From the right wing punditry to the Republicans in government, all conservatives are expounding the intellectual flatulence that "unemployment compensation makes people lazy." One is doubtless tempted to offer the obvious rejoinder, "there are no jobs for the unemployed to take," or "there are six applicants for every job opening in the country." Maybe screaming would make it more satisfying. Somehow the act of applying for jobs creates more jobs?
Let me suggest something else to the Republicans and to our gutless press. The fact that they're obviously not trying very hard to do anything for the American people in this Great Recession means that they are not trying hard enough. It means that they are, in fact, lazy. Cockamamie social Darwinism is fine for their base voters and, apparently, the mass media, but to everyone out of a job it feels like rubbing scalding salt in a gaping wound. For some it means the destruction of a life that has already been a struggle to build.
Republicans got that way, lazy, by being elected again and again without ever proposing anything much more thoughtful than "unemployment compensation makes people lazy" or Trickle Down or religious war on the Muslims. Their laziness is built on success at pushing public opinion hot buttons through the stupefying drivel purveyed by our compliant mass media as actual political discourse. But in that overconfidence in their lap dog media propaganda conduits, they have failed to consider the real outcomes for the public that the media can't hypnotize away. Synthetic entertainment happiness can only be spread so thin before the pinch, pain, spurting arteries of public carnage show up in the street in front of eyes instead of being sanitized by news at 11:00 anchormen. It is to that thin brink that the GOP now pushes the credibility of the formerly trusted media to cover their swindling ways.
Now the GOP has reasoned that holding the U.S. economy hostage with a stinking lie about deficit spending is their easiest route back to power. They figure, openly, that if they screw the economy up still worse than Bush did, that the public will blame the Democrats for it. They fail to even consider the consequences of a ruined economy which their party platform is not capable of fixing. It is not only lazy, it is skirting treason. American diplomatic and military power depends on the economy. To ruin an economy is the goal of strategic warfare. Are you, GOP, at war with the United States? And how are we to believe that if we elect you back to power that you will cease to make war on our country?
Republicans, you made the mess and you don't have a clue how to fix it anymore than Hoover. You absolutely refuse to consider that your philosophy is a demonstrated failure and that it is your philosophy that unemployed more people than were newly employed under the Bush years. It is your philosophy that gave the modern world the two greatest economic calamities it has endured. What thinking citizen would now heed your screeds, much less elect you to office?
But you keep lying your way back into public trust. Lying is easy. Lying works. Lying is lazy.
You've gotten away with this laziness so long that you have forgotten that the last two times you got away with it, implementing your perennially ill conceived and unchanging agenda, that the world was plunged into economic nightmares. You do know that you are repeating the history of the GOP in the Great Depression, advocating austerity and deficit fears before the economy even has its head above water? You do know that a Republican in the back of the unemployment line is a Democrat by the time he reaches the front?
If you do successfully inflict enough pain on the American workforce that they blame the Democrats and elect you, what do you propose to do once elected? You propose that the free market be the government, sit back and let markets solve problems. You do realize that markets have no power other than to establish prices? Markets do not set transformative goals. It takes a vision irrespective of markets to move economies and the world forward. Markets can't move the world forward by themselves, but if the last two great economic calamities are to be learned from, they can destroy the world by themselves.
So what you propose is that spot price fluctuations govern the nation in speculative orgies of booms and bust both large and small. You do realize that averages out to net capital destruction in the long run, as the Great Depression illustrated on a global scale, and the Great Recession looms as its equal?
You, Republicans, are both lazy and shortsighted if you can't counsel the rich that the very nation on which they depend for growing their wealth is powered by the salaries and benefits of the people, to whom they would sell. Some one of you, if you were not all lazy craven bootlicks of the rich, should illustrate to the wildly already rich that their wealth is only valued in an orderly medium of exchange backed by a government responsible to the source of all wealth, labor.
GOP, you use government to extort the public into submission to the will of your overlords. You do not believe in any objectives other than spending tax dollars to enrich you donors through war or health care or petroleum dependence. Out of no seeming reason except laziness, rather than focus on the many real justifications for less government where it might in fact be too big, you sweep away all government, good and bad. In doing so you vote away the futures of middle class aspirants to wealth while you dupe them into thinking you to be on their side.
GOP, you, like Bernie Madoff, are so lazy that you will make no effort more than to formulate the next lie required to get you through fleecing the next mark. Your political contributors, banks, are cut of the same cloth, chasing the low hanging fruit they saw in pushing mortgages on the unqualified because in the heat of the market they couldn't lose. Nor could they lose when their bets were hedged through credit default swaps, except that those swaps were created by bigger liars. Your big oil contributors arranged the perfect oversight for themselves, none. And now BP may cease to exist because the management was motivated by their bonuses rather than by sound governance. Your re-importer business contributors are running to the end of depredation of the largess of U.S. markets and posit not a care at its end, as long as it isn't this quarter. And your robber takeover and merger swindler buddies have created a swath of scorched earth business destruction rivaling the Mongolian Khans, because it was easy. You made it easy by being lazy.
So don't give me your scurrilous polemics about unemployment insurance making people lazy. You, Republicans, in your current Reaganesque incarnation, are the laziest bunch of legislators that this nation has produced in any living person's memory. If you were smart, you wouldn't vote for yourselves.
If you lazy Republicans want to be elected, then by all the things we hold to be self evident, do something to actually help the economy and create jobs! Don't just sit like demented clowns going 'round and 'round on an ideological carousel horse. You could at least get your business buddies to hire some people on the speculation that if everyone else does, the economy would grow by that much exactly.