America's third war

Ian Boyne, Contributor

AMERICA IS on the front line of three battles today: Iraq, Afghanistan and one on its own soil - perhaps its fiercest - a deep ideological war. The austerity war being fought between the White House, the Congress and the Senate involves millions of 'troops' and has worrying implications for the rest of the world.

The deeply divisive, emotionally taxing and intensely partisan struggle over the debt ceiling and deficits is more than a fight between Democrats and Republicans or between right-wing extremists of the Tea Party and progressive forces; or about racists ganging up against America's first black president. This is essentially a philosophical and ideolo-gical war - a conflict of visions, a divergence of views about the role of government.

Looming global depression

Professor emeritus and Helen Sheridan Memorial Scholar James Crotty in a major paper delivered in April this year put it well: "The current austerity war is an attempt to destroy the economic system created in the US and elsewhere in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II. The economic model is called social democracy or regulated capitalism, or the mixed economy. In the US, the foundations were built with the creation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's(FDR's) New Deal. The increasing political pressure to destroy the foundations of the New Deal is bizarrely paradoxical. The right-wing coalition is on the verge of succeeding in its 80-year quest to defeat the New Deal."

Crotty was prescient: "The adoption of austerity programmes across the globe threatens to sink economies deeper into recession or even depression, perhaps triggering yet another global financial crisis."

And last Thursday, stock markets plunged to their lowest levels since 2008, triggering fresh fears of another global financial meltdown. Meanwhile in Jamaica, ordinary Jamaicans and political and financial analysts are worrying about Jamaica's agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and what other punishing measures might be imposed if our targets are missed.

All over the world, austerity, debt and deficit reduction is the name of the game - and the obsession. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected, he said famously, "Government is not a solution to (this) problem. Government is the problem." Prime Minister Bruce Golding said exactly the same thing in his Budget speech this year, heralding his Government's game-changing, conservative economic policies. We recoil from discussing philosophical issues - and end up making tragic practical mistakes -

when our times call for more conscious and deliberate philosophical analysis.

The Tea Party movement overturned the Democratic majority in the US House of Representatives and sent those elected on one mission: Reduce the size and scope of government and take back power from Washington. Plain and simple. What would normally be an effortless raising of the debt ceiling became a major, drawn-out issue which threatened America's triple A rating, seriously wounded its national pride and prestige and brought it on the brink of a default. It happened not primarily (if at all) because these white people don't like their black president. The larger issue is class and ideology. Even before the election of a black president, there had been a growing conservative grass-roots movement in the US, fuelled by a right-wing and reactionary media, including talk-radio, that had been resuscitating the Barry Goldwater conservative movement.

In their view, Washington is bloated and broken. Now they are even talking about a constitutional amendment to force Washington not to spend over a certain amount. (Interestingly, too, the Golding administration is talking about amending our Constitution to enshrine fiscal responsibility, but this has generated no debate here because both PNP and JLP have bought into the canons of neoliberalism.)

What cannot be denied by libe-rals and progressives in America, though, is that this Tea Party movement and the whole conservative thrust is not just a ruling class, big business phenomenon. Liberals and the Left have had to concede that grass-roots, working-class people have been demanding a radical reordering of economic policy. The question is, if these austerity, fiscally repressive policies are objectively not in the interest of America's working and middle classes, why are those classes so willingly complicit in their own disempowerment?

False consciousness

Because of what Karl Marx called "false consciousness": The media and the ruling elites, by defining what "common sense" is and by framing the parameters of the discourse, hoodwink people into working against their own interests. As Marx said, "the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas".

The Foxification of news and commentary in America have convinced many ordinary Americans that government is, indeed, the problem and that their solution lies in less government and more private-sector action. Barack Obama, now reviled and scorned for selling out and bowing to the Republicans, realises that they would blow up the place, as it were, had he not given in to their demands. He refused to invoke the Fourteenth Amendment, relying on his usual consensual, collaborative style, not relishing having the legacy of being the only president to have used this to raise the debt ceiling.

