https://www.youtube.com/...
I thought I knew something of the extent to which Cheney and Halliburton has screwed this country-- its taxpayers, its military, its security. In the name of privatization, of "the free market" increasing efficiency and innovation, these politicians awarded billions in contracts to Halliburton on a "cost plus" basis, meaning that whatever they spent, it would be repaid, with a percentage of profits on top, giving them the means and opportunity to waste as much as they possibly could to increase their profits-- guaranteed. They had literally no incentive whatsoever to do the jobs they were contracted to do, and there was no reason to think they had the capacity to do them in the first place; the only qualification was "they're one of us" and the more they could cheat, the more "our sort" would make off with. Please, if you have ever had the slightest sympathy for conservative economic arguments, familiarize yourself with the way the Republican Party actually instantiated ideals of efficiency and innovation when they had the opportunity to remove control from "wasteful" government oversight. "Government" can't be allowed to "pick winners and losers" since the market must define success; but every single ill Republicans assign to the evils of "big government bureaucracy" was in fact embodied in the no-bid, insider deal that gave this private company a free hand with the public funds. If you think that right wing politicians care about the American military, watch what they actually did to it, in the persons of the American soldiers they were munificently paid to feed, house, launder, supply, and transport.
Everyone with the least knowledge of military affairs knows that logistics are crucial to military success-- yet the people in charge of the US military allowed their entire logistical apparatus to be taken over by people who had neither experience, nor capacity, nor motivation to do the job well, and persisted in handing them billions of dollars even after it was proved they were doing a terrible job and overcharging for it exponentially. $99/bag for laundry done so badly soldiers started washing their own in the sink, only to be forbidden to do so; Marines showering daily in water seething with contaminants; soldiers lining up every day at the same time to die like ducks in a row, because it was cheaper for Halliburton to keep them waiting in half-mile lines at the same time every day rather than feed them 24 hours as the military did. Their version of free market competition has nothing to do with rewarding hard work or innovation or good ideas; Halliburton essentially hired a bunch of American workers, truck drivers and mechanics and secretaries, to play the role of workers while in fact wasting as much money as humanly possible while presenting a halfassed appearance of doing some job they had a contract to do, while callously risking their lives and taking advantage of their confidence that a big Fortune 500 company with important politicians on their side wouldn't throw their lives away. Workers who complained that they weren't doing the job they had been hired to do were told to shut up and enjoy wasting more money; Halliburton did exactly the job that a monopoly supplier of any good or service will do when their profits are increased by waste, and they were a monopoly supplier of EVERYTHING from clean laundry to potable water to reliable intelligence, no matter how little performance or competence they supplied at ANY of those things. And the people in charge of this debacle were not ignorant of these facts; they knew they were trading lives, both military and civilian, for policies maximizing Halliburton's take. They just didn't care; the "sob stories" of individual human beings suffering and dying, of their families left bereft and unsupported, just weren't important compared to the profit bonanza. "Sob stories" is what a right-wing talk radio host said mocking the results of taking healthcare coverage away from millions of people; he complained about having to endure "sob stories" about "who is dying of what".
There isn't much I can think of that's more immoral than discounting the suffering and death of fellow human beings as unimportant-- just an "operating cost" of policies that make more money for people with money to invest. If you're an employee, or if you're in the military, or if you're just an ordinary decent human being, your suffering and death means nothing to these people except something to mock-- who cares if you die? Not your employer, not under Republican policies; not the government, not under Republican politicians. Of course the deaths of their OWN family members would be important-- yours, if your daddy was not in Skull and Bones, is silly sentimentality that "we can't afford".
We can't afford another Republican administration. They wasted more money on the Iraq meat-grinder, killing people like you and me, Americans and Iraqis, than it would cost to fund the entire social safety net-- because Americans don't seem to understand that the safety net is for everyone, and part of its function is to put a "floor" underneath people's desperation for survival, so they will not allow employers to send them places where they will die in order to earn enough to make their children safe from need. The first "laissez faire" economists were actually involved in forcing people off the land in order to leave them no option other than accepting a large landowner's wages-- it drove them bonkers that peasants with a share in a common could fall back on a common to sustain their lives, which they saw as "producing idleness and vice" if people could live in any other way than whatever wage the landlord saw fit to give them. How dare you live, unless you wring bare subsistence from an employer who will pay as little as he can possibly get away with? If we owners do not find you useful enough to pay you, how dare you continue to breathe by raising your own food or grazing a cow or feeding a pig on the common fields and forest shared by your grandparents and parents and everyone else in that village? After all, your life is just idleness and vice, unless a boss is using you in order to create profits for someone else; only by destroying the means of small scale subsistence, making the choice "work for me or starve," could they compel most people to accept work so ill paid, and under such demeaning and dangerous conditions.
