Calling BS on the GOP
We’ve got give republicans credit for perpetuating the lies. The problem is, most people believe them.
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
Republicans are trying to hammer home to potential voters that everything wrong with America is Democrats’ fault.
Tune into any debate between a Democrat and republican, or even just an interview with any random republican today, and we will hear several grievances.
Grievance 1: Crime is “out of control” because of Democrats’ “soft-on-crime policies”.
As former labor secretary Robert Reich explains in a recent piece in The Guardian:
“This is pure rubbish. Rising crime rates are due to the proliferation of guns, which Republicans refuse to control.”
When Democrats are in power, republican lawmakers, candidates, and right-wing hate media dust off the tried-and-true greatest hit of “Democrats are coming for your guns,” despite the fact it has never happened nor ever will.
As a result, gun sales spike.
Naturally, then, since “Democrats are coming for your guns,” crime rates must skyrocket.
And, of course, “it’s all Democrats’ fault!”
Actually...
2019 to 2020, violent crime rose 28%; gun homicides increased 35%. States that have relaxed gun laws have experienced surges in gun crime.
Recent data from the centrist think tank Third Way reveals republican-led states report significantly higher homicide rates; some of the highest murder rates exist in cities with republican mayors.
Eight of the 10 states with the highest per-capita murder rates voted for Donald Trump.
None of those states have voted Democratic since 1996, ironically two years after former president Bill Clinton signed the controversial federal crime bill responsible for harsher sentences and ballooning mass incarceration.
Major Democratic-run cities spend 38% more per person on policing than republican-led ones. 2019 to 2022, 80% of the largest cities increased police funding.
But republicans and their propagandists keep trotting out the lie that crime in “Democrat-run cities is rampant,” and have convinced enormous swaths of voters they are not safe so long as Democrats are in power.
Then it’s all because of “bail reform laws,” they pivot.
There is no correlation between progressive prosecutors’ policies and crime rate fluctuations.
According to recent data, re-arrest rates have remained stable wherever bail reforms have been instituted.
It’s a convenient fallacy republicans engage in to dupe low-information voters by frightening them with the modern-day equivalent of the Willie Horton ads.
Grievance 2: Democrats “out-of-control spending” and “wage increases” are responsible for inflation.
Let’s not forget, there was a once-a-century global pandemic that literally shut down shipping ports and increased demand for which there was not enough supply.
We can’t return to the way things were the beginning of 2020 by flipping a switch no matter how much we want to do that.
It’s no surprise China owns our manufacturing, and when Chinese ports shut down, we were hurting.
We’re still hurting.
Plus, don’t forget, Russia invaded Ukraine in February, and that war is still raging.
With the COVID-19 pandemic interrupting manufacturing supply chains, people are experiencing the impact other countries’ domestic affairs have on them.
Russian aggression against Ukraine is demonstrating that a conflict half a world away can have devastating consequences for nations far removed from any bloodshed.
Known as the “breadbasket of the world,” Ukraine is the world’s sixth largest wheat exporter.
Before the Russian invasion, it shipped 4.5 million tonnes of agricultural produce through the Sea of Azov and Black Sea ports each month.
Now it ships only 1 to 1.5 million tonnes.
The primary domestic driver of inflation is corporate greed.
American corporate profits are the highest they’ve been since 1950 while wages have remained mostly stagnant, which isn’t stopping the economic royalists from jacking up their costs simply because they can.
But, sure, go on blaming Democrats.
Why not?
Grievance 3: “Democrats voted to hire an army of IRS agents who will audit and harass the middle class!”
More B.S.
Fox’s favorite prime-time fascist Tucker Carlson claimed a provision in the Inflation Reduction Act to provide the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) $80 billion over ten years to ensure Americans making over $400,000 aren’t gaming the system is, in effect, “hiring another 87,000 armed IRS agents just to make sure that you obey.”
Not even remotely accurate.
The IRA does not mention hiring 87,000 IRS agents.
It does not state anything about arming agents.
No one is going to “spy on your bank accounts”.
Something the IRA seeks to accomplish is replenishing the IRS enforcement staff that has been cut 30% in the last 12 years despite a population increase.
