Is the Donkey Dying?
TYLER, GUS
ASK JOE AND JANE SIXPACK Is the Donkey Dying BY GUS TYLER IF THE UNITED STATES had a parliamentary system such as exists in England, Bill Clinton would now be out of office, replaced at 1600...
...It is to say, rather, that the key is how the setback is perceived and what the Chief Executive does in the intervening two years...
...the other vice and incompetence...
...If Thomas Nast's symbol is to be raised up on its feet again, they will have to raise their voices on the way to '96...
...Thus the challenge confronting Bill Clinton as he tries to revive the donkey Thomas Nast made the symbol of the Democratic Party...
...They listen to the groans in their gut and respond with a growl on Election Day...
...The anger was so great, it carried over to the midterm balloting...
...Nothing happens anyway...
...The exception that proved the rule came in 1934, two years after Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected President on a wave of discontent directed against Herbert Hoover and the Grand Old Party...
...A stimulus program, what FDR called "priming the pump," could still have a positive impact in our time if necessary adjustments were made...
...There's so much crime," they smirk, "we don't even bother reporting it anymore...
...Cato the Elder agreed...
...Over the last eight decades the average loss has been 33 seats, and this time the Democrats dropped 54...
...The Administration counters that the real income of the "average" family has been rising...
...FDR, too, said he would reduce the national deficit...
...Consistently the midterm election turnout is small, and those who vote are strongly motivated by a determination to protest the policies of the President and his Congress...
...Clinton should have been pursuing a global Keynesian balanced economy, beginning with the Big Seven industrial democracies...
...With one exception, the party in control of the White House has lost seats in the House of Representatives in every midterm contest since 1914(when the number of House seats was set at 435...
...Some of the Federal budget cutting has forced state and local governments to raise their levies, resulting in an overall larger tax bite for middle-class America...
...Now the huge multinationals are bidding goodbye to their countries of origin to get their work done by slave and child labor...
...The implication was that people are in fact living better...
...Because many of them are aware that the rich derive the bulk of their income from capital gains that are taxed at the ridiculously low rate of 28 per cent, they know that what some spokespersons for the Democrats have been saying ain't necessarily so...
...When Uncle Sam put people to work in the '30s and '40s, they spent their earnings buying things made by Americans who, in turn, did the same...
...The maneuver reflected the nature of American politics...
...Exactly a century ago, another Democratic President showed how the tactic could be overcome...
...He somehow comes across as a vacillator who draws a line in the sand and then seems to embrace those who cross it to attack him...
...To Plato the problem was clear...
...In allocating blame for the Democratic disarray, fingers should point beyond the Republicans, Clinton himself and the media, to include all the good friends of the President who voted for him and who held their tongue because they felt the Republicans would exploit any criticism...
...ALAS, WE HAVE DONE precisely the opposite...
...And not being Plato or Cato, they react by demanding more and meaner punishment-longer sentences, tougher prisons, the death penalty...
...Viewed conceptually, these free-trade arrangements are a reversal of the progressive economic policy that virtually eliminated recurrent deep recessions-a return to laissez-faire...
...Adding to Joe and Jane Sixpack's feelings of frustration is the sense that they are paying ever higher taxes merely to buy more woes...
...What counts are not principles, programs or practices...
...The contented are less driven to express their approval...
...Poverty," he said, "is the mother of crime...
...In short, as the world's biggest market at the moment, the U.S...
...Today, any stimulant poured into the economy goes into a leaky barrel...
...The Democrats were aware of the GOP-black ploy, but were reluctant to act lest their opposition be seen as anti-black...
...All he had to say, aside from pointing to the merits of a proposal, was: "A clear majority in the Congress is for this bill...
...Clinton has not challenged this narrow, counterproductive, non-Keynesian, nonsensical strategy...
...By cutting expenditures on social programs, they further weakened buying power...
...Instead, he continues as President despite having suffered a "no confidence" vote this past November 8. The best the Democrats can do is attribute their debacle to the sinister "midterm syndrome...
...If Joe and Jane understood the difference between "average" and "typical" they would accept the government's figures-and they would be enraged...
