Nazis Rally in Tampa! Demand Hated Right-wing Dictatorship of the 1%
Republican National Convention: A celebration of reaction
By Patrick Martin
30 August 2012
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/aug2012/repu-a30.shtml
Excerpts:
The Republican National Convention opened Tuesday in Tampa, Florida and quickly concluded its main business, endorsing an ultra-right political platform and rubber-stamping the nomination of Mitt Romney as the Republican presidential candidate.
The general tenor of the Republican convention was set by the keynote speech delivered Tuesday night. The hard-line right-wing message found an appropriate human repository in the thuggish persona of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. His theme was that politicians had to choose between being respected and being loved.
Politicians of both parties, he declared, “have decided it is more important to be popular, to do what is easy and say ‘yes,’ rather than to say ‘no’ when ‘no’ is what’s required.” Now, he argued, at this Republican convention, “we choose respect over love.”
According to Christie, it is necessary to say “no” to the expectations and needs of the American people—to slash the jobs, wages and benefits of public employees; eliminate teacher tenure and gut public education; and cut spending on entitlement programs for the poor, the sick and the elderly.
The New Jersey governor claimed that the people of his state “stepped up and shared in the sacrifice,” although not a penny was extracted from the super-rich or big business. The entire burden of budget cuts and deficit reduction—$132 billion in a single state, by Christie’s boasting account—was imposed on the backs of working people.
He claimed that his policies were popular in the state, although opinion polls consistently show majority opposition to his drastic deficit reduction measures and growing hostility to Christie personally. Only the collaboration of the Democratic Party, which still controls the state legislature, and the treachery and cowardice of the public employee unions has enabled the Republican governor to sustain his chosen posture as the bully of New Jersey politics.
An incoming Republican administration in Washington would carry out similar measures, Christie declared. “We believe in telling our seniors the truth about our overburdened entitlements,” he said. The truth, in fact, is that the so-called crisis in Social Security and Medicare is the product not of inexorable demographic trends, but the insatiable profit drive of Wall Street. Finance capital looks upon these social programs, the last remnant of the era of social reform in America, as a source for more bailouts and more raids on the public treasury to prop up the banks and the financial oligarchy.
Christie made no reference to the Wall Street crash of 2008 or the economic crisis that followed it. The words “recession,” “slump,” “unemployment,” “foreclosure” and “eviction” never crossed his lips, let alone “poverty,” “homelessness” or “hunger.”
There are two concerns revealed in Christie’s emphasis on “respect” over being “loved.” The short-term issue is that the Republican Party and its nominee, Mitt Romney, are deeply unpopular. One recent survey showed that despite hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising by the Romney campaign and pro-Republican super-PACs, only 35 percent of those polled had a positive impression of Romney.
More fundamentally, Christie, Romney & Co. are well aware that the measures demanded by the American financial aristocracy—which calls the tune in both the Democratic and Republican parties—will provoke massive resistance among working people.
There is no way to make popular the destruction of working class living standards and social conditions to finance ever-greater tax cuts for the wealthy and big business. To carry through these measures will require dictatorial methods.