united NATIONAL independent Tea Party polite just to a point
Guerrilla Government 1
This entry was posted on 3/21/2010 11:52 AM and is filed under Added Articles.
1 The Parable of the Crazed Mechanic
Say you take your slightly used car in for an oil change and tune up. The guy’s posted rates were so cheap they could hardly be believed. It’s not a perfect car but you have quite a bit of money invested in it and it is running well except for a few minor adjustments. But after several unexplained delays when you go back to pick it up you find the mechanic has tinkered with it, removed vital parts and put inappropriate parts in their place. It now doesn’t run at all. In fact, now he guarantees you that it can’t even be fixed. Yet for all his inappropriate and destructive mechanical machinations he is not only not contrite but expects you to pay many times what you had bargained for as he had to work longer hours screwing up than he should have ever had to spend fixing it. Eventually, among other indignities suffered by your car, you find out that the mechanic had been letting his profligate free living banker, who happened to hold the mortgage on his garage, take long reckless drunken joy rides in your car while entertaining his clients without even providing due care or proper provision for maintenance. With more research you find out that this mechanic regularly does things like this. He takes in working automobiles, ostensibly to repair them, then claims they aren’t worth repairing, buys them from the owner for next to nothing, breaks them down and then sells the parts through his own salvage yard as if they were new. When you refuse to pay him he comes up with a counter offer to take the car off your hands for $10. Among your other complaints you grouse that then you wouldn’t even have a way to get home. “No problem” the guy says and totes out a ramshackle bicycle and offers to sell it to you for $150. Finally, thoroughly disgusted, you arrange to have your vehicle towed over to a reputable mechanic’s garage, the fierce competitor of the mechanic who has just destroyed your car. But the first mechanic won’t cooperate. Thinking it would reflect badly on him if his opponent should fix the car which he claims can’t ever be fixed, he becomes recalcitrant, boorish, obstreperous, obstructionist, self-righteous and condemnatory – which is a lot of big words to describe the behavior of a very small and petty man.. He takes the tires off your car, chains the chassis to the wall, throws a tantrum, buys a gun, calls you every name he can think of, files law suits against you to hold you up in court and defames your reputation to anyone who will listen, all to keep you from claiming your own vehicle which he has nearly destroyed back. He hates this other mechanic so much that he is even willing to destroy his own business and reputation just so the other mechanic can’t get the credit for doing the job he’s refused to do. Even after you’ve overcome all the obstacles he’s put in your way and the tow truck is finally hauling your car out the door, this crazed mechanic, face red with rage, deep in high dudgeon and low umbrage is chasing after your car trying to spike the car’s gas tank with sugar to destroy the engine. If he can’t have your car which he doesn’t even intend to try to fix then, to his bizarre and selfish way of thinking, nobody else should ever be able to drive it again either.
The republican party today is playing a dangerous double game of extraordinary cynicism. They have spent nearly thirty years trying to dismantle government effectiveness to prove their theory that government cannot be effective. Now that they have brought nearly everything to a standstill and a ruin and the people are angry and upset and tired of their tiresome pontificating they voted them out. The republicans claim it wasn’t them in charge of government that was the problem, it was the government that was the unfixable problem they were in charge of. Besides, somehow the democrats are all secretly responsible for all this anyway for opposing them in their demolitions. Unfortunately their theories ignore the first couple hundred years of our history when our government was acknowledged to be the best in the world. Strangely, it has only become more and more unworkable since people who claimed it was unworkable were placed in charge of it. Normally, after all, if someone is running something poorly, from a car company to a bank, it doesn’t follow that automobiles and banks are intrinsically evil and should have never been invented and must be destroyed. It just means that they are poorly run. It’s not the thing that is being run that is the problem but the person put in charge of running it who is incompetent. It is similarly absurd to say that the answer to bad government is no government. Such logic throws all principles of human accountability out the window. It is like allowing the drunk driver guilty of multiple counts of vehicular homicide go free while throwing the book at what he was driving, imprisoning his car for life - or perhaps sending it to the death chamber in Texas or even to Guantanamo if it's a foreign made car. That’s what it sounds like when the republicans join with tea party sympathizers to claim that government is the blame for poorly run government as if it were a disembodied entity separate from the people who have actually been in charge of running it. To claim as some do that this government which hasn’t done anything by way of balancing a budget or solving a problem for decades of republican rule, is now becoming oppressive, when it has really been astonishing ineffectual, hamstrung and subjugated to outside influences spreading money like manure around, is hard to credit. Clearly, as most of society has realized, it is not too much government that’s the problem, it’s too little government too ineffectively and corruptly applied that’s killing us. That is the problem, lack of quality people in Washington. In government, just like everything else, size doesn’t matter nearly as much as quality of the people in charge. Quality in a democracy therefore is incompatible with politicians unduly influenced by outside moneyed interests. Many might be forgiven for believing that this debilitating corruption is exactly what the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United portends to expand, amending the Bill of Rights to put a double line through the “s” in the word “speech” - the last double strike in an ongoing, semi-surreptitious coup of the moneyed interests against free democracy. Republicans in Washington immediately praised this decision until it was found that Americans in large numbers disapproved. Their ensuing silence on the issue is more about deceptive prudence than any sudden conversion to the public’s enlightened point of view. By disclosing their intentions so brazenly, by barely hiding their corrupting intentions, by agreeing with the court that money is speech and money is holy by enshrining it as sacred when held by a corporation, they have clearly committed democratic blasphemy. They have showed they are in favor of elevating the importance of money ahead of speech and wealth for its own sake ahead of the individual. Clearly this puts the cart before the horse, the ox behind the plow, quantity over quality, money over meritocracy and the future of the American people in the jeopardy of those who don’t necessarily mean them well. But none of this is new. Republicans have believed in doing these things and have been doing these things to us for decades.
