Killing the New Deal

"The very rich are different from you and me. … they have more money." Ernest Hemingway.

Sometimes the consensus is just so wrong and the facts so twisted that somebody has to say: stop, think before you join the parade. The Restoring Honor rally on the mall on Sunday was just such a wrongheaded mass of twisted facts. Here, as too often, the public is following the shallowest of ranting preachers, pundits and politicians. Neither Glenn Beck nor Sarah Palin knows anything about the source of the money or ideas that they are slave to.

Publicity seekers like Palin and Beck are in fact taking the money and mouthing the cant of billionaires David and Walter Koch and, of course, Rupert Murdoch and Fox news. The Koch brothers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars convincing people to attack the government itself rather than the corporations who own their government.

In the 1930s, President Roosevelt was able to pass the New Deal because he convinced the people that they would be more free and secure if they had a countervailing power in unions, if they had someone watching their food, air and water and if the financial sector were held to a minimum standard of decency. That is, if they had a New Deal.

The very rich have been trying to kill the New Deal from its beginning. The DuPont brothers in the 1930s, exactly like the Koch brothers today, warned of dangerous un-American socialism. The DuPonts set up the Liberty League and the Koch brothers set up Americans for Prosperity. The agenda was the same then as now: lower taxes, smaller government and deregulation. To these billionaire families as well as the Olin and Scaife families, it is supposedly incidental that their agenda is all profit oriented.

The Tea Party is playing its assigned role when it advocates the platform of the very rich. "Lowering taxes" is a code word for budgets balanced on the backs of the poor. "Smaller government" means less services for the needy. "Deregulation of business" means leaving business free to pollute and leaving us choking and poisoned. The very rich are twisting the facts to attack, and if possible, revoke the New Deal.

Over the past 40 years, the very rich have built a powerful political and cultural machine with one purpose: regain control over the wages and working conditions of paycheck families. They expect to achieve this control by taking away the mediating influence of government which now comes between them and "their" workers.

The very rich had little hope of reversing the New Deal unless they could convince those workers that the government was their enemy, that free markets are always equitable and that come job loss, illness or accident they would be able to take care of themselves. It took big bucks to convince them that the disasters of the Bush years were caused by government interference in their lives. But the rich have largely succeeded.

Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works are astroturf groups that are hovering around funding the Tea Partiers even when they don't know it. This is standard practice and includes the Koch brothers founding and funding of the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. The Koch brothers have given hundreds of millions of dollars to their conservative think tanks and institutes. For the very rich, it has been money well spent.

The rally on the mall last week contains all the elements of the battle of the last 80 years. A stealth campaign hides the source of money behind preachers or pundits, a Father Coughlin or a Glenn Beck. The deliberately vague, self-interested agenda favors the very rich. Then that agenda is cloaked in the patriotism of a Liberty League, America First or Americans for Prosperity.

In truth, employees of astroturf groups, and real grassroots organizations like much of the ea Party, often don't know where the agenda comes from anymore than they know who is paying for the buses, the publicity and costly arrangements for their rallies.

It took decades of spending to convince working families that Social Security, the right to organize a union, minimum wage, child labor regulation and Medicare were all bad for them. But the American business community has always been good at false advertising. We got to see just how good on the mall last Sunday.

Be aware, if elected in November the stooges of the rich will repeal the New Deal. Your privatized Social Security will be subject to their manipulation of financial markets, your health care will be dictated by the profit goals of the insurance industry, the well-being of your grandchildren will depend on the level of pollution manufacturers allow themselves and our national security will be set by how much production they feel like off-shoring.

The people with big bucks have purchased too much of our government. The Tea Party is right, we should demand it back.