Is the Conservative movement dead?

After the break Sam Tanenhaus is going to drop by. He’s got a new book out called “The Death of Conservatism”.

There’s a meme that extending across this entire issue. That meme, a thought virus, a concept, an idea that is being promoted in the media that I think is in some ways frankly very toxic, that when Ted Kennedy died, that was the end of it for the Liberals. So we’ve got these interesting dueling memes out here about “The Conservative movement is dead”, “The Liberal movement is dead”. What are we left with? The Corporate movement. And there’s actually some small grain of truth to that.

When you look at the members of Congress, for example, who are being pitched to head up the Banking Committee for example, the Democrats who’s being pitched to head up the Banking Committee took twelve million dollars from banks and affiliated industries. I mean we have, you know, Max Baucus taking millions of dollars from the health industry. He’s writing the Health Bill. We have the best Congress money can buy. Increasingly it doesn’t all that much matter Liberal or Democrat, Conservative or Republican. And all the more the tragedy. And these corporate shills are portraying themselves as Conservatives and they’re playing on the emotions and on the cares of Americans. And it’s just so wrong. It’s just so very wrong.

This is for example. This is Congresswoman Lynn Jenkins. She’s the Republican from Kansas. I don’t know, you may want to go call congress.org, give her office a call, let her know what you think of her, particularly if you’re listening to us in Kansas. I know we have a lot of listeners in Kansas. (video).

A twenty-seven year old uninsured woman by the name of Elizabeth Smith brought her child up to the front, and she didn’t do a very good job of eating the mic as they say in the radio business, you can’t hear it very well. So I’ll tell you what she said, and then you can listen to it, and she says, “I want an option that I can pay for. I work. I pay my bills. I’m not a burden on the state. I pay my taxes. So why can’t I get an affordable option? Why are you against that?” So here’s this woman talking about her concerns. This is Elizabeth Smith, twenty-seven years old uninsured waitress, with a child.

Elizabeth Smith: “I want an option that I can pay for. I work. I pay my bills. I’m not a burden on the state. I pay my taxes. So why can’t I get an affordable option? Why are you against that?”

“Why can’t I get the option?“

Lynn Jenkins: "A government-run program is going to subsidize not only yours but everyone's in this room. So I'm not..."

And then she says, “No it’s not.” And you hear the heckles in the room.

Lynn Jenkins: "So I'm not sure what we're talking about here."

Lynn Jenkins says “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” It comes down to the whole “Ok everybody, we’re going to listen to each other respectfully”, she says.

And then she gets to the, essentially to the gist of the matter, and this is where she says, and I'll tell you in advance what she says, she says, “I believe people should be given the opportunity to take care of themselves with an advanceable tax credit to go be a grown-up and go buy the insurance..” She’s telling this twenty-seven year old uninsured waitress, who is working full-time and has a kid, and isn’t poor enough to qualify for the poverty-level programmes, for Medicare and things like that, but can’t afford health insurance. She’s saying “Grow up and go buy insurance.”

Lynn Jenkins: "We’re gonna all listen to each other respectfully, and we if have to disagree. I think we can agree we need reforms, again it’s just how we gonna do it. I believe people should be given the opportunity to take care of themselves with an advanceable tax credit to go be a grown-up and go buy the insurance."

Yeah. And now here’s the thing that’s so important about that. She’s saying that “This is the so-called Conservative position. Let’s give people an advanceable tax credit". In other words, let’s take government money. Let’s take money that we collect from taxes, or from borrowing, or whatever. Let’s take government money and give it to individuals so that they can give it to the for-profit health insurance companies who can then continue to pay their CEO’s tens of millions of dollars a year. Or in the case of United Health Care, over a hundred million dollars a year, let’s do it that way with the for-profit health insurance companies, which, I bet you dollars to donuts, are kicking something back to Congresswoman Lynn Jenkins, the Republican form Kansas.

You know, let’s just pass that along to them. And this is where just, it gets so, so very bizarre and frankly, tragic. You know, it’s just beyond that; what they are pretending is Conservatism, and they say they’re hewing to the Constitution. I’m sorry, the Constitution says, right in the Constitution, that the Government has the power to levy taxes and appropriate and spend money to provide for the general welfare of the people. Now if keeping people alive, if having the right to life isn’t the general welfare, I don’t know what is. I mean, am I missing something really big here? I mean, this is so…

Congresswoman Jenkins, let’s just….. I’m just curious here. We have Lynn Jenkins, the Republican from Kansas. She’s been in Congress for two years. No, I’m sorry. She’s been in Congress since 1989, and she has apparently, she’s represented Kansas since 2008, so it's less than two years. She’s already raised one million seven hundred thousand dollars. Commercial banks are number one. Leaderships PACs are number two, that would be right wing PACs. Retired people, number three. General contractors, number four. Real estate, number five. Health professionals, number six. Oil and gas. You look at the sector totals, she’s got a third of a million dollars from finance, insurance and real estate.

This woman has only been in Congress a year and a half [since January 3, 2009 - ed.]. She’s a little behind in Defense, it seems, given the rest of them. But you look at the PACs that are giving money to her, she’s getting sixty-six percent of her money from business, thirty-four percent from ideological and single-issue PACs, which are probably the anti-abortion and things like that. And zero percent from labor.

And if you look at her donors, her number one donor QC Holdings. I don’t know what QC Holdings is [payday lending - ed.], but I’d be willing to bet that it has something to do with the healthcare industry, but I don’t know. Wishlist, Federal Credit Council. I mean, here’s the point. You can see, the Freedom Project right-wing think-tank, what you can do if you go to opensecrets.org is you can see who owns your member of Congress. And this is the problem that we ha, is that we don’t have debates in the United States anymore based on Conservative vs. Liberal, or even frankly, historically, Democrat vs. Republican.

What we are seeing over and over and over again with, you know, vigorous enthusiasm, and much damage frankly to the American body politic, is debates based on what’s good for corporations. Now the argument that was made for doing that, and there was an explicit argument made for doing that, back during the Reagan years, during the ‘80’s and the ‘90’s, and during the Clinton era, when Clinton was pushing forward NAFTA, and CAFTA, and all that. Is the old saying that what’s good for GM is good for America. The paraphrased phrase of, I forget who it was, the guy who was the Secretary of Commerce, if I recall, during one of the administrations of in the early '20’s and '30’s. But the point is, that it ain’t.

They have been saying all this time, you know, what’s good for American business is good for America. And what we are seeing is that when American business is tightly regulated, and when the wealthy are not allowed to become obscenely wealthy, because you have a top tax rate of seventy-four percent or ninety-one percent, as we had from 1936 until 1983, then yeah, business grows, the American economy grows, the American middle-class grows.

But when you take off the regulations, when you open the doors to transnational, unlimited competition, when you just blow open the whole thing, and when you start attacking labor and destroying labor. Keep in that when Reagan came into office, a quarter of the American workforce, the private workforce, was organized. Now it’s about eight percent of the private workforce in the United States. When you do that, what you end up with is the working poor. And the debate shifts from being what’s in favor of Republicans and what’s in favor of Democrats, to being what’s best for the corporations. And that’s really what this debate is. Nothing more. What’s best for the corporations, and the conversation about what’s best for the people, that Ted Kennedy kept trying to have, by and large our corporate media doesn’t even let it in.

Transcribed by Gerard Aukstiejus.