By Jim Hoover
Consumed with an ideology that would leave plutocratic boots on the necks of the middle class, ruthless Republicans have let loose a conflagration that will incinerate all that we have and all that our children and grandchildren could hope to achieve.
Republican visions of heaven are for themselves and their plutocratic supporters; their visions of hell for the rest of us. Prospects of the rich are soaring. Hope for the middle class is plummeting and under the flames of Republican deceit.
Their livelihood under attack, voters in Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, Florida, and Maine have discovered that a vote for Republicans is actually a vote to help the tentacles of a plutocratic octopus take what belongs to the people, as Republicans use government to not only accomplish this grab, but also to weaken the opposition and its party.
They, along with their business masters, would rip apart our states and deny the historic victory for worker rights. They would crack our bell of liberty with laws to control us, laws that invade female bodies and enter bedrooms.
They would exploit tax laws to destroy opportunity for the middle class. They would demonize our president and besmirch the White House to win elections for the shills who represent the rich. They would lie about global climate change, and pander to polluters, heating up our planet.
They would consume the world for profit, giving Wall Street another opportunity to destroy all for personal gain.
Promoting the domain of their masters and demonizing the domain of the people is the Republican plan. Thus social services that educate, protect, and nurture the people is the target of attack — schools, unions, firefighters and even police. All these services can be privatized. The jobless, the unprotected, and the uneducated are more vulnerable and easier to manipulate.
The American people need to understand that the Republican program to demonize government is not an impromptu effort. It has been planned and coordinated for decades.
It was no accident that the Republican-beloved Ronald Reagan made an oft-quoted speech with a much-highlighted statement: “Government is not the solution. It is the problem.”
Propagandized like a lot of Americans, Reagan’s conservative bent made this belief his mantra; but many Americans have had this prejudice highlighted, mouthed, and repeated so many times that they tend to pronounce the same vilifying words about government ineptitude without even thinking about its truth.
The effort to emboss it on all consciousness is pervasive.
Like pedagogues in the classroom, Republicans are unified in reciting a litany of chants, of dogma that engender the type of rote learning elementary teachers utilize for things such as multiplication tables and grammar.
The Bush administration was a champion of this mind-bending chant. The incurious mind of George W. Bush was quite talented in this repetitious rant, using simplistic emotion-packed or fear-laden phrases like “They [terrorists] hate us for our freedom,” or “We must fight them there, before they come here,” or he appointed incompetents to run important agencies to fulfill his prophecy that the government fails.
Note any Republican talking-head on any television show. Fox News will consistently rail against President Obama’s activities and Democratic programs, utilizing a few paradigms they mostly recite: Progressives are big spenders, Big government is bad, Liberals are Godless, Republicans are the party of strength and security, and on and on in such a manner.
If conservatives are invited to shows with progressive guests, the technique is to preach about all of these issues and speak loudly and vociferously in order to drown out the progressive message.
Americans don’t realize how much monolithic corporations are behind efforts to demonize government, for it is corporate money that backs efforts to destroy public credibility.
For the Bush administration, unaccountable corporations like Halliburton, KBR and Blackwater, a private military company, replaced public workers and military personnel. The former were noted for repeatedly defrauding taxpayers, while Blackwater agents committed wartime atrocities. In fact, to erase memories of its deeds, Blackwater changed its name to Xe Services LLC.
It is no accident that Scott Walker and Republicans in Wisconsin – elected with corporate money — wasted little time attacking unions and passing legislation that would put government services in the hands of the companies that helped finance their elections.
Recently, NY mayor, Michael Bloomberg, entrusted leadership of NY schools to Cathie Black, a high-profile magazine executive. Her business career made her qualified, he thought. She left the position in disgrace and with a 17% approval rating.
And at the federal level, it is no accident that Republicans stand for eliminating public programs like Medicare and Social Security, government programs that work for the people, so that Republican benefactors can reap big dividends by capturing these services for their own profit.
Paul Ryan, the young Republican darling of the House, recently proposed his intention to end Medicare, most immediately a bargaining chip to get Democrats to abandon supporting regulation of businesses that pollute and a Wall Street that defrauded Americans into the great recession.
Ultimately Republicans hope to privatize Medicare and Social Security for the benefit of their business benefactors.
Our country keeps going down, down into the flames of Republican perfidy: blackmail, intimidation, ruthlessness, a dogged determination to capture all power, and an extreme partisanship – all are accepted techniques meant to destroy the public dream for the sake of conservative control.
This is our future if we do nothing.