The only armed IRS agents will be ones who have been traditionally responsible for criminal investigations.
For a party so obsessed with “law and order,” one would assume republicans would be all in favor of criminal investigations.
Just not the kinds of criminals they want investigated.
Tax cheats and the economic royalists whom the republican party solely serves are going to have to pay more, and that’s just a bridge too far.
Grievance 4: “Gas prices are all Biden’s fault!”
Don’t be surprised to see gasoline soar to over five dollars a gallon or higher again as they where this spring.
In some places, like California, Nevada, and Hawaii, they already are.
While there are steps Congress can take and has taken, and decisions the president can make regarding how we navigate the Faustian milieu multi-billion-dollar fossil fuel corporations control, the fact is the President of the United States does not control global gas prices.
That is not something most people know or choose to acknowledge, especially when there is a wealthy corporate media infrastructure beholden to fossil fuel interests refusing to dispel the assumption.
The international fossil fuel puppet master is the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and the timing of its decision this week to cut two-million barrels a day from production is likely not a coincidence.
Congress and the Biden administration successfully drove down fuel costs this summer.
The Inflation Reduction Act seeks to invest about $385 billion in energy and climate change incentives that include tax credits for solar and wind energy equipment production and electric vehicles purchases, and will create up to nine million new good-paying union jobs in the renewable energy field to reduce carbon emissions 40% by 2030.
The landmark legislation is also requiring companies that report more than $1 billion in profits (including those that deal in fossil fuels) to pay a 15% minimum corporate tax rate, and wealthy shareholders will pay a 1% tax on stock buybacks.
Do you believe the powers that be controlling our energy supply are eager to see any attempts to cut into their profits?
Do you think they aren’t aware their days are numbered?
Do you assume they’re seeing countries’ efforts to reduce carbon emissions as benign?
Can you imagine they’re excited the United States finally has a leader seriously confronting the climate crisis?
Not on your life.
They’re aware the United States’ republican party works solely for the corporations, especially those engaged in our environmental demise.
So why would those same corporations and countries loyal to them refuse to assist the party working on their behalf?
The November 8th general election is a month away, and if there is anything we have learned about electoral politics, it’s that every month before an election there is some sort of “October surprise” that threatens to tip the scale in favor of the party struggling to gain or maintain power.
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) may have just delivered it.
Oil production has increased on Biden’s watch despite what republicans insist absent evidence.
There are 9,600 active leases on fed lands where oil companies, sitting on record profits of $46 billion and using 40% of it to buy back their own stock to enrich their executives, could be drilling and aren’t.
Despite this, we currently export 800,000 barrels of refined gas a day to Brazil and Mexico.
Alan Zibel, Public Citizen research director and author of the new report, “Fossil Fuels Are the Problem, Not the Solution,” explained:
“Over the past decade, the fossil fuel industry has reoriented itself to prioritize profits from consumers overseas, jacking up prices for American consumers, while putting the climate at peril, exploiting public lands and leaving marginalized Gulf Coast communities in the lurch.”
He argues rapidly reducing our fossil fuel reliance is the ideal way to remedy this, a goal the Biden administration aspires to achieve with its new infrastructure spending.
And, there’s that war in Ukraine again, which has upset global fuel markets.
All republicans have is fear, outrage, and grievance.
Since most Americans are woefully uninformed, thanks to a corporate-owned mainstream media, they are rife for exploitation from right-wing hate media and the republicans vying for its approval with lies and subterfuge.
Instead of breaking down the reasons people are struggling, the corporate media opts instead for low-hanging fruit like Hunter Biden’s laptop “scandal” and fear of “CRT.”
It’s lazy, cheap, and, worst of all, dangerous.
Americans deserve a media that will serve the public interest, as it used to do before several federal administrations relaxed telecommunications’ broadcasting and licensing regulations.
The result is the dearth of a truly progressive media infrastructure that can compete with the titanic infrastructure the millionaire- and billionaire-backed right-wing media has been able to construct.
Right-wing outlets have done such a successful job hammering home the lie that any other mainstream outlet not them is de facto “liberal” that the presumably “liberal” outlets tack further to the right to avoid being accused of it.
These four lies are just a fraction of the damage being inflicted.