Opinion: The Democratic Party Has Failed Us

By Broadside Opinion Editor Arthur Gailes

The Democratic Party has failed to fix anything during its two years in control of the Senate. After six years of Republican-controlled Legislative and Executive Branches, the American people stood up for a change in 2006 and put the Democratic Party in control of Congress in 2006. In exchange, they promised us that they would fight for us, that they would end the Republican favoritism of the rich, that they would stop the Bush administration’s infringement on our rights, and that they would stop using terrorism as an excuse for imperialism.

The bailout is the latest failure to uphold that promise. Not only does it specifically target the richest companies and individuals among us, but they used it as an excuse to sneak in specific measures that place the burden even more on the shoulders of the consumers. A little talked about aspect of the $700 billion plan is that about $150 billion of this goes to tax breaks to specific industries. This ranges from charging us roughly $2 million for cheaper arrow shafts to giving an estimated $478 million to the movie industry.

Rather than looking out for us, the entire congress has been using the bailout as an excuse to push their own agendas. They’ve held our struggles up as leverage, while looking out for their own constituents. This is exactly the type of behavior that we elected the Democratic Party to fix. Instead, it has proven to be just a different side of the same coin. The Democrats play the middle man in allowing big business to rob us as opposed to the Republicans allowing them to do it directly.

Even if we are to believe that a bailout is necessary, the bloated version that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and the Congress have given us is a disgrace, and the congressmen who allowed themselves to be pressured into voting for it are as spineless as those who did the same with the war in Iraq. We’ve allowed ourselves to be bullied with the gloom-and-doom prophecies of both parties, while they and their friends laugh themselves to the bank.

The worst failure of this plan is that it does nothing to address the problems that created this mess in the first place. There is no proposal to fix our flawed regulatory policy. There is nothing put in place to keep banks from making the risky short-term loans that got them here—and then passing those loans off to another bank that can’t cover them. They have done nothing to keep real-estate firms from preying on ignorant consumers with bad mortgages. They’ve treated a hemorrhage with a Band-Aid®.

And in the meantime, they’ve actually given these companies an incentive to keep up their current policies. Why not? If they make bad loans that only pay off in the short term, the government will just bail them out in the long term. We took our best chance to punish companies for their costly mistakes, and instead we’ve rewarded them for it.

To be fair, not all of the Democratic Party has left us behind. Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut made vast improvements to the initial proposal, giving equity to the tax-payer and adding protection for some mortgages. And there are some Democrats who stood against the bailout from the start and held strong throughout. Those few deserve praise for at least trying to stand up for those of us who can’t afford lobbyists. But the rest of their party has signed off on a bill that robs us for the profit of corporations.

Many Democrats say that they’re just waiting until after the bailout to fix regulation. It won’t happen. Change like that happens when it’s a pressing issue. After passing something as big as the bailout, politicians on both parties will feel less pressure to make the necessary changes and any proposed deal will fall apart.

The Democrats have blown their best chance to force their policy, consolidate their position, and most importantly, do what was right. Instead they’ve been the party behind a panicked and corrupted waste of $700 billion dollars.

They’re the party of cowards who couldn’t even stand up for their voters in the time where they had possibly the most leverage they’ll ever see. It might not come to haunt them this November, but when 2010 comes, we will almost certainly see their day of reckoning.