...Meanwhile they neglected the real solution-expansion of the economy to broaden the tax base...
...Certainly, neither Plato nor Cato would have argued that all criminals are poor or that all the poor are criminals...
...When a number of Senators from his own party resolved to talk to death a bill to demonetize silver, Grover Cleveland let them talk themselves out for 46 days-and the bill became law...
...Their silence has not helped their candidate or their cause...
...Joe and Jane may not realize the connection between rising poverty and rising crime, yet they cannot escape the consequences...
...A recent Census Bureau report confirms the continuing downward drift...
...That is not the experience of Joe and Jane Sixpack...
...According to the Census Bureau report noted above, in 1993 the poverty rate rose from 14.8 per cent to 15.1 percent, the highest since the recession years of 1982-83 when the jobless rate was in double digits...
...It inched up to 71.5 per cent upon Clinton's arrival in '93...
...BESIDES THE ISSUES of income, crime and taxes, Joe and Jane Six pack and their parents are distressed by Clinton's squaring his jaw, tightening a determined lip, but carrying a short stick...
...For a while, the rationale was that a pact joining the U.S., Canada and Mexico would be a counterweight to the European Community...
...A more accurate figure would probably be 46, for about eight districts were lost through racial gerrymanders...
...could take to plug the leak...
...GUS TYLER, a frequent NL contributor, is Assistant President of the ILGWU...
...They have not...
...A minority of 41 Senators seeks to deny the will of the House, of a majority in the Senate, and of the American people...
...Then along came Ronald Reagan and George Bush, and the national debt rose to 68 per cent of GNP in 1992...
...In the same year, the real value of a full-time male worker's wage or salary fell by $700, and of a female's by $250...
...But like Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor, they understood it is necessary to "feed men, and then ask of them virtue...
...Each dollar the government shelled out was multiplied many times over...
...We could deny Most Favored Nation status to nations that deny elementary labor and human rights to their people...
...This is not to suggest a sizable midterm loss by the party in possession of the Oval Office will usually be followed by its emerging victorious from the next Presidential election...
...Joe and Jane wonder how come the President can do that for Uncle Sam, but not for the Six-packs and their six kids...
...ASK JOE AND JANE SIXPACK Is the Donkey Dying BY GUS TYLER IF THE UNITED STATES had a parliamentary system such as exists in England, Bill Clinton would now be out of office, replaced at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue by a Republican...
...Joe and Jane are not conscious of the relationship between lower real income and street crime...
...In 1893 Cleveland did not have the advantage of radio and TV One wonders what would have happened if, from the outset, Clinton had taken to the airwaves and urged the American people to demand that their Senators stop filibustering measures enjoying wide popular support...
...They simply know that regardless of official statistics, their communities are not getting safer...
...Indeed, his policies contributed both to the economic discomfort and the fear of physical assault that prompted a great many voters to turn against the party in office...
...His big boast is that he has reduced the deficit...
...By raising the taxes of Joe and Jane Sixpack, they lowered the buying power of the quintessential market for our market economy...
...Had he been re-elected, Bush would have had a hard time pushing NAFTA through...
...By 1981, however, the total debt was only 33.5 per cent of GNP: The economy had grown faster than the debt...
...During the campaign the Democrats repeatedly pointed to the decline in the jobless rate, the growth of the economy, and the low rate of inflation...
...For the nonce, the Comeback Kid Clinton is the loser, covered with black-and-blue marks on his political body...
...Realistically, Joe and Jane are not guided in their voting habits by statistics- good or bad...
...So these people resent being told only the wealthiest 1.2 per cent of families have had their taxes hiked...
...Then it subsided and politics reverted to its normal pattern: In 1936 Roosevelt carried all but two states, yet in '38 his party lost very heavily...
...here are the names...
...They play by their own rules and thumb their noses at any govemment that would dare to tell them how to behave...
...But he decided to put that campaign pledge on the back burner and do what had to be done immediately to put people to work and stimulate the economy...
...Well, not really...
...Dole played to win-scraping skins, kicking shins, kneeing groins-and he won...
...Examples to the contrary abound...
