Bill Moyers, on his PBS show NOW, said "We are watching the country's
future slip deeper and deeper into a black hole of red ink."
Rightwing strategist Grover Norquist's stated goal of shrinking
government so that it can be, as he put it, "drowned in a bathtub", is
now being fast-tracking at a rate that must surprise even him.
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/print.php?sid=23124
Wednesday, October 12
Breaking the bank: The rightwing road to America's privatized future
By Bill Willers, Common Dreams
In September, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, in a comment
perhaps not intended for publication, told Thierry Breton, French
Finance Minister, that the US budget is out of control with the
country being plunged ever more deeply into debt.
The Economist reported Breton's disappointment "... that the
management of debt is not a political priority today."
Breton was wrong.
Accumulation of massive debt is the number one priority of the Bush
Administration - a deliberate, managed move toward its goal of an
"ownership society" in which all aspects are privatized.
Since the introduction of the massive Republican tax cuts, many
observers understood immediately that they were to plunge government
into debt, thereby undercutting its ability to fund social programs
such as Medicare and Social Security, and to administer public domain
that has long belonged to all citizens in common.
In May of 2003, Princeton economist Paul Krugman wrote that "gimmicks
used to make an $800-billion-plus tax cut carry a price tag of only
$320 billion are a joke ... The people now running America aren't
conservatives: they're radicals who want to do away with the social
and economic system we have, and the fiscal crisis they are concocting
may give them the excuse they need."
Krugman had plenty of company.
Peronet Dispeignes reported in the Financial Times of London that the
Bush Administration had shelved a report commissioned by the Treasury
that showed the US facing a future of chronic federal budget deficits
totaling at least $44.2 trillion in current US dollars, and that
closing the gap would require the equivalent of an immediate and
permanent 66% across-the-board tax increase.
Bill Moyers, on his PBS show NOW, said "We are watching the country's
future slip deeper and deeper into a black hole of red ink."
The corporate sphere has spent countless millions lobbying for
deregulation of its activities, for maintaining specific legislators
in office, and for the privatization of everything from health care to
education to Social Security to federal lands, including national
parks.
The goal is ownership and control of every corner of society by a
"private sector" primarily in the form of corporations.
Over more than a century of legal maneuvering, corporations have been
able to create for themselves the status of "persons" in US law, so
that the fortunes they lavish have, absurdly, become "free speech".
They have also acquired ownership of mainstream media and so have been
able to obscure the significance and gravity of the situation while
simultaneously perpetuating another widely believed absurdity, that of
"the liberal media".
A key mechanism for privatization is "outsourcing" to the private
sector jobs that have historically been governmental.
National parks, it seems, have been a trial area for this.
Plans for the privatization of parks have lain obscurely on the
rightwing to-do list for more than 20 years, and now the Bush
Administration is allowing them to move ahead quickly.
Terry Anderson, lead architect of a strategy to transfer America's
public lands into private ownership over a forty-year span, advises
President Bush on public lands matters.
Early in 2003, Interior Secretary Gale Norton announced her intention
to outsource as many as 11,000 (72%) positions in the US Park Service.
Shortly thereafter, President Bush declared that as many as 850,000
federal positions could become privatized.
This is an attack on public ownership and of federal programs
supportive of the poorer and middle classes that together constitute
the bulk of society.
While framed as an argument for fiscal efficiency, it is a recipe for
a two-tiered society of a super rich minority atop a vast underclass
of workers.
The Bush Administration's assault on government, under the banner of
"cutting federal spending", is the cause of a FEMA underfunded into
relative impotence and for inadequate levees in New Orleans.
But even as we are learning that the cost of reconstructing the Gulf
Coast will be (yet another) $200 billion, and that no-bid contracts
(yet again) are being handed to Halliburton, news comes that to pay
for it all will require "further cuts in federal spending".
And things just don't add up.
Well, perhaps they do.
Maybe they make even more obvious the Republican game plan to plunge
government so deeply into debt that it can no longer offer support to
the larger citizenry, and that this can only result in the corporate
sector winning by default and becoming, in principle, like so many
mediaeval landowners.
Looking ahead, one sees the main controlling element of society not a
government of, by and for the people but a corporate sector that
controls life's essentials and charges as much as the market will
bear.
"Nothing personal; just business."
Rightwing strategist Grover Norquist's stated goal of shrinking
government so that it can be, as he put it, "drowned in a bathtub", is
now being fast-tracking at a rate that must surprise even him.
_________________________________________________________
The road to economic hell is being paved by the American right-wing.
Harry
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