Last January, demoralized House Republicans trudged to a retreat in Williamsburg, Virginia to plot out their legislative strategy against President Obama for his second term. Common wisdom from mainstream media sources had them in retreat mode.  But Republican tradition, especially since the Newt Gingrich shutdown and stormy Speakership, oozes aggression, attack, misinformation, demagoguery, and partisan intimidation.

In other words, the GOP was not about to admit defeat. Unity was crucial. Stubbornness was called for. And apartheid was the continuing policy. Keep America divided. Continue propaganda and legislation meant to build a chasm between rich and poor, forget minorities and keep poor whites, demonize government, represented by the shadow of the entitled minority image (a dark people image). The latter – mostly, women and children — they would brutally attack by cutting food stamps. Keep the vast right-wing media on the same page, and keep taking money from their rich backers.

But most of all, though losing the election to Obama by over 3 million votes and outvoted in the House by over a million votes by Democrats, Republicans kept their gerrymandered majority in the House. Thus, stoked for inaction (on important things, but not the 41 futile Obamacare repeals, for example) and then a sort of action when the budget ran out (with a defund Obamacare CR), the real hostage was economic shutdown.

They have already achieved their goal of manipulating Democrats into a CR (the $986 billion Senate temporary CR of six weeks) that approaches the brutal Paul Ryan budget of $967 billion, with the sequester, but without Ryan’s savage cuts for the poor.

The strategy chucked immigration reform to appease Latinos and their vote, forgot any compromise with Democrats and rejected any concessions for economic progress.

To gauge the effort and the enforced unity of the neo-conservative movement, look at a Heritage Foundation letter of action last May. It suggested the Washington DC conservative think tank’s role, and its sway in uniting the GOP caucus behind the hostage-taking we are now experiencing.

 Dear Congressman,

In the coming months, you will face tremendous pressure to accept a deal to raise our nation’s debt ceiling. Conservatives around the country will insist the debt ceiling not be raised unless our nation gets on a path to a balanced budget within 10 years and stays balanced. This is not an arbitrary marker; rather, it is the marker laid out by the entire House Republican Conference in what has become known as the Williamsburg Accord.

 Conservatives cannot enter into the debt ceiling debate without understanding the promise of the Williamsburg Accord.

 On January 18, four current and former chairmen of the Republican Study Committee announced an agreement to re-sequence the 2013 fiscal fights. In exchange for holding the line on the sequester and producing a budget that balanced in ten years, conservatives agreed to postpone the debt ceiling debate for several months. In turn, the debate on the debt ceiling would revolve around enacting the policies that put the federal budget on the path to 10-year balance.[i]

 This perhaps informs the story of repeated Republican rejection of Senate and House proposals by Democrats to start budget negotiations. The Republicans were planning to take hostages all along, most likely a strategy approved by conservative think tanks that coordinate Republican strategy. Accordingly, we are used to hearing the same Republican talking points from all or most GOP sources, exclaimed before the media.

While Wall Street, the Chamber of Commerce and business leaders demonstrate fear of an ultimate default by Republicans, they have fed the GOP monster for years, funded Republican politicians directly and indirectly through think tanks like the Heritage Foundation. The Tea Party was part of that funding to mimic a kind of libertarian populism and a vocal affront to Democrats.

The Heritage Foundation has already shown their role in supporting the Republican extortion[ii], but certainly will never be connected and blamed for any of the repeated “over-the-brink” strategies of Republicans.

The majority of Americans face certain global economic failure because of such radical policies encouraged by conservative think tank strategy and the bottomless money pit of the obscenely rich corporate state.

Politicians like John Boehner, hopefully snatching us from the pit of economic doom, can eventually be discarded, a spent tool of the rich puppeteers operating in the comfort of lofty offices.