...Uncle Sam may incur a debt of, say, $ 150 billion to "stimulate" the economy, only to find that the money is stimulating the economy in China or Brazil as we run a negative trade balance of an equal sum...
...He borrowed, he spent, he pursued policies-like minimum wages, unemployment insurance, Social Security payments-to expand aggregate demand...
...In the 1993-94 session of Congress the Republicans resorted to the filibuster on 28 separate occasions, wrecking one piece of good legislation after another...
...Some may respond that this year's midterm defeat was worse than any either party had previously sustained...
...Then they charged that this was a "do-nothing" Democratic Congress...
...For they would realize the "average" includes the families in the top 5 per cent of the nation, whose real income in '93 went up about 10 per cent...
...Between 1992 and 1993, the typical family's income went down by $400, from $31,553 to $31,141...
...Moreover, Joe and Jane's parents, retired couples in the middle-income range, have not 50 per cent but 85 per cent of their Social Security taxed...
...But soon Clinton embraced the Uruguay Round, which would bring virtually every country in the world into a "'global NAFTA...
...An ever higher percentage of the dollar is used to buy imports made by American companies that have left our shores to get their work done at a fraction of the rates paid domestically...
...Clinton, by pressuring Democrats and wooing almost every Republican vote in Congress, managed to get it passed...
...The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Mexico was Bush's idea- a way to make very cheap labor available to U.S...
...After seeing their family income shrink steadily for two decades, their hope was that with the election of Clinton and a Democratic Congress things would change...
...We could insist that the basic code of conduct laid down by the International Labor Organization be respected in countries with whom we trade...
...In the process, blacks were removed from districts where they had given Democrats the edge...
...Here is the count...
...companies who would manufacture down there for sale up here at prices guaranteed to puff up profits...
...The trait surfaced early as he withdrew one appointment after another, evidenced itself in a series of in-again-out-again foreign policy sallies and retreats, and became most apparent in the way he let Senator Robert Dole club him with that rusty old weapon called the filibuster...
...It should also be recalled that under Harry S. Truman the Democrats lost 54 seats in 1946, under Woodrow Wilson they lost 61 in 1914, under FDR they lost 70 in 1938, and all three were re-elected...
...The reason, it seems, is that in the political psyche hate is stronger than love...
...Warren G. Harding lost a whopping 74 seats in 1922, and a Republican won in '24...
...The manic-depressive behavior of capitalism was tamed by Keynes' strategy of government intervention that balanced the power to consume with the ability to produce...
...they were elected by you to speak for you...
...The political game has become just that-a game like hockey or basketball...
...From the founding of the republic up to 1993, the filibuster was used in the Senate about 15 times...
...From the 1930s to the present, the industrial world has witnessed no major national depression...
...simply threatening to do so was enough to rout the White House...
...There are steps the U.S...
...But, blinded by his dual obsession with balancing the budget and encouraging free trade, he has moved us back toward a pre-modern age, harming the typical American family and hurting the Democrats...
...World War II, of course, was the greatest stimulant and very costly...
...Why the ratio of debt to GNP has kept growing under Presidents preoccupied with deficit reduction is not hard to fathom...
...At War's end, the national debt was 127 per cent of the Gross National Product...
...For them the bottom line is income, adjusted for inflation...
...Clinton could have reversed the downward slide of the typical American family-roughly 80 per cent of the population-by taking his cue from Roosevelt and keeping his promise to "invest in people...
...They would have employed the weapon more often, but it wasn't necessary...
...Shall we allow that to happen...
...The average has often been exceeded, though, and the '94 number is deceptive...
...could use its vast purchasing power to insist on a more level playing field...
...As it was, the filibustering Republicans turned what could have been a most productive Congress into a farce...
...What counts is who wins, no matter how rude, crude, unfair, or "physical" the players are...
...Republicans joined quite successfully with black politicians in many states to create racially homogeneous districts guaranteeing the election of black representatives...
...He warned against a society where relatively few have too much and most have too little: "The one produces luxury and idleness...
...The problem did not start with Clinton...
Vol. 77 • November 1994 • No. 11
