Don't Worry, We'll Do Nothing (REALLY!)

In what is likely to be a Republican landslide, the GOP is set to take-over control of the U.S. House of Representatives and probably draw to near parity in the U.S. Senate later today when election results are announced.

When Barack Obama took the Oath of Office a little more than a year and a half ago, the Republicans were terrified. Here was a President elected on a platform of potentially radical change, threatening to reign in the financial sector, manifestly remake health care, and to institute a movement toward renewable energy which would at the same time directly attack the death-grip the oil industry has on the US domestic energy markets. They hoped, at that time, to forestall Obama until the 2010 elections to hopefully then have the votes to keep Obama from moving ahead with his plans. As Rush Limbaugh, the most influential spokesman for the GOP famously said, "I hope you fail!" in one of his radio shows, the goal of the GOP was to delay and stall the Democrats, both to keep the changes they desired from being passed and to paint them as incompetent and incapable of getting anything done. Even though, Hank Paulsen said that without the bail-out and subsequent stimulus, unemployment would have topped 25% - that' s Hank Paulsen, a financial conservative and appointee to deal with collapse in the waining days of 2008.


Roll the clock forward 20 or so months and they've succeeded in large regard. They kept "Cap and Trade" legislation from being enacted, they made sure health care reform is a weak, tepid step-child of what was desired by the majority of the nation and of what was needed, and that the financial reform which was required was not passed. Instead we received new, toothless laws to replace our old, toothless laws. A couple of fairly useful points were passed/made in the new financial oversight laws, but against the backdrop of continuing "dance while Rome burns" attitudes about the bond market and lack of regulation thereof, those points (requiring banks not to sell their own accounts) are essentially meaningless. In addition, the Republicans stalled Obama's pick for overseeing the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (Elizabeth Warren) for as long as they possibly could. They did so not because she wasn't qualified (though they claimed it) but because they knew well that she would be an aggressive and effective watch-dog, seeking to take the limp financial regulatory overhaul and turn it into something which might have a chance of preventing the 2008 collapse from happening again in the next 10 years.

Now, bolstered by a section of the electorate which thinks is it wrong for the government to try to keep financial services businesses from offering investments which they themselves are betting against financially and talking down privately, the Republicans stand poised to be elected to do nothing at all. The promise they offer is that they'll cut back on government. The question of course as always is where? They won't cut Medicare, they won't cut Social Security and the won't cut defense spending. After that, there isn't much else TOO cut. Instead, they'll promise cuts, but do nothing. They even call cuts to Medicare "wrong" (as Erik Paulson did in one of his campaign commercials- he's my ultra-conservative US House Rep).

They act as if they somehow would have handled the financial crises of the 2000's better. Crises which they helped foster by deregulating banks and by having a "hand's off attitude" about auditing and corporate oversight. The last crisis before the one in 2008, was only 6 years earlier, when the largest corporate collapse in history, that of Enron, occurred under Bush's watch. The reaction by the "best and brightest" of the Republicans was to pass the useless, busy-work making Sarsbannes-Oxley legislation which was supposed to make CEO's accountable for their balance sheets and ultimately make shadow-corporations a thing of the past. It did neither, as cooking-books and creating fake companies to hide losses continued, and the only thing "SOX" as it's known in the financial services industry did was create a wasteful, useless set of rules segregating technology from business. In short, it did exactly what the Republicans complain about when they complain about legislation. It didn't prevent anything, it simply created costly, bureaucratic mountains of needless and pointless paper. Their financial "overhaul" prevented nothing, but then again, it seems, that's what they excel because it was their intent.


The point is, the Republican party prevented progress on important and necessary measures for 20 months and now stands poised to take advantage of doing nothing. Moreover, they appear to be ready and able to be congratulated by those who vote for them for promising NOTHING and doing NOTHING at all. If they pass nothing, they'll succeed. In this time of enormous under and unemployment, if they do nothing to curb outsourcing, they succeed. If they do nothing to recognize the vastly unfair trend of pay and hours and treatment of labor, they succeed. If they do nothing to protect benefits, they succeed. If they do nothing to help health care, they succeed. So congratulations to the GOP, and to those who will today vote for them thinking (foolishly) that the government somehow is the reason unemployment continues, or worse, that the stimulus and the bail-out were failures and should not have happened. You are about to reward exactly those who put you out of work or imperil your job. You are about to reward the leaders of industry who put hundreds of millions of corporate dollars into this election. You are about to send right back into power those who advocate letting the system "govern" itself into moving 10 Million technology jobs from the US and Europe over to China and India solely for the benefit of those leaders of industry and almost exclusively harming you. When your wages, health care and benefits continue to be flat or gone, you should look in a mirror and think about the fact that you're buying the same line of bull you were fed in 1980, 1994, 2000 and 2004 - namely that cutting taxes and getting the government "out of the way" will solve everything. It didn't work then and won't work now. It never has and never will.

You will get nothing, and that's exactly what you've been promised.