2 Beginning in 1980, a bizarre new economic theory was propounded, something called “supply side” economics which was portrayed as a magical economic elixir for all that ails us as if it were a perpetual motion money machine. It said that the more you cut taxes the more tax revenues you raised. Pause and consider the inanity of that snake oil for a second. A greater, more brazen lie has seldom if ever been told a free people by a large proportion of their government. So in 1980 with the national debt at only $900 billion Ronald Reagan cut taxes across the top (as opposed to across the board) to only the wealthiest of Americans and unleashed and deregulated corporations like dogs on the American people. These policies were supposed to make us more competitive in the world but they have made us less competitive. They were supposed to make us richer as a nation and have made us poorer. Tax cuts were supposed to generate so much capital that we could cut taxes permanently, time after time, and still have more than enough for essential services (a social safety net), but have done nothing but bury us in debt, leave all our necessary jobs undone (and the unnecessary ones immune from cuts) and give us a government that when not just making us a laughingstock in the world is indulging its own perverse moral habits in semi-secret or wallowing in money grubbing disgrace like all too public carnival barkers. Very soon after the advent of Reaganomics we passed from being the world’s greatest creditor nation to the world’s greatest debtor. It is at this point we started our decline. Because our banks prefer their customers indebted rather than solvent, our government did everything they could to help comply with their wishes. Wages became stagnant for most Americans and government officials actually took pride and bragged on the falling wages and decreasing benefits of our workers, almost as if our people were separate from the country, almost as if middle class workers weren’t even true Americans or at least Americans whose welfare they needed to concern themselves with. Our government actually cherished the proposition that making the majority of our people poorer actually meant the nation could be stronger. For business to be “efficient” and “competitive” abroad, they told us, our citizens must actually come to resemble the third world here at home. So they tried to destroy unions while deregulating controls on and limiting taxes on business and business leaders and investors. Meanwhile, executive wages, squeezed from the workers’ pensions and pockets and beholden to no one, skyrocketed in a way our poor floundering, underfunded space program could not. Who else but large money interests have profited from these policies? Not the public. The republicans say that government is responsible, ignoring the fact that for the last thirty years they have eviscerated government, but really it is anti-government behavior which is responsible. Guerrilla Government. They have lobbied relentlessly against campaign finance reform. And money has replied by promoting an entire degenerated legion of say anything, do-nothing politicians to bankrupt our democracy further. Like a team of horses unrigged from the wagon, as government effectiveness declines business may become as rapacious as it wants and begin to work against the best interests of America rather than as an integrated part of our national economy pulling the prosperity of the country along with it. To do this perverse bidding, these politicians with their childishly bogus economic theories started by intentionally plunging our government into the red by enacting huge tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy while keeping everyone else’s taxes correspondingly high. In effect, they’ve cut services to the public and gutted the efficiencies of government programs to place a well balanced, productive and livable society at risk. They used manufactured moral issues immorally to try to keep the nation divided against itself (and unable to unite against them). At the same time they sowed mistrust among the people with well organized and very well funded nullification, scare and disinformation tactics against responsible government behavior. They have not only colluded with business to suppress wages and benefits but to levy unseen large taxes against the middle class and the poor from which the wealthy are exempt. But not content with that they have gone further. This debt is not only national but personal debt as well. Again with congressional complicity, Wall Street has scammed and suckered the public with shifting credit card charges, escalating scales of interest, predatory lending practices, mortgage debt and debts incurred through manipulation of markets (such as energy, stocks, medical costs, petroleum, drugs, etc.). Along the way they have dismantled half our economy and sent it overseas with neither a bang nor whimper from a subservient congress. They’ve polluted two-thirds of the world with little control over their actions. They have rabidly supported unnecessary wars which, though harmful to our interests (and those of the world) while being devoid of benefits to the United States taxpayers, were nonetheless quite profitable to defense corporations, their brothers in service to the destruction of America. Technically, this means that so the very wealthy may have their taxes unjustly lowered everyone else in society has had theirs raised and been squeezed in many other ways as well. In effect, this leaves the middle class to carry the bags and pay the taxes and support the extravagant life styles of the very well to do. Then, after they rendered the tax code inexcusably unfair they then rail against an "oppressive" government for enforcing the unfair tax code that they have authored. When a psychopath recently stole a plane in crashed it into an IRS building in Austin, some republican leaders actually implied that his murderous, terroristic behavior was justified for opposing the very tax code that they themselves have written and solely profit from. The net result of this is that massive debt has been saddled on the backs of the American people at large, all with the enthusiastic support of the moneyed interests at whose pleasure our members of congress serve. That’s why Dick Cheney could infamously claim at the outset of the Bush administration that deficits don’t matter.
