Dr. J.'s Commentary: Whom the GOP Serves

One of Ronald Reagan's first acts on his first full day in office, January 21, 1981, was to completely shut down the alternate/renewable energy program that Jimmy Carter established in the late 1970s. At that time, a few scientists were already predicting global warming, but there was little data and most of what was going on was in the realm of hypothesis. What was known for sure at that time was that however much more oil and other fossil fuels were eventually discovered, they would eventually run out. There is only a finite supply of the stuff in the Earth. The only variable is that we don't know just how much there is or how much it would cost to extract every last ounce of it. At some time, if civilization were to be preserved, other sources of energy had to be developed. Furthermore, if all of the petrochemicals were burned up, much of the stuff of modern life, from plastics to pharmaceuticals, would disappear as well.

So Carter was more likely to be thinking about "peak oil" than he was about global warming when he set up the alternative energy research program and when he had solar panels, pretty primitive ones in those days, installed on the roof of the White House. Of course, those panels went pretty quickly too.

After a lifetime as a "B" movie actor, a hawker of cigarettes, and a shill for the AMA when in the mid-1960s it was going after Medicare as meaning the death of American medicine and the imminent arrival of socialism on these shores, Ronald Reagan was given his biggest role, first as the acting (not Acting, unfortunately) Governor of California and then as the acting (again not Acting) President. (I cannot take credit for the appellation. It is the title of a book by Bob Schieffer and Gary Paul Gates that does not treat Reagan too kindly. Yes, indeed that is that Bob Schieffer, who in his old age has morphed into the political equivalent of Casper Milquetoast. My contemporaries will know who that was.) He was given that role by those elements of the U.S. power elite that have dominated the GOP since his election.

On Nov. 8, 1956, after his re-election, President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously said: "Should any political party attempt to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid." Unfortunately, Eisenhower was wrong.

If global warming, produced primarily by the uncontrolled burning of fossil fuels, especially petroleum, eventually does us in, and perhaps along with us many of the rest of the Earth's species, he will have been proved to have been dead wrong. (If you want to be truly terrified about what we may well face, see Scientists: Pace of Climate Change Exceeds Estimates, Sunday, 15 February 2009, by Kary Lydersen in The Washington Post, not some wild left-wing outlier.) The group first coalesced around Goldwater, then Nixon, although he wasn't really their guy no matter how much of an anti-commie he was, because he brought in agencies such as the Environmental Protection Administration and legislation such as the Clean Water Act. They found their ideal mouthpiece in Reagan.

Since the Reagan election, without wavering, the GOP has been serving the interests of Big Oil and the other elements of what I call the "extractive industries." They are, in addition, coal, big lumber, and mineral mining. Then there is the military/industrial complex, also famously identified by President Eisenhower as a threat to both American democracy and the then American way of life. That way of life, by the way, imperfect as it may have been in such realms as segregation and the pervasiveness of white supremacy, and paying for health care, was characterized by a fairly broad level of prosperity and job security for white workers. Why? The major reasons were a relatively high level of trade union representation and high marginal taxes on the wealthy, both supported by Eisenhower, who is looking better and better in the rear view mirror.

Following the military/industrial complex in historical development has been the prison/industrial complex. Its rise was fueled by the so-called "War on Drugs," really a war on non-white users of certain drugs, such as heroin and cocaine (not others such as nicotine in cigarettes and alcohol, which are much more damaging on a population basis). Approximately 75% of the users of the "illicit drugs" are white; approximately 75% of persons imprisoned for drug-related offense are non-white. It has served both for-profit prison operators and state systems, for political purposes. In California, the state system supplies so much employment that when this past year there was an initiative that called for the moderation of some of the most draconian of the state's "drug" laws in favor of treatment of non-violent offenders, the prison guards' union mounted an advertising campaign against it. But the GOP makes the most political hay out of the "drug war." In certain states, the party also uses the war to disenfranchise non-white voters who are "convicted felons" under the drug laws. A Bush follow-on for the prison/industrial complex was the creation of the national security state that, if it is ever implemented on a broad scale against American regime-opponents, would provide a bonanza for this complex.

This is the primary three-legged stool that the GOP serves now. It has until very recently served the interests of the financial industry, with the repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act having allowed investment banks to get into the mortgage business without having to meet reserve requirements anywhere near what commercial banks have to meet, and the massive de-regulation that began under Reagan, which was continued, interestingly enough under Clinton, but then became a steamroller under Bush II. But with the collapse that these Republican policies directly lead to, the financial industry is looking more and more to the regulated markets that will once again be created, to a greater or lesser extent, under Obama. Likewise the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, which have flourished under the Republicans since the time of Reagan, are now seeing the handwriting on the wall and moving towards some kind of accommodation with some sort of national health insurance program.

So, while there are of course variations at the margins, the core of GOP support is to be found among these three major elements of the power elite: the extractive industries, the military/industrial complex, and the prison/industrial complex. That they are now running the Republican Party has been made very clear by the "debate" over the stimulus package, and will be made even more clear as such other major problems, such as climate change, are tackled by the Obama Administration. We shall stay tuned.

Steven Jonas, MD, MPH is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY) and a www.TPJmagazine.us Contributing Author; a regular Columnist for BuzzFlash; a Special Contributing Editor for Cyrano's Journal Online; a Contributing Columnist for the Project for the Old American Century, POAC; and a Featured Writer for Dandelion Salad http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/.    

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