a regime of “forced solarization” as I believe she understands that weatherization, buyers coops for heating fuel, etc. may be more appropriate for some Baltimoreans. Oddly, Newgent seems to regret the fact that Allwine’s plans “forces [us] to choose how and [sic!] we power our homes and how much energy we use.” I’m confused: I thought the so-called conservative mantra was that citizens know how to spent their money better than the government and that the power of capitalism is the buyer’s freedom of choice!
Newgent further writes that, “Allwine’s economic and tax proposals drip with rank class warfare rhetoric . . . Typical of such socialist twaddle, it lacks the concrete understanding that such livable wages actually creates unemployment.” This conservative shibboleth is easily debunked: the US has raised the minimum wage many times and our unemployment rate is still among the lowest in the world—even despite the influx of millions of illegal workers. I suspect if we mandated prison terms for owners of companies that hired illegal workers, we could raise the minimum wage to $12 an hour while keeping our unemployment rate under 5%. Would Newgent support such a proposal?
Newgent also repeats the “higher taxes creates lower tax receipts” conservative mantra, even at a time when the Republican administration in Washington has lowered taxes on the wealthiest Americans and our federal debt has soared to the highest level in history! So-called conservatives do not have a leg to stand on with regard to taxes and debt because their record of fiscal mismanagement (think of Reagan, Bush I and Bush II) in these regards is disastrous!
Newgent claims “Allwine wants to tax businesses out Baltimore.” This is not true. Allwine wants businesses to pay their fair share of taxes and, as a small business owner myself (and one who has never asked for nor received any government-sponsored “sweetheart deals”) I could not agree with her more. I want a level playing field for small businesses like mine to compete on, and that includes ending corporate subsidies, giveaways and PILOTs.
So, finally, I ask: Are red (state) supporters the new black (shirt) fascists? Are so-called conservatives the modern equivalent of the Italian fascists who under Mussolini created a government that combined corporatism, totalitarianism, nationalism, militarism and anti-Communism? It rather sounds like that to me: From what I can tell fear of “socialism” has replaced fear of communism in the arsenal of scare tactics employed by so-called conservatives like Mr. Newgent.
But the citizens aren’t buying it: They know corporations have too much power over their lives, they want “socialized” medicine, they want to keep their social security as a public trust, and they want to raise the minimum wage. Many want public financing of elections and publicly owned utilities. Almost all Baltimoreans are pissed off that their utility rates had to increase by 72% in order for BGE’s Mayo Shattuck to become the highest paid CEO in Maryland! Some are now even (finally) questioning the unholy alliance between corporatism and our wars of empire, the latest of which (in Iraq) is said to have already cost every American man, woman and child over $8,000!
One thing hasn’t changed however, as Newgent noted in his revealing comment at the end of his piece that “If the Greens are the so-called ‘alternative’ to business as usual, business as usual doesn’t sound so bad.” This is an echo of the early 1900’s Baltimore Democratic political boss Arthur P. Gorman’s denunciation of the possibility of third-party success as being “more objectionable even than Republican success.” What was true then is true today: the Republicans and Democrats (“Republicrats”) know a good thing when they see it and are not about to change the status quo in which their leaders are allowed to revolve between their corporate jobs and their government jobs, all the while serving the interests of the rich few at the expense of the poorer many. And that is the way, presumably, so-called conservatives like Mr. Newgent like it.
Sunday, November 04, 2007
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