Meredith Tax - The Suicide Caucus: big oil, good ol’ boys & bible punchers

Who engineered the Congressional shutdown that imperiled the world economy?  Meredith Tax looks at an alliance of three groups: big oilmen, Southern oligarchs, and Christian fundamentalists.

while the Koch Brothers, Southern good ol’ boys, & Christian fundamentalists all bear responsibility for the shutdown, none were its sole movers.  The interesting question is the relationship between them— and their relationship to oil.

Bill Moyers, a Southerner himself, has gone so far as to call the shutdown a second effort at secession: “Like the die-hards of the racist South a century and a half ago, who would destroy the union before giving up their slaves, so would these people burn down the place, sink the ship.... At least, let's name this for what it is: sabotage of the democratic process. Secession by another means.”

Whew. It’s over. At least until next time.  At 10:40 PM on Wednesday, Republicans in the US House of Representatives voted to end the shutdown they began so cavalierly on Oct. 1. But not until the world saw the US government screech to a halt and the global economy held hostage by a bunch of irresponsible yahoos who wanted to play chicken with the President, threatening a default on US debts unless he backed down on the Affordable Care Act.

Observers from Bill Moyers to Andrew Sullivan to John McCain pointed out that the shutdown was unconstitutional. The Affordable Care Act was passed twice by Congress, signed by a President who had just been re-elected by a substantial majority, and approved by the Supreme Court. That makes it law. Congress is constitutionally obligated to fund laws once they are passed.  

But Tea Party Republicans have their own interpretation of the Constitution, and were unmoved by the misery they caused by putting eighty thousand federal employees on furlough, shutting down infant feeding programs, holding up subsistence money to Indian reservations, and closing Head Start and daycare centers.  Damage to US prestige has also been extensive, and there is talk in China of going off the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

What caused such a mess?  US liberals and leftists have offered three main explanations of the debacle.

Explanation 1: The shutdown was caused by a capitalist cabal of climate-denying, big government-hating, welfare-cutting libertarian oil magnates and international capitalists, led by the Koch Brothers of Wichita, Kansas.  This position was laid out by an investigative report by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Mike McIntire in the New York Times, and echoed in a recent openDemocracy interview with Colin Greer.  According to the Times, the shutdown plan was hatched by former Attorney General Edwin Meese and Michael Needham of Heritage for America, the recipient of a half million in Koch Brothers money.  Other groups involved include Tea Party Patriots, Americans for Prosperity, Freedomworks, and the Club for Growth—all also funded by David and Charles Koch. 

And who are the Koch Brothers? Their father, a founder of the John Birch Society, set up oil refineries under Stalin, saw his associates purged, and  became convinced that socialism—which he saw as identical to big government—was the source of all the world’s ills.  His sons David and Charlie are billionaire oilmen, and, according to a 2010 New Yorker profile, “longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests.”  The Koch brothers are often cited as an example of the unprecedented power of capital in US politics since the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision removed limits on corporate campaign contributions. 

Explanation 2: The shutdown was a rational expression of the class interests of the old Southern oligarchy, descendents of slave owners, who are scared by the fact that white men are now a minority and hope to keep control over their local turf and its people by weakening the federal government. This position has been developed by Michael Lind in Salon & Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker.

Noting that the shutdown Congressmen come from electoral districts that differ demographically from the rest of the country, Ryan Lizza says, “The members of the suicide caucus live in a different America from the one that most political commentators describe when talking about how the country is transforming. The average suicide caucus district is seventy-five per cent white, while the average House district is sixty-three per cent white. Latinos make up an average of nine per cent of suicide-district residents, while the over-all average is seventeen per cent.”  And a majority of them come from Texas and the South, former slave states.

The long term economic strategy of the Southern white elite has been to attract investment by holding down wages, crushing labour unions, and skimping on social services to keep taxes low.  They use voter suppression to keep blacks and immigrants from voting, particularly since a June 2013 Supreme Court decision invalidated parts of the Voters Rights Act.  And, says Michael Lind, if these tactics are not enough, their representatives in Congress can try to stop new federal programmes that would help the working poor of the South by “devolving federal programs to the states, privatizing federal programs like Social Security and Medicare, blocking the implementation of new federal entitlements like Obamacare.”.. read more: http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/meredith-tax/suicide-caucus-big-oil-good-ol%E2%80%99-boys-and-bible-punchers