Republican presidential debate highlights further shift to the right By
Patrick Martin
9 September 2011

The Republican presidential debate in California Wednesday night marked a
further shift to the right of the entire US political establishment. For the
first time in modern US history, a major capitalist politician openly
advocated the destruction of Social Security, the principal retirement
program for tens of millions of elderly Americans.

Texas Governor Rick Perry, who has topped the polls since he entered the
Republican presidential contest last month, was participating in his first
debate since joining the contest. He was asked if he stood by his
condemnation of Social Security, first made in a book published last year,
and he reiterated this position vociferously.

“It is a Ponzi scheme to tell our kids that are 25 or 30 years old today,
you’re paying into a program that's going to be there,” he said. “Anybody
that’s for the status quo with Social Security today is involved with a
monstrous lie to our kids, and it’s not right.”

Perry’s principal rival, the previous frontrunner, former Massachusetts
Governor Mitt Romney, rejected Perry’s language, if not his assessment. “We
all agree and have for years that the funding program of Social Security is
not working,” he said. But it was wrong to say Social Security was a
failure, he said. “You can’t say that to tens of millions of Americans who
live on Social Security and those who have lived on it.”

None of the other six Republican candidates – Congresswoman Michele Bachmann
of Minnesota, Congressman Ron Paul of Texas, former Utah Governor Jon
Huntsman, former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, former House Speaker
Newt Gingrich, and former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain – took up the
issue explicitly.

Five months ago, House Republicans adopted a budget proposal that called for
phasing out Medicare, the principal healthcare program for the elderly, and
for ending Medicaid, which underwrites healthcare for the poor and disabled,
by transforming it into a fixed block-grant to the states.

The Republicans express most openly and nakedly the basic direction of the
political establishment as a whole and at the same time serve to shift the
framework of the discussion ever further to the right.

The onslaught against the major entitlement programs has been facilitated by
the policies of the Obama administration. Obama opened up Medicare for
destruction by proposing $500 billion in cuts in the healthcare reform
legislation passed in 2010 by a Democratic-controlled Congress. He played
the same role this summer in relation to Social Security, introducing
proposed cuts in the retirement program as part of the deficit reduction
talks with the Republicans.

The Wednesday night debate was conducted within a completely reactionary
framework, subscribed to by all eight candidates and the two media
representatives who moderated the affair, NBC anchorman Brian Williams and
John Harris of the Politico.com web site.

Three years after the Wall Street crash triggered the worst economic crisis
since the Great Depression, there was not a single question about the
responsibility of corporate America for the suffering of tens of millions of
people.

On the contrary, both the millionaire candidates and the millionaire
journalists took for granted that the solution to all problems was to boost
corporate profits and increase the wealth of the super-rich.

Perry boasted of his supposed record of job-creation in Texas, rejecting
suggestions from his media questioners that the state leads the US in
minimum-wage jobs and ranks dead last in education and first in food stamp
use. He claimed that the solution to the economic crisis was to cut taxes
and regulations on businesses and “free them to do what they do best: create
jobs.” No candidate or journalist questioned this argument, although
corporate America has created no new net jobs in more than a decade.

Similarly, Romney sought to position himself as a career businessman, not a
politician. “My experience, having started enterprises, having helped other
enterprises grow and thrive, is what gives me the experience to put together
a plan to help restructure the basis of America's economic foundation so we
can create jobs again,” he claimed.

Again, there was no suggestion that as an investment banker and hedge fund
manager, Romney’s business career personifies the utter parasitism of
American capitalism, the characteristic that contributed most to the crash
of 2008 and the subsequent depression.

The debate was structured to convey the division in the Republican field
between the two frontrunners, Perry and Romney, and the six also-rans. Perry
and Romney stood side-by-side in the center of the group of eight, and
received the lion’s share of the questions and camera attention. Bachmann,
whose candidacy was heavily promoted by the media in previous debates, and
who won last month’s straw poll in Iowa, was effectively shunted aside in
favor of the equally reactionary but better-financed governor of Texas.

As it unfolded, the debate became a round robin of reaction, as candidates
attacked one another, each seeking to get to the right of their rivals. Thus
Santorum attacked Bachman, Huntsman and Paul for opposing the Obama
administration’s war against Libya, a position he denounced as
“isolationist.” Gingrich attacked Paul for opposing the establishment of the
Department of Homeland Security. Paul, Bachman and Romney attacked Perry for
supporting a mandatory program of HPV vaccination of teenage girls in Texas.

Two of the lesser candidates sought to differentiate themselves from the
group as a whole. Huntsman, a former US ambassador to China, criticized
Romney for his proposal to officially label China a currency manipulator. He
suggested that this might spark a trade war with China that would have
devastating consequences for the US economy.

He also attacked Perry for his position of rejecting the scientific
consensus on global warming and opposing the teaching of evolution, arguing
that the Republican Party should not brand itself as the anti-science party.

Congressman Paul sought to stake out an even more extreme right-wing
position than the any of his rivals, calling for the dismantling of
virtually the entire federal government except for the military. Pressed by
his media questioners, he backed the elimination of the minimum wage, school
lunches, air traffic control, disaster relief and all federal regulation of
health and safety.

All the Republican candidates called for the repeal of any restraints on
profiteering by drug companies and insurance companies, as well as the token
regulation of Wall Street imposed by the Dodd-Frank bill, as well most
environmental regulations.

Here too the Obama administration has taken its cue from the Republicans,
advocating major corporate deregulations, including the rejection of new
smog regulations last week that would have saved thousands of lives.

Perry, Bachmann, Romney and several other candidates voiced their support
for complete militarization of the US-Mexico border, with the stationing of
thousands of federal troops and the construction of a full-length wall to
stretch more than 2,500 miles.

Bizarrely, Perry responded to a question about why Texas has the highest
proportion of its population without health insurance by blaming federal
regulations and calling for block-granting the joint federal-state Medicaid
program, a measure whose purpose is to allow states greater freedom to
reduce health coverage for the working poor.

One incident late in the debate cast a chilling light over both the
Republican candidates and the audience that had gathered in the Ronald
Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, a Los Angeles suburb, to hear
them.

Brian Williams asked, “Governor Perry, a question about Texas. Your state
has executed 234 death row inmates, more than any other governor in modern
times. Have you...”

At this point, the question was interrupted by a spontaneous ovation from
the audience for the blood on Perry’s hands. The Texas governor, in office
five years longer than George W. Bush, has long since surpassed Bush in
ordering executions.

Williams was clearly taken aback by this response, but continued to ask the
question, “Have you struggled to sleep at night with the idea that any one
of those might have been innocent?” Perry blithely rejected any such
concern, declaring himself completely impervious to any doubts. Perhaps that
is why he singled out only one action of Barack Obama for praise: the US
military raid that assassinated Osama bin Laden.

Williams then asked, “What do you make of that dynamic that just happened
here, the mention of the execution of 234 people drew applause?” Perry
embraced his audience’s applause for state-sanctioned killing, declaring, “I
think Americans understand justice.”

*
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