Main Street

Cantor Bails on Economic Speech

Eric, Eric, Eric.

Remember the “speech on inequality” Rep. Eric Cantor promised earlier this week that he’d deliver today in Philadelphia? He cancelled it at the last minute when it turned out the University of Pennsylvania would allow the general public to show up.

Cantor’s office provided to the university’s newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, the text of the speech he would have delivered. And while it’s stuffed full of pretty-sounding rhetoric, it’s also by turns evasive, hypocritical and misleading. It’s remarkably slight on actual policy, and no wonder: other than pretty rhetoric, Cantor – the second-highest-ranking House Republican – can only talk around the problem.

Where it turns from eye-rolling banality to jaw-dropping hypocrisy is in a few key lines. With a straight face, Cantor was prepared to say sentences like “we must ensure fairness at every level. We must ensure that those who abuse the rules are punished,” while his caucus in Washington is busily dismantling the rules that protect fairness. Cantor was prepared to talk about giving people “a hand up to help…climb the ladder of success in our country” and “some guarantees” while his allies are undermining the public education, infrastructure and support to those in poverty that actually contribute to those goals.

Cantor’s political agenda consists of reducing the services government provides to its citizens, eliminating the guidelines and rules protecting workers and consumers, undermining Social Security and Medicare and making the tax code more favorable to corporations and the very wealthiest. If we give more and more to the wealthiest, he contends, they’ll magnanimously help the rest of us out. Maybe in his heart of hearts he truly believes that this is how you build an economy that works for everyone else, or maybe he just doesn’t care—but the effect is the same either way. In Cantor’s world, you’d be on your own and without a safety net.

We watched for the past decade as light taxation, light regulation and light enforcement were the rule at the national level, and for most of us, Cantor’s economic fairy tale stayed fictional—jobs went overseas, wages stagnated and working people went further and further into debt. All the pretty rhetoric Cantor can spin out can’t make the real world fit the fable.

No wonder, when he’s forced to present this story to the general public, he turns tail and runs.

Tags: Corporate Accountability, Eric Cantor, Jobs, OWS, taxes