Torching Hope and Opportunity,
Tuo11
13 Apr 2011Unfortunately liberal ideology, in both the Republican Party and Democratic Party, have PROGRESSIVLY made the majority of Americans dependent on government programs. The real problem is that big government programs come in, truly help people during bad economic times, but then they stay. Instead of aiming to simply get people back on their own two feet the government programs remain available indefinitely and people start incorporating government into their life plans. Then when another economic hardship hits our society the only solution the party in power can present is more government, not less, because people are already dependant on the existing government programs. The severe partisanship we see today in our politics derives from the fact that conservatives are looking around and seeing that government is already massive. Progressives always wanted massive government they just had to implement it progressively. There can no longer be compromise because progressives don’t want to go backwards with relation to their ultimate goals and conservatives are putting their foot down.
ocjim0
13 Apr 2011What part of government are you speaking of: a few might be the military, social security, Medicare, Medicaid, paying farmers not to grow, subsidization of oil companies, or the feeble effort to restrict mercury in our fish or the lack of control of commodities speculation?
Social Security, the military, and Medicare are continuing expenses. How about fire services, police services and education at local levels? Is that too much government?
Tuo11
13 Apr 2011Opposition to small government often focus on the essential government services when trying to combat the supporters of limited government.
Smike
13 Apr 2011Oh good a fight…..
What Tuo fails to understand is that the expansion of government services and functions is a global phenomenon and has more to do with the ever more complicated nature of the global economy than it does with a cabal of eggheaded freedom hating technocrats. Although, I wouldn’t be surprised if this argument were rebutted by Tuo with the assertion that the global character of government expansion can be attributed to the global character of the villains involved (trilateral commission, Bilderburgs, Illuminatti, Jews, etc), the fact of the matter is that in a rapidly changing world, people want certain guarantees that only governments can provide. This is why they keep voting for it.
In the mid to late 80’s the solution of less government was applied to the financial sector of the economy. Today we are dealing with the consequences of that “solution”.
Another great example of the effects that less government can have on certain markets is the 1996 Telecommunications Act which gave phone and television companies unprecedented freedom to buy one another, share infrastructure, and create other non-government barriers to entry. The results of this experiment are the ossified, inefficient, and predatory megafirms we have today. The act was implemented using the rhetoric of increased competition, but the result was the merging of one company into another until we have this.
http://www.freepress.net/files/att_history.jpg
Which results in things like this.
http://newsroom-magazine.com/Pix/Charts/connection-speed-country.png
Tuo’s freedom is the freedom of the plantation owner.
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Tuo11
14 Apr 2011I always found it interesting that people who advocate for less government are called racists. Slavery was made legal by government. Jim Crow laws were created by governments. So please explain to me how limited government is the racist one.
Smike
14 Apr 2011Governance is not so simplistic as more vs’ less. The right of states to protect the institution of slavery is a pretty heavy handed form of Big Government, it just isn’t taking place at the Federal level. JIm Crow laws were indeed created by governments; and in turn, overturned by the government as well. The American left has never advocated government as a solution to -every- problem, it has advocated it as a solution to -specific- problems. Everyone knows that The Communist Party has never held an appreciable power in the U.S.A. (unless of course you’re a John Birch Society conspiracy theorist) and it still is not even on the political map.
The protection of basic human rights is a legitimate function of government and it is institutionalized in the Bill of Rights. However, it has been the conservative element of the American political establishment that has suspended habeus corpus for terror -suspects-, sought to legalize institutional discrimination, and limit the freedom of individuals to move their bodies across borders.
The right of a Black man to his own body supersedes the right of a White man to his “property”. If that makes me a Big Government liberal, then so be it.
Government (like anything created by humans) is a tool. You can use a hammer to build a house, or bash someones brains in. The same principal applies our laws, bureaucracies, courts, entitlement programs, and regulatory structures. These social inventions aren’t inherently anything. They should be judged on their social utility relative to their cost.
Take responsibility for the historical failures of your ideology.
Tuo11
14 Apr 2011If individual liberty makes me a conservative, then so be it. I can’t get over the fact that people feel entitled to someone else’s earnings. This ideological divide is why compromise has become impossible.
Smike
14 Apr 2011Are Black people not entitled to ownership of their own bodies?! Doesn’t self ownership lie at the very center of the idea of individual liberty!? What!?
I believe in individual liberty as well. Liberalism (the broad definition) is still the overarching point of philosophical contact for both Republicans and Democrats and the two parties set of ideological assumptions are still fundamentally the same. More on this later, I’m out of time.
For now I’ll just say that the future is going to be more Gay, Brown, secular and environmentally sustainable. Your America is dieing and my America is taking its place.
(P.S. I’m not gay or brown)