The Republicans are unfit to govern

Train wreck One of this biggest economic stories of the past week was this:

The 17-country eurozone risks falling into a 'severe recession,' the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warned on Tuesday, as it called on governments and Europe's central bank to act quickly to keep the slowdown from dragging down the global economy.

Just six months ago the OECD considered a 2 percent European contraction the worst-case scenario, but it now sees that as close to happening.

The report forecasts Europe falling further behind other countries, particularly the United States, whose economy is expected to grow 2.4 percent this year and 2.6 percent next.

Let me repeat: Europe's economy is contracting, while the U.S. economy is growing. Europe's economy is in imminent danger of contracting at the rate that just six months ago was considered the worst-case scenario, while the U.S. economy is expected to grow even more next year than this year. And just outside the Eurozone, this past week also saw England's double-dip recession reported as even worse than had been thought. In other words, as the world continues to attempt to dig itself out of the economic collapse that was caused by the banking meltdown, the United States is slowly recovering. Europe isn't.

While Europe elected conservative governments at the worst possible moment, and then embraced the cruel stupidity that is economic austerity, the United States took a different path. The United States should have embraced a much more aggressive growth policy, but at least it didn't slash and burn government spending the way Europe did. Europe's economies and Europe's people have been devastated by economic austerity while the tentative Obama stimulus package has stimulated tentative economic growth. Stimulus works, austerity doesn't. Until the economy is fully back on its feet, more stimulus would be the best economic policy. Austerity would be the worst economic policy. So what do the Republicans want to do?

Mitt Romney would have let the auto industry go bankrupt. Mitt Romney thinks unemployment insurance is a disaster. Mitt Romney wants to cut Medicare and Social Security benefits. Mitt Romney wants to cut benefits on just about everyone who needs them in order to finance even more tax cuts for the extremely wealthy' people such as Mitt Romney. In other words, Mitt Romney wants to impose austerity on pretty much everyone other than the very few who are in the economic class of Mitt Romney. In fact, Mitt Romney's economic program is so unfair, and it so favors the very few who are in the economic class of Mitt Romney, that he doesn't even want us to know its details. And that gets to the core of why Mitt Romney is unfit to govern.

The problem with Mitt Romney is not only that he doesn't want us to know the details of his economic agenda, which suggests that it's even worse than what we do know, and what we do know is bad enough, but Mitt Romney also doesn't want us to know any details about Mitt Romney. Breaking with the tradition that voters should know as much as is possible about presidential candidates, Mitt Romney won't release his tax returns. What is he hiding? Breaking with the tradition that voters should have at least some idea about a presidential candidate's positions on major issues, Mitt Romney has flip-flopped so many times on so many issues that even one of his top campaign advisors openly admitted that Romney's stands can be erased and rewritten without notice. Does he even have any principles or values, or is that he doesn't want us to know what they are? What is he hiding? Mitt Romney has taken so many stands on so many issues that even he can't remember where he is supposed to stand on them on any given day. Maybe what Mitt Romney is hiding is that there is no Mitt Romney at all.

For their part, Republican congressional leaders want to repeal the Obama health care law, which would explode the national debt. Republican congressional leaders offer nothing to replace the Obama health care law. House Republicans voted to end Medicare. House Republicans want to decimate health care spending. House Republicans want to take away a million Pell Grants. House Republicans want to punish low income Americans. House Republicans want to punish senior citizens. House Republicans want to punish women. House Republicans want to drive even more Americans from some semblance of food security into poverty. The House Republican budget leader wants to drive even more children into poverty. Whatever they may say they want to do, the agenda of congressional Republicans would be devastating for tens of millions of Americans.

Unfortunately, being wrong' even stupidly wrong' is not in itself proof of unfitness to govern. As the Bush-Cheney team proved, it is in fact now a prerequisite for any Republican aspiring to national office. But the destructive policy agenda of congressional Republicans is not even remotely the worst of it, because in order to impose these policies they have resorted to tactics that are nothing more than political extortion, and government cannot function by extortion. It cannot function when hard fought agreements are blithely broken for the purpose of further extortion. And that's what the Republicans now are about. They operate like criminal thugs and they cannot be trusted to keep their word. And it's not merely a game of daring high stakes brinksmanship, for merely playing the game is itself dangerously destructive.