Republicans Trying to Wreck the Federal Government?
As everyone knows, the Democratic Leadership Council is the steward of modern, centrist liberalism, spending the bulk of its time urging Democrats to follow in Bill Clinton's hawkish, third way, values-loving footsteps. Love 'em or hate 'em, the DLC is the voice of the moderate wing of the Democratic party.
Here's what Ed Kilgore, the DLC's policy director, had to say about the election yesterday:
I came to believe strongly that the real agenda of the people closest to Bush--including his political advisors and much of the Republican congressional leadership--was not only dishonest, but deeply cynical and irresponsible: a drive to simultaneously wreck the federal government and to perpetuate their control over the wreckage as long as possible through the exercise of the rawest sort of institutional power and corruption.
Kilgore is part of a remarkable phenomenon: the radicalizing of the center left. He's part of a crowd that includes people like Paul Krugman, Al Franken, Howard Dean, Atrios, and, um, me: liberals who are basically fairly moderate in policy terms but who have been appalled to discover that what seems unthinkable actually appears to be true. The modern Republican party really does seem to want to wreck the federal government.
Email ends here.
Above is an email that Bruce Conklin sent me. This idea to me comes completely out of the blue. Since the Republicans and the Democrats and the transnational corporations run the Federal Government anyway, why would any of them destroy it?
But I started thinking about it. When would I destroy an institution? If I thought it was fundamentally tainted and that it could not be reformed I could do it. If there were elements within the Republican leadership whose ideology it was to reduce government then why not. Add to this the fantastic profits some of them would make by doing so then it becomes less unthinkable every minute. I'm not sure that I believe they would actually do something as potentially dangerous to themselves as this. However it is an interesting gauge of my state of mind that based on my current information about how the Republicrats are behaving that I'm actually willing to sit and think about it.
I sent Bruce Conklin an email in response asking him what the motivation of these people would be to wreck the Federal Government. His reply is below:
To completely dismantle anything from the New Deal. To privatize everything and anything because their ideology is capitalism is better than anything all the time. To make the deficit as big as possible to strangle all descretionary spending. Their guru is Grover Norquist. Google his name.
Bruce
posted by Vincent @ 2:17 PM
1 Comments:
I've been saying that since last spring. And I believe, Emannuel, that I had told you the same thing.
When one looks at the existing economic path that the Bush Regime has already taken, it leads to one place, the financial ruin of the Federal Government (and by so doing, taking the states with them). Bruce is right, it is the express purpose of enforced privitisation of every aspect of governance, except, MAYBE, the army.
As to the last point, let me address it first. I look at Halliburton's private army as a test bed for privitising the U.S. Armed Forces. One of the last stories that leaked out about the mercenary army was that the different private armies, hired by the corporate entities that are there to pillage that nation, were setting up their own inter-army command post; that is that the were co-ordinating their efforts.
So I think this goes even one-step further than their Ayn Randian utopia, in that they will de-nationailse the Army. I absolutely agree that the Neo-Con's long term plan is to bankrupt the entire nation, and the whole world, by extension, with their corporations taking over as complete a control of as much as possible.
The vision they have is a fascist globe, where 99% of the population are enslaved to the corporation, and only themselves and their closest friends actually have any 'freedom'.
P.S. I don't really understand enough about them to see any difference from Ayn Rand's Objecti(fication)ism and Mussolini's coining of the term fascist. The Randists insist that their version is about rugged individualism and Mussolini is about the exalted state, but what I see is the Rand's minimalist state, police, fire, army, is just there to enforce the will of the corporation.
-Comrade Rutherford
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