Adam Smith and his ilk saw a free person whose life they were not turning into wage slavery and equated it with a fallow resource, a gold seam lying in the ground with no one turning it into money, but they weren't going to pay those peasants enough to make them choose to sell their labor rather than keep it for themselves; they had to destroy that choice, and impose on every laboring person a slavery of necessity and desperation. Large scale farming landlords hated nothing so much as the peasantry growing "saucy"-- since they were, on the view of Victorian upper-class capitalists, inherently lazy and vicious, they must be made to work. Republican politicians echo this same ideology every time they rail about the lazy poor and how they don't deserve better wages-- if they were worth anything, they'd get better jobs!--while neglecting the shameful spectacle of people working themselves to death trying to make an honest living for themselves and those that depend on them. I remember George W. Bush beaming warmly at a woman who told him she worked three jobs to feed her kids, saying how wonderful it was that she did so, although it meant her children raised themselves and never saw a mother; and last year, mocking a protest by fast-food workers asking for a living wage, Fox News commentators loudly complaining that if the minimum wage was not enough to feed a family, then people working those jobs should not HAVE families. As though having a family to support were some sort of optional luxury, an indulgence they should have to be rich to deserve, rather than an obligation that happens to people whether they like it or not, a moral claim only the immoral and selfish reject, like Clarence Thomas mocking his sister for caring for their mother on welfare while he did nothing to support either his mother or the sister caring for her in illness.
Here's an alternate approach: Let's fix the system so that everyone can survive at a basic level-- where your decisions aren't motivated by the desperate fear of you or your family dying on the street-- and then fix the jobs so that they pay well enough, and are safe enough, that people who aren't in fear of starving to death will take them. There will be some people who won't work for other people at all, but most people want something to do, want to be appreciated by others, want to be useful, and want more than basic subsistence. Supporting whatever number of "idle" poor (meaning, people who are not providing their labor to others in order for others to make a profit from their labor) will be much, much cheaper than what we do now, which is provide enormous amounts of money for rich people under the assumption that rich people will of course do what's best for everyone who is worth anything to them, meaning, as far as they are concerned, everyone who deserves to live at all. The amount of money we spend "saving" poor people from their own "laziness" and "immorality" is staggering, all because we have bought into a Victorian prejudice that assumes that every human individual's life is a grave moral failure, an affront to God, if it is not regimented and disciplined into productivity by their "betters", a productivity which benefits their owners.
Of course, it is only the poor who are presumed to be lazy and morally vicious; as long as someone is rich, not only is it permissible for them to live without working, they are presumed to be superior beings who will work anyway-- not because most human beings would rather work than do nothing, but because they are special and better than poor people. Of course, the fact that the rich will work has nothing to do with the fact that they can choose some work they enjoy, and leave it if they find it unfulfilling or its conditions irksome, nor that the jobs that they deign to do are much safer, more comfortable, more interesting, and better paid. In short, jobs a reasonable normal person might choose to do rather than do nothing. And of course, the fact that people don't want to work for minimum wage for McDonald's has nothing to do with the fact that the work is dangerous, ridiculously underpaid, subject to managers' whims for scheduling and constant petty supervision-- literally jobs no one would do if they had a choice, because they don't pay enough to live AND make your life miserable. No, no, no-- it's just that the rich are better, more moral, and deserve better lives, with work that is worth doing to them, while if you aren't independently wealthy you are lazy, presumed to be worthless, a fallow resource no one is using, who shouldn't have been born, and who has no excuse for continuing to live.
