This column has never been a fan of Carly Fiorina but it is inarguable that she shone at the Republican debates. Watching her, it became obvious that she was much better when she expounded on a plan of what to do with the country than she was as the GOP’s attack dog.
I don’t see Fiorina as presidential material but she definitely has something to say and so far on these debates she has said it well. The biggest problem that she faces is the same one that all the other Republican candidates face. They all want to say something about helping the middle class and the poor but all their thought processes and all their allegiances are aimed at just the opposite.
Bush talks about 4% growth. That’s insane. We now grow our economy by about 2% per year and at the moment, with China slipping, we are the strongest economy in the world. The Republicans all speak to helping those who need help out of one side of their mouths while they are talking about things that will destroy, those same people out of the other, the profit driven side.
Huge corporations and billionaire backers drive the GOP. You can’t follow two masters. Everything that the corporate elite want from their Republican sycophants, flies in the face of anything that those same Republican congressmen could do for those in the middle class that needs them.
Right now, even as they are seeking the votes of the poor, the middle class, Hispanics, blacks, Asians and other minorities, the Republican party is doing everything they can to exclude those same people from participation in the election process and indeed from earning a decent wage. Even as they espouse clean air, Republicans are pushing for legislation that will allow the Keystone pipeline, encourage coal companies to dig even more coal, drill for tar sand oil and set up oil platforms in the arctic. Their fallacious claim that the digging of coal provides jobs, is obliterated by the fact that the renewable resource industry creates tens of thousands more jobs than the coal industry ever did.
The GOP calls for the reduction of regulations to protect small businesses from folding when everyone who has ever owned a small business knows that the biggest threat to small business success is corporate bullying tactics and that regulation is the only thing standing between small business success and small businesses being stamped out by the big corporations. Just about every stance that the GOP takes supposedly in support of the great middle class and the poor is pure hypocrisy.
The Republicans are still in an all out attack on the ACA, AKA, Obamacare, but they have no plan to replace it only to end it. This is typical Republican policy and why nothing except war ever gets done when the Republicans are in charge. In fact, health care costs are inflating at a much slower rate under Obamacare than ever before in history. This allows more people to afford it and more people to be covered by it. Yes, the insurance monsters are looking to raise their rates and their deductibles and that is exactly why there should be a bi-partisan effort to dump all the insurance companies and create a single payer (government) system. But the Republicans will never do that because they are already on the payroll of those insurance companies. Again with the GOP, payoff trumps the good of the people.
And finally we look at the enormous Right wing bugaboo, big government. What the GOP doesn’t seem to understand, doesn’t seem to have a clue about, is that the problem with big government isn’t size, it’s inefficiency.
This is a big and diverse country. The existence of federal government bureaucracies is what keeps the deployment of government services on as fair and equal a plain as is functionally possible. As soon as you break this overlay of services down and spread them around to local government, their fair application disappears and they become accountable to local pressures and prejudices. Equality disappears and the public is no longer fairly served.
It is the accumulation of all of the above that makes what little there is of a Republican platform, impossibly non-functional. It doesn’t, in any of its aspects work for the poor or the middle class, in fact it drives them further into a deep hole, one from which they will never be able to emerge.
Without a functioning middle class the United States will no longer be the United States. This country has succeeded by having an upwardly mobile under class, struggling and succeeding in its goal of moving up to middle class standards and then looking forward to achieving the American dream. Without this, we become just another European style country with an established rich minority and a permanently stuck in place majority that has no hope for the future. If this is what you want, then it behooves you to vote Republican in the 2016 election.