New Right Wing Agenda.....

[Lyle]

This is an excellent article from June 2003. Notice how much of this has come to fruition since it was written.

http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views03/0613-02.htm

The New Right Wing Agenda
by Steven E. Miller
June 13, 2003

What is going on in Washington? What is the larger agenda behind the amazingly aggressive right wing moves coming from the White House? According to the people I’ve been talking to and the articles I’ve been reading, the right wing agenda has three main points, each of which has precedents in earlier Republican and Democratic Administrations but which have been pushed to a qualitatively new level by the W clique:

1) Fundamentally change the role of government. In the Nation a couple weeks ago, this was described as going back to President McKinley. In other words, stripping government of all social welfare functions and all economic regulatory activity. Instead, government would revert to the sole role of protecting property and sovereignty through the use of its police/military power. This change will be accomplished in all three branches. The judiciary will be stacked, the legislature will pass the appropriate laws, and the executive will become more centralized and autocratic. The transformation of our budget surplus to endless deficits is part of this strategy – instead of having to argue against specific social programs the right-wingers can now simply say that they’re being realistic and dealing honestly with the real lack of funds. Pushing the fiscal crisis down to state and local levels (whose governments are often constitutionally prevented from running deficits) further spreads the transformation and diffuses opponents’ ability to fight back. Those functions that simply cannot be eliminated will be privatized as much as possible. The end result is an authoritarian state whose main function is repression of all institutionalized (and individual) avenues of resistance, perhaps even of dissent, particularly the labor movement.

2) Fundamentally shifting the burden of taxation from capital (including profits and all forms of “unearned” income) to consumption. The eventual goal is to eliminate all capital gains, inheritance, and corporate taxes, as well as the entire income tax. Before that, it means finding ways to exempt as much as possible – starting with those aspects that primarily hit the “investing classes” (i.e. – the rich). Radical and repeated tax cuts help create deficits (re-enforcing the first strategic goal). They also make taxation increasingly regressive, putting ever-larger burdens on working families and the poor. Since this is happening at the same time that services provided by government to those groups are being reduced, it reinforces the traditional anti-tax feeling among the general population – making it easier to push for still more tax cuts and reinforcing the general anti-government feeling that has always been part of American culture.

3) Fundamentally change the nature of international relations from a “trilateral” world in which multinational elites collaborated on creating an investment-friendly world into a US-dominated “new world order” in which narrow nationalist goals are achieved through unilateral and pre-emptive use of the US’s military power and everyone else is forced to accommodate Washington’s ability to “create facts on the ground.” This involves the radical transformation or withering away of many existing multinational organizations and arrangements and the permanent escalation of US military spending (which helps support the other two strategic goals). It plays to the US’s currently dominating military strength while papering over our economic and other weaknesses. It also serves a domestic purpose of evoking knee-jerk nationalism and concern for the soldiers, which distracts attention other issues and makes it very hard to mount an oppositional movement. Acting like a bully also helps create the type of world that justifies the behavior. In the Middle East, Hamas and Sharon need each other to legitimize their own violence as the only viable response to the extremism of the other side. Similarly, by acting in ways that assume the world is full of terrorists, that allies are untrustworthy, that security comes from hitting everyone else before they can hit you, the new imperialists help create the very conditions they claim to be responding to, which then makes it necessary to act even more aggressively.

--(more)--
http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views03/0613-02.htm

[AX10]

1. All I can say is that the Democrats need to come up...

with a clear alternate and pro-American vision. We need to get back into power to stop the madness.

[PATRICK]

2. They are doomed

but may be enough to take quite a lot of us if not all down with their folly. Some things ARE too powerful and evolutionary for any act of organized will to ignore and supplant. In fact imagination often supplies what is concretely lacking.

Or maybe in the larger scheme this madness is the incoherent panic stampede over a cliff such as any time of war or crisis will instill as a herd mood. Maybe they are completely insignificant as is the powerless majority the progressives supporters, evolutionary surfers and builders and enablers. I think this has shown we are ALL insignificant. Unless humanity as a whole can get its act together and tune out the RW noise and the herd instinct, there will be no better response to a radical change in human history than a massive dying out.

Dying is not learning. Dying is not reform. Killing is not a cure.

[jwirr]

3. This does not surprise me at all. Greed is the name of the game.

What does scare me is that it is a powerful idea and has almost been accomplished. I want to go back to the back-to-the-earth movement that I was part of in the 60s but even that takes money and know-how to succeed. We need to do the best we can with what we have. And we need to keep fighting because sooner or later others will follow.

God help us because it is certain that the church will not. However they also face their own doom in this scenario. When the members of the blind churches no longer can support their preachers then they will fall. And you can bet there will be no multinational corporation to prop them up waiting on the sidelines.