The ideology at work in right wing "laissez faire" capitalism is just this: If you don't have to do what we want you to do, you won't, and since you are naturally worthless and perverse and immoral, we have to make you do what we want to make our factories run and provide us services we desire; your own purposes, whatever you would do with your life if you weren't working several part time minimum wage jobs, have no value whatsoever. You'd just spend your time raising your children, or looking after your elderly or sick, or going to church, or some other activity that may be nice for you and your family, but don't make a dime for my investment income, and there's NO excuse for that. Your only legitimate reason for existence is that capital doesn't transform itself into income without someone doing some labor, so someone must labor, and since labor must exist in order to create investment income, it is your only excuse for living. If you won't work for us, for whatever is the least amount we can possibly give for your time, then you have no reason to exist; if you keep breathing, without working for us, you might as well be stealing from us. Rich people can be trusted to work, and it's fine if they only ever do work they want to do, even if that work is paid for by the taxes on your labor, but poor people's lives are owed to rich people, and you ought to be grateful if they let you work for them-- that is, exist-- at all.
Just as only the rich are allowed to be idle, only they are allowed to enjoy leisure. The Industrial Revolution depended on the enclosure of the commons, which removed the last resort of the poor to live on their own labor on terms other than those employers were willing to grant, and those employers literally viewed the working class as subhuman, lives that had no right to exist, lives the mere continuance of which was immoral absent their labor being extracted for the benefit of their employers. Anyone who lived off what their own work can wring from a share in a local common set a bad example of living for their own purposes, not someone else's, and this was a fundamental affront to the wealthy farmers and employers of the nascent "free market" system. Living from what one could grow, or graze, or gather from one's share of a common was supporting oneself, but that independence was anathema, "producing idleness and vice". (Only the rich deserve to knock back a few whiskies to blow off steam-- if you do it, it's drunkenness, damaging how much labor can be extracted from you, or even damaging your constant ability to worry about making sure you make yourself valuable to your owner!) You must never forget your dependence on his goodwill or question his disposition of your life and labor, as independence is only a virtue in owners, not in workers; workers "need" harsh discipline and the spur of desperation to motivate them to fulfil their purpose, obedience to their superiors, service to whom is their only virtue. The entire point of enclosures was to destroy the ability of poor people to live independently of the wage system-- how can you make a gigantic profit exploiting people in sweatshops if they see it is possible to survive at all without them?
It doesn't have to be this way. Denmark has a strong economy and its government doesn't even have to impose a minimum wage, because they don't fall into the ideological trap of despising poor people and allowing the rich to exploit them; everyone's labor is deemed to be worth about $20/hour, no matter what they're doing, and that's how much employers expect to pay people to spend their time working for someone else rather than doing whatever else they would do with that time. They have extremely robust unemployment insurance, reliable social safety nets for people in trouble, and universal healthcare. People making the very least amount of income for a full time job can afford to buy goods and pay for services; they can even support a family; Danish businesses don't all go broke, because everyone has discretionary income, not just the richest people, and thus they can use a lot more goods and pay for more services. It costs our economy a lot to keep people in dire poverty-- a nation full of middle class incomes simply supports a much larger economy than a nation of mostly wage-slaves with a tiny number of rich people. Giving more money and power to the richest people does not, never has, and never will make the economy grow; it both makes the whole pie smaller AND reduces the amount of that pie which the majority controls.
This is not a complicated fact; it's actually a rather simple piece of reasoning from easily observable evidence, yet Americans allow themselves to be frightened, bamboozed, threatened, and tricked into believing that "we" will all be better off when those "bad" poor people are all punished into either wage-slavery or death. The Republican politicians keep invoking the racial, ethnic, or cultural Other and blaming Them as though they were the ones making Americans poorer than we ought to be; but we aren't poor because there are other poor people, we are poor because our rich don't think we deserve to live for ourselves rather than for their profits. When the rich say we, with that wink and nudge, they don't mean we white people, they mean we rich people; they are not going to pay white Americans a living wage just as soon as they get rid of all the brown ones. Social safety nets don't bankrupt this nation, but war profiteering, starvation on wage slavery, and every-man-for-himself/Devil take-the-hindmost reasoning has bankrupted us morally even as it prevents us from realizing greater wealth and better lives for ordinary, normal, decent people who just want to work a full week and live a decent life on a respectable income.