The Progressive Populist Today Blog: Editorial: GOP’s Big Lie Closers

Saturday, October 29, 2022

Editorial: GOP’s Big Lie Closers

Republicans have a special skill for staying on their message, no matter what the facts are, and the broadcast media is unwilling or unable to hold them accountable for their distortions.

Republicans have been blaming Joe Biden and the Democrats for inflation, crime and immigrant invaders smuggling fentanyl into the US, with the Greedy Oligarch Party relying on the infotainment media to relay the distortions without context. That has resulted in tightened polls heading into the midterm elections.

For example, polls show Americans trust Republicans more than Democrats on economic issues. even though the past three Democratic presidents have had to bail us out of recessions left by their Republican predecessors.

Biden took over an economy that Donald Trump left in shambles, with the loss of 2.9 million jobs and a 6.3% unemployment rate. Under Biden, the Democratic Congress passed an American Recovery Act that not only provided free distribution of COVID-19 vaccines to enable the country to open up from the pandemic lockdown, but also provided assistance to help Americans pay their rent and mortgages, as well as a Child Tax Credit and extended unemployment benefits that kept 25 million of the working poor out of poverty.

Inflation has risen 8.2% in the past year, the highest rate in four decades, but lower than other industrialied nations, while 10 million people have returned to work under Biden, cutting the unemployment rate to 3.5%, the lowest rate in five decades. And even though much of the inflation is due to profiteering by fuel and food distributors taking advantage of global supply-chain problems to generate record profits, the Federal Reserve has turned to its main inflation-fighting tool — tightening the money supply, which is likely to lead to a recession that will cause layoffs in an effort to force prices down.

Republicans have not said how they would reduce inflation. However, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and other Republicans have called for making the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent, as well as to extend or expand several other corporate tax breaks. So higher wages for workers is bad for the economy, but more dividends for the rich is great for Republicans’ sponsors.

Republicans also plan to seize the opportunity to force cuts in Social Security and Medicare if they regain a House majority. McCarthy and the four Republicans vying to serve as House Budget Committee chairman have plans to hold the debt ceiling hostage next year unless Democrats agree to entitlement cuts and work requirements on safety-net programs. Rep. Jason T. Smith (Mo.), ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, told Bloomberg Government (Oct. 11): “The debt limit is clearly one of those tools that Republicans — that a Republican-controlled Congress — will use to make sure that we do everything we can to make this economy strong.”

President Biden Oct. 21 said holding up the debt limit to extract spending cuts would “crash the economy,” and Republicans should forget about it. “Let me be really clear: I will not yield,” Biden said. “I will not cut Social Security. I will not cut Medicare, no matter how hard they work at it.”

Republicans also are hauling out the crime scare, spreading paranoia about violent crime committed by dark-skinned people.

Across the country, Dana Milbank has noted, Republicans and allied groups have spent tens of millions of dollars running tens of thousands of crime-related ads over the past two months — often with racist undertones. The Congressional Leadership Fund, the main super PAC affiliated with House GOP leadership, has emphasized crime more than any other topic but the economy in its ads.

“Murder, shooting, stabbings, rapes, carjackings are skyrocketing. Bloodthirsty criminals are laying waste to Democrat-run cities,” Trump said at a rally in September. “Crime is rampant like never before.”

In fact, Milbank noted, crime did soar in 2020 during the pandemic, which also happened to be Trump’s final year in office. But in 2021, the FBI found in its annual report on crime released in October, violent crime actually declined slightly, by 1%, from 2020, largely because of a 9% drop in robbery. Homicides increased slightly, by 4%. And while Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), a former football coach, declared at a Trump rally in Nevada in October that descendants of enslaved people “do the crime,” a report last year from the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, using 2018 data, found that White people were offenders in 52% of nonfatal violent crimes overall (and 56% of rapes or sexual assaults) in which the victim identified the race of the offender. Black people were offenders in 29% of nonfatal violent crimes (22% of rapes or sexual assaults). Latinos were offenders in 14% of nonfatal violent crimes.

And crime isn’t just a problem in Democrat-run cities. The centrist Democratic group Third Way found that in 2020 homicide rates were on average 40% higher in states won by Trump. Eight of the 10 states with the highest homicide rates have been reliably red states for the past two decades. Republican-led cities weren’t any safer than Democratic-led cities.

Among the 10 states with the highest per capita homicide rates — Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama, Missouri, South Carolina, New Mexico, Georgia, Arkansas, Tennessee — most were in the South and relatively rural. The findings were broadly consistent with other rankings of states (and counties) by violent crime. Milbank noted.

Finally, despite Republican complaints that Joe Biden is running an open border with Mexico, the US Border Patrol apparently didn’t get the memo, as it arrested 2.4 million migrants at the Southwestern border during fiscal year 2022 — the highest number ever recorded. Migrant arrests, or encounters, for the year were 37% higher than 2021, and more than two times the number recorded in 2019, the Texas Tribune reported.

It’s unclear how many of the 2.4 million encounters represent individuals crossing the border because the count includes people who make repeated attempts during the same fiscal year. Last fiscal year, Customs and Border Protection reported a recidivism rate of 27%.

Republicans also claim Biden’s “open-border” policy has allowed dangerous drugs like fentanyl to flood into the country, imperiling our children. The amount of fentanyl seized by Customs and Border Protection has increased in the past few years, but just under three-quarters of all fentanyl seized by CBP is taken at US-Mexico border crossings, Philip Bump noted in the Washington Post Oct. 4. Only about 11% of fentanyl is seized by the Border Patrol between checkpoints. CBP doesn’t have data on the percentage of seizures from US citizens. But a perusal of the organization’s website turns up a large number of news releases in which fentanyl seizures involve Americans, Bump noted. “[T]he idea of smuggling fentanyl into the country is to get the drugs in quickly without detection. Paying a citizen to drive them in makes more sense in that regard than having a noncitizen lug them across the Rio Grande,” he wrote.

And after smuggling fentanyl into the country, the narcotraffickers aren’t about to give it away to Halloween trick or treaters. So get out and vote like your democracy depends on you. — JMC