3 Soon, to repeat, because bankers prefer debtors to solvent clients our nation had piled ten times more debt onto our system since 1980 than in the previous 200 years combined. This is a nation in decline. We used to lead the world in nearly every measurable social, health, education and innovation category. Now we lead in almost nothing and are losing ground across the board in the others. Yet the ones responsible for this are in favor of reforming nothing. Why? They are for sale to the ones abusing us. This is the way their masters with the money like their congress, weak, supine, stupid, obstructionistic and in their pocket. The Supreme Court enthusiastically agrees. Like the Talley court they seem to prefer a slave economy rather than a democracy where instead of everyone, rich and poor, having equal rights and access to our government, only a few super citizens shall lead us. It’s a slave economy they are building and they are the plantation owners. The court in its deep reasonings has glossed over these pernicious trends. It finds no fault with lobbyists writing legislation for supplicant members of congress which they are then supposed to support or suffer the consequences for their opposition. Frequently now, only wealthy Americans are recruited to run for office, leaving congress itself rife with class prejudice in favor of the already affluent. Now, with increasing examples and cases of blatant fraud and moral peccadilloes proliferating among our ruling class, morality is more and more a political posture than a way of life. This corrupted class does not seem troubled by our national decline, it seems only to wonder why it’s taking so long, apparently, because where ever possible it is certainly doing its part to speed it along.
The decline and dismantling of our government is nearly complete. The Monetocracy is pleased because government was the only entity, this troublesome democracy, which could stand in the way of Wall Street’s continued, highly profitable exploitation of our prosperity and manipulation of our future. Wall Street wins whether the US prospers or declines, and one can’t help but feel they are busy selling us short. Government only of the wealthy, for the rich and by the very, very well to do has nearly been brought about in America. That’s the real lesson to be learned from the decision in Citizens United. The public fortunately has seen through this. Unfortunately many have drawn the wrong conclusions. The enemy is not government, it is bad government, government dominated by the moneyed interests which consistently displays beliefs and hopes not shared by the vast majority of Americans. To paraphrase Clinton, there is no problem with bad government that good government cannot magically solve. The Tea Party Movement has it almost exactly wrong. The republicans support them in their outrage over policies that the republican theory of non-government is nearly entirely responsible for bringing about. They are the bigoted mechanics of our demise. They have spent nearly thirty years trying to dismantle government and now that they have nearly brought everything to ruin and the people to their knees and the public is angry and fed up with the tiresome, immoral, do-nothing pontifications going on in Washington, the republicans pretend that they’ve had nothing to do with any of it and in fact are even more outraged than the rest of us are about it. It is almost hard to fathom American public servants so self-consciously devious to their own employers. The republican support of the Tea Party would be like the original Tea Party in Boston if it had been British and assorted Tory sympathizers who had disguised themselves as Native Americans rather than patriots. And then pretended to take over the vessel in Boston harbor and angrily thrown the boxes of tea on shore to cheering colonists so grateful for their feigned outrage and pretend rebellious behavior that they would gladly pay double their taxes to get back at those damn British. The republicans are trying to sell us tea and tax us too. Something tells me our original patriots would have been a touch too smart to fall for such an obvious duplicity. I'm not sure many of us are as smart today. No wonder the republicans wanted to gut public education and destroy the Department of Education. If the British would have been this smart and brazenly cynical they might still be in charge today.
