As Nation Mourns, GOP Shoves Through Political Agenda

by Randolph T. Holhut

Hyperbole? Read the following words from House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas) regarding the attacks. He said them to Pat Robertson on his 700 Club TV program in early October.

"It's really unfortunate that it's happened," DeLay said. "But, at the same time, the opportunity that this has presented to us is unbelievable."

While DeLay was talking mainly about the need for, as he put it, "our culture to come back and be centered on God and renewed," he was really talking about the Republicans finally getting a chance to advance its hard right agenda while everyone is preoccupied with the "War on Terrorism."

The weeks since Sept. 11 have been a bonanza for the right. The hyper-patriotism around the country has rendered honest dissent about the conduct of U.S. foreign policy as treasonous. Police powers have been expanded to a degree previously unimaginable and the most noxious elements of Bush's domestic policies are being rammed through Congress with little opposition.

The Wall Street Journal tipped the GOP's hand the week after the attacks on its editorial page, when it urged President Bush and Republicans in Congress to take advantage of "a unique political moment when Americans of all stars and stripes are uniting behind their president" and push for more tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, revving up Star Wars, passage of the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas and getting as many conservative judges on the federal bench as possible.

As for the legitimate post-Sept. 11 concerns such as improving airport security, beefing up our public health system and taking care of the workers who have lost their jobs in the ever-expanding recession, the GOP has done almost nothing.

One can argue that past conservative policies that have gutted the public sector over the past two decades are playing into the hands of terrorists. Basic public infrastructure in the U.S. has gone to hell over the years because in the conservative world, government should not have a role in the public sphere. That's why half the states in the U.S. don't have federally-trained bioterrorism experts, why there aren't enough anthrax vaccines to inoculate the entire U.S. military, let alone all of the civilian population, why the federal Environmental Protection Agency is years behind schedule in developing a plan for protecting water supplies from bioterrorism, and why the Food and Drug Administration is equally unprepared for protecting the nation's food supply from contamination by bioterrorists. The federal government spent less than $50 million last year on improving the nation's local and state public health infrastructure, a laughably small amount compared to the more than $300 billion that was spent on the military.

A little more money invested in public health might have closed some of the rips in the social fabric that terrorists have been able to exploit with the ongoing anthrax scare. But shoring up our public infrastructure would take away from the real priority of President Bush and the GOP -- shoveling as much money as possible into the hands of the wealthy and corporations.

The $100 billion "economic stimulus" that the House GOP is pushing is a prime example of this. Only $2.3 billion is earmarked for helping the folks who lost their jobs as the American economy slides into recession. But $54 billion is going for huge tax cuts for the richest 30 percent; half of that to the richest 2 percent. These are the people that already got most of President Bush's big tax cut from earlier this year.

Repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) will cost us $25 million next year, which -- according to the non-partisan Congressional Research Service -- benefits companies such as IBM (about $1.4 billion), General Motors ($833 million), General Electric ($671 million), Chevron Texaco ($572 million) and Enron ($254 million). These and other companies would not only no longer pay any federal taxes, they would also receive a rebate for all the AMT money they paid over the past 15 years -- the numbers quoted above are what those five companies alone would get back in rebates.

For example, to be considered a "terrorist," under this law, you only have to do three things -- break a state or federal law, commit an act "dangerous to human life" in the process of breaking that law and the act must "appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce" a civilian population and/or the government. Under this interpretation, a sit-in at a federal building or at the front gate of a military base could easy be trumped up into an act of "domestic terrorism."

The USA PATRIOT Act expands the ability of federal agencies to conduct surveillance and wiretapping operations, including the reading e-mails, stored messages and files and tracking Internet browsing habits. The feds can perform secret searches of suspects' homes without warrants and people can be detained indefinitely without being charged with any crime if they're "suspected" of having an association with "terrorists."

There's little in this law that will prevent future terrorist acts. But it does give the government almost unlimited power to spy on its citizens and silence any person who disagrees with what his nation's leaders are doing in his name. Squelching dissent is something that the right-wingers love almost as much as cutting taxes for the rich or cutting public spending.

These last few weeks have been disheartening. The opportunism of the hard right to use the anger and the grief over the dead in New York, Pennsylvania and the Pentagon as a smoke screen to reward its friends and punish its enemies should disgust every American, regardless of political affiliation. In a time of crisis, Americans deserve better from their leaders than this.