Second of Two Parts
BY VERN TURNER
The original draft of this essay intended to compare the 1956 GOP platform with the 2014 Democratic Party platform, but the main intents and points were so similar and parallel that the exercise was underwhelming. Instead, I will compare the ’56 and 2014 GOP platforms to illustrate the distance this party has traveled in its mad dash toward ending the New Deal, reducing the middle classes to serf levels and advance the corruption of our tax system such that the majority burden of taxation falls on the lowest wage earners.
Progressive pundits and real, prize-winning authors have been wailing the warning sirens on this topic of inequality for years. So, why do good, intelligent, hard-working, kind-hearted, well-meaning and patriotic Americans cling to a political entity that is dragging the entire nation’s and world’s economies to the brink of fascist feudalism operated by an oligarchy of plutocrats? Don’t the lessons from Germany’s 1930s debacle have meaning anymore?
It’s about the money, of course, but it’s also about the class warfare that has always existed since the invention of economics. But we are now supposed to be civilized with a sense of caring for one another – the best way to provide quality living for anyone striving to live that good life. Even our original national documents mention “pursuit of happiness.” Why do today’s Republicans keep insisting on a hard life for so many when just a few decades ago they were advocating for the common good?
The New Deal was FDR’s extension of his Uncle Teddy’s Square Deal. The difference was that Teddy’s Republican Party rejected his idea while Franklin had a Democratic Congress to implement it. It worked. The egalitarian and freedom-from-want philosophies were and are wildly popular in the United States and as a model for democratically socialized nations around the world.
While president, Dwight Eisenhower built upon the New Deal and FDR’s “second bill of rights.” Here are comparisons between the ’56 GOP platform and that second “bill of rights”:
President Dwight D. Eisenhower has counseled us further: “In all those things which deal with people, be liberal, be human. In all those things which deal with people’s money, or their economy, or their form of government, be conservative.”
The record of performance of the Republican Administration on behalf of our working men and women goes still further. The Federal minimum wage has been raised for more than two million workers. Social Security has been extended to an additional 10 million workers and the benefits raised for 6½ million. The protection of unemployment insurance has been brought to four million additional workers. There have been increased workmen’s compensation benefits for longshoremen and harbor workers, increased retirement benefits for railroad employees, and wage increases and improved welfare and pension plans for federal employees.
The Eisenhower Administration has enforced more vigorously and effectively than ever before, the laws which protect the working standards of our people.
Workers have benefited by the progress which has been made in carrying out the programs and principles set forth in the 1952 Republican platform. All workers have gained and unions have grown in strength and responsibility, and have increased their membership by two million.
Furthermore, the process of free collective bargaining has been strengthened by the insistence of this administration that labor and management settle their differences at the bargaining table without the intervention of the government. This policy has brought to our country an unprecedented period of labor-management peace and understanding.
We applaud the effective, unhindered, collective bargaining which brought an early end to the 1956 steel strike …
The Eisenhower Administration will continue to fight for dynamic and progressive programs which, among other things, will:
Stimulate improved job safety of our workers, through assistance to the States, employees and employers;
Continue and further perfect its programs of assistance to the millions of workers with special employment problems, such as older workers, handicapped workers, members of minority groups, and migratory workers;
Strengthen and improve the Federal-State Employment Service and improve the effectiveness of the unemployment insurance system;
Protect by law, the assets of employee welfare and benefit plans so that workers who are the beneficiaries can be assured of their rightful benefits;
Assure equal pay for equal work regardless of sex;
Clarify and strengthen the eight-hour laws for the benefit of workers who are subject to federal wage standards on federal and federally-assisted construction, and maintain and continue the vigorous administration of the Federal prevailing minimum wage law for public supply contracts;
Extend the protection of the federal minimum wage laws to as many more workers as is possible and practicable;
Continue to fight for the elimination of discrimination in employment because of race, creed, color, national origin, ancestry or sex;
Provide assistance to improve the economic conditions of areas faced with persistent and substantial unemployment;
Revise and improve the Taft-Hartley Act so as to protect more effectively the rights of labor unions, management, the individual worker, and the public. The protection of the right of workers to organize into unions and to bargain collectively is the firm and permanent policy of the Eisenhower Administration.