The Left in America will have to do more than simply scream, shout and rant about racists, terrorists and fascists. The Left has to move beyond name-calling and the invocation of saints like Marx and Keynes. If you are an informed person who listens to debates in America today, you would be very saddened at the low quality of what passes for dialogue. It's a dialogue of the deaf. People are just speaking past each other - much like the discourse here. (We are so American, even as we indulge in the myth of Independence. I suppose we all need myths to live by, religious or otherwise!)

We need a reasoned debate on economic and social policy and on debt, deficits and economic deve-lopment (not just economic growth). We need to get to the heart of the issue at contention in this American ideological/austerity war: Democrats rail about Republicans' wanting to keep the Bush tax cuts to the rich indefinitely. And make an emotional appeal by talking about letting off the hook people with their corporate jets, yachts and multimillion-dollar homes; these super-millionaires and billionaires who have all these tax loopholes. Nancy Pelosi moaned that "not one red cent" came from the pockets of the richest Americans in last week's deal.

The share of the income captured by the top one per cent of the income stream in America increased to about 50 per cent during the Reagan Republican presidency. Trillions of dollars which could have gone to government programmes to support the poor and middle class were lost through the Bush tax cuts alone. Some 38 per cent of the tax cuts between 1997 and 2007 went to that top one per cent of income earners in the United States.

Black democratic Obama

Even Obama himself has been favourable to the wealthiest Americans. In 2010, he and Congress agreed to extend the Bush tax cuts for two more years at an estimated revenue loss of $850 billion. The top one per cent of income earners will get 25 per cent of the tax cuts, while the bottom 40 per cent get just nine per cent under this democratic - and black - president. Blacks continue to suffer disproportionately high unemployment, underemployment and prison rates under this black, democratic president. They are still waiting for a change they can believe in. Having a black president in the White House carrying out the dictates of the white ruling class in America is no better than having a white president to do so.

Liberals and progressives can draw on an abundance of statistics to show how the wealthy have been benefiting under various administrations. But Republicans shoot back by saying that it is these people who have the capacity to create the jobs, to create dynamism in the economy and to stimulate growth. It makes no sense mouthing Leftist slogans and "persecuting the rich" if the data shows that giving tax breaks to the wealthy is the way to create jobs and support economic expansion.

But Fareed Zakaria, the brightest and best-read of all interviewers on American television, made an important point in a GPS programme on CNN recently. It used to be said that it was Liberals whose arguments were premised on ideology rather than facts. Conservatives were seen as hard-nosed realists, sticking to brute facts and strictly following the empirical. Now it is reversed. Despite the Bush tax cuts, there has been no net creation of jobs and no buoyant economic expansion, yet conservatives continue to believe.

Where is the evidence that giving tax breaks to the rich provides a rising tide which lifts all boats? It's pure faith to propagate that. Liberals and Progressives can say objectively that when unemployment is high and the economy is sluggish that is the time to spend, to raise taxes and to run deficits. It's economic madness to slash spending and have no revenue-generating measures when the economy is sluggish and expect growth. That's fantasy. This is why while America has avoided a debt default, the agreement of last Monday will see reduced growth, more compression, more unemployment, a threatened double-dip recession in the US and slower growth for the global economy.

The Left must now challenge Conservatives on empirical, rational, not purely ideological grounds. The Left must demonstrate that the policies of the Tea Party and the Republicans are counterproductive and injurious to economic growth and prosperity and that they will produce more debt and deficits and hence more intergenerational theft. As the liberal publication The Nation said on its blog last Wednesday, "Respected economists on both sides of the partisan divide agreed that cutting spending during a recession is certain to make things worse. This consensus was hardly mentioned in the debate and not reflected in the outcome."

Says Dan Froomkin in the Huffington Post last Wednesday: "None of the signs that augur for deficit reduction are remotely visible. Quite to the contrary: A high unemployment rate, enormous unused capacity, inadequate market demand, cheap capital and record-low interest payments, incipient inflation, crumbling infrastructure and underwater homeowners all point to this being an ideal time to increase government borrowing." But that would violate the Republicans theological dogma of limiting government, of course.

America is being sold down the tube for ideology.

Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and ianboyne1@yahoo.com.