In 1954, 1955 and again in 1956, President Eisenhower recommended constructive amendments to this Act. The Democrats in Congress have consistently blocked these needed changes by parliamentary maneuvers. The Republican Party pledges itself to overhaul and improve the Taft-Hartley Act along the lines of these recommendations.
FDR’S SECOND BILL OF RIGHTS
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.
You’ll have noticed the highlighted items that sound very much like today’s Democratic Party platform. Try selling that to today’s GOP. Today, the GOP wants to cut all those benefits, de-fund public education and it despises unions. That “idea,” of course, comes from Reaganomics. Enough said about that.
Taxes? Well, Ike and the GOP cut taxes. They were very proud of that, but look at from whence those tax cuts came:
TOP TAX RATES [TTR]
1913, Income tax amendment passed – TTR was 7% [not the 67% progressives wanted]
1916, Beginning of World War I, TTR was 15%
1918, End of World War I, TTR was 77%
1920-30, TTR fell to 25% [The Great Depression began in 1929]
1932, Progressives defeated bill to have a National Sales Tax as unfair to lower wage earners. (Conservatives still think this is a good idea.)
1932-42, TTR slowly rises to 40%
1942-45, World War II, TR rises to 94%
1946-63, TTR hovers at 90% under Truman and Ike (Ike cut it by 4%; prosperity was everywhere, 3% unemployment.)
1963-64, JFK cuts tax rate to 77% in 1964. [“A rising tide lifts all boats,” he said.]
1980, Reagan cut TTR to 70% … to 50% in 1982 … to 35.8% in 1987 … then to 28% in 1988 … forever earning the title “God of Reaganomics” for the rich. This also kicked off the era of mega-inflation, a recession and $6 trillion of debt. Those rich now spend their excess cash, not on wages and goods, but on buying politicians to keep their advantage while creating even more tax loopholes so as to avoid taxes altogether.
Please note that taxing the rich has proven to create jobs and foster prosperity. Amazing how that works when people have jobs, earn money, pay taxes and consume to fire the engine of capitalist economics. Also note that Ike’s boom was during a rare time of peace in America.
The wildly irresponsible economics in government began with the Reagan Administration’s embracing of Milton Friedman’s foolish and destructive [Nobel Prize] notion of Supply-Side Economics. This philosophy channels capital to the rich, cuts all social programs, outlaws labor unions, privatizes everything and reduces government in size while handing it to the elites who most benefit from the sale of government-operated entities to private parties or other nations.
Today’s Republican Party not only clings to this idea of totally unrestricted, free-market capitalism – the Coolidge/Hoover years also thought this would work, giving us the Great Depression – it also exacerbates the destruction of working classes for the sake of profit for the few.
To make this slow-motion coup d’etat complete, the Bushes and Reagan have appointed Supreme Court justices to warp the law such that money equals speech and corporations equal actual people. A coup d’etat by any other name …
Two warnings of dire consequences from two entirely different people from entirely different times are linked irretrievably because those warnings were ignored.
Karl Marx pointed out that unrestricted capitalism will destroy itself by its own greed. Friedman’s SSE does just that. Eisenhower’s warnings of grave consequences from the influence of the military-industrial complex on American policy have also been ignored. The wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan – wars of choice, based on lies – show how prescient Eisenhower really was.
So, America, how does a greed-motivated, power-mad political locomotive [GOP political policy] get stopped before it carries itself and its train of western civilization over the cliff of history and cause the entrance into a new dark age?
It’s up to us. Europe follows our lead. Asia will simply follow the money. Start by voting and getting your friends to vote, because the lives of your children and grandchildren depend on it.
If the current voting generations don’t fix this slide toward oblivion, it will be too late for the next generations.
– Vern Turner lives in Marble Falls, TX and is a regular contributor to The Oklahoma Observer. His latest book, Racing to the Brink: The End Game for Race and Capitalism, is available through Amazon.com. The first of these two essays can be read here.
