Guest editorial by Ernest A. Canning
The radical-right agenda, hidden from so many of the uninformed, working class useful idiots (aka post-2008 “Tea Party” followers) was aptly described by Chalmers Johnson on the cover of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine as “a conspiracy to privatize war and disaster and grab public property for the rich few…[as part of] our headlong flight back to feudalism…”
In Meg Whitman, Wall Street, ‘Billionaire Sociopaths’ and the Media ‘Substance Deficit’, we cited a Pew Research Center study on how the campaign by America’s political elites to ravage the middle class has, for “wide layers of the population,” destroyed “faith in the US government to secure their most basic social needs.” As we observed at the time:
An American Political Science Association study, cited by Bill Moyers in Moyers on America (2004) referred to a “radical political elite who have…inequality as its mission and has organized ‘a fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory cannons, and the intellectual and cultural framework that have shaped public responsibility from social harms arising from the excesses of private powers.'”
Into this mix comes “Tea Party in Sonora”: Ken Silverstein of Harper’s Says Arizona is Laboratory for Radical GOP Policies, a powerful, must-see segment of Democracy Now (video below) which exposes the bleak future, indeed the madness, in store for all of us if we permit the radical right to assert the same control at the national level that they have already secured in Arizona.
An eerily prescient 1944 New York Times op-ed written by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s then-Vice President may have best described the ultimate goal of the hard-right agenda of those who now drive the so-called “Tea Party” in 2010…
Fascism
In viewing the video and in analyzing the propaganda utilized by the billionaire-funded hard-right to divert the attention of the 21st Century “know nothing” from the global class war to wedge issues, like immigration, consider the words of former Vice President Henry Wallace, which appeared in his April 9, 1944 New York Times op-ed:
They claim to be superpatriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjugation.
The endpoint of their deceit is the tyranny of a corporate controlled economy.
Feudalism
While there may never be a return to de jure feudalism entailing bonds of fealty between master and serf, as we discussed in ‘Savage Capitalism: World Divided Into Rich and Poor As At No Time in Our History’, covering Maude Barlowe’s powerful recent address directed towards the elite leaders of the G-20 nations, hard-right policies have already produced a dangerous level of inequality that is producing a de facto master/servant society.
As she noted:
Thanks to corporate control of the media and the politicians their wealth promotes, economic disparity produces a vast gap in political power which, in turn, produces policies designed to further exacerbate inequality.
The logical outcome of privatization, never ending tax cuts for the wealthy and round-after-round of cuts to public services is not just the realization of Grover Norquist’s infamous call for government to be reduced to the point that it could be “drown in a bathtub,” but the elimination of government as a source of “public” services or as a vehicle in which individuals and the environment can be shielded from the arbitrary excesses of corporate wealth and power.
In the case of Arizona, Silverstein reports
Keep “starving the beast” while squandering the National Treasury on corporate welfare, the military-industrial complex and wars for imperial conquest and eventually there will be no money whatsoever left for public education, health care, environmental protection or public safety.
The resort to temporary solutions described by Silverstein, such as the securitization of Arizona’s state lottery money, which will ultimately lead to the same type of massive unsustainable debt to Wall Street that we described in Meg Whitman, Wall Street, ‘Billionaire Sociopaths’ and the Media ‘Substance Deficit’; the selling off of public buildings, including Arizona’s capitol, only to pay greater sums in rent, offer no real long term solution.
The end point has to be the elimination of res publica producing a harsh “winner-take-all” society in which all semblance of community and common interest has been thoroughly eroded. Instead of a source of public good and democratic accountability, government will become but an empty shell that, as revealed by the Arizona “Tea Party” experiment, spends its time in what George Orwell described in 1984 as the “three minutes of hate” — exemplified, for example, in immigrant bashing legislation which riles the useful idiots, diverting them from the true source of their demise.
Economic Collapse
Through comparative examination of the U.S. with Empires past in Wealth and Democracy, Kevin Phillips presents an astute thesis that the end-stage of Empire is marked by outsourcing of manufacturing which is supplanted by finance. In Freefall, Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz observed that “while the top has been doing very well over the last three decades, incomes of most Americans have stagnated or fallen. The consequences were papered over; those at the bottom — or even the middle — were told to continue to consume as if their incomes were rising; they were encouraged to live beyond their means, by borrowing….”
The 2008 Wall Street implosion underscored that, long-term, this neoliberal system is simply unsustainable.
Ken Silverstein’s July 15, 2010 appearance on Democracy Now!…
Ernest A. Canning has been an active member of the California state bar since 1977. Mr. Canning has received both undergraduate and graduate degrees in political science as well as a juris doctor. He is also a Vietnam vet (4th Infantry, Central Highlands 1968).
TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”
Excellent.
I also read an analysis of the AZ immigration law (I think on truthout.org somewhere) in which the author suggests that the main reason behind the law was to intimidate and reduce Democratic voters. I don’t know about the main reason but I would think the law would have that effect and therefore I would guess that it was purposefully designed to do just that, among other things.
Ernie,
Finally read that Leo Strauss book you recommended. Our current crop of lying sociopaths of the GOP persuasion nicely fit Drury’s descriptions of the neocons and what makes them tick, but this great Henry Wallace quote you’ve got here suggests that a similar MO predates Strauss. So to be a Straussian is sufficient but not necessary to be part of this batshit cultural movement? That would make sense to me cuz the Democrats(who’re probably not Straussians) in their own unconscious way seem to be very much a part of the same off the cliff trend. Thoughts?
I guess maybe they’re all just variations, compatible threads of the same sort of suicidal madness. Ways of thinking and being that have been around for a long time.
I’m with Jerry Mander, David Orr, and so many others in thinking our predicament is at root an absence of the sacred(love for Mother Earth). That without the awareness, appreciation of, and respect for the interdepencies of the web of life things really don’t make much sense. Opening ourselves up to any number of false paths. That what it looks like to this peasant.
love,
Dave
Woah, Lasagna! I was just reading that heart*pumping article in WAPO last week “TOP SECRET AMERICA” re: how much $$$ we’re blowing on…well…everything, and I had a similar thought.
Not manifested as “mother earth” per say…
One of the cyber-terrorism fortresses they’re spending millions to build was described as “two shimmering, 5 story blocks of ice, barely visible through trees”…
and I thought
so much money and life endless spent
on boys and war toys
our whole planet as their shrinky-dink.
In New York just after the attacks, I had a girlfriend who said to me, “Watch out for what comes next. You know what just fell? Two giant dicks.”
As always, David Lasagna, your thoughtful comment and inquiry is most welcome.
The links between the 21st Century “Tea Party” movement and fascism antedate not only Leo Strauss and the neoconservatives but the 1944 quote from VP Henry Wallace.
The late Senator Prescott Bush–George W. Bush’s paternal grandfather–has been linked to an early 1930s Wall Street plot to stage a military coup d’etat in order to overthrow FDR’s government and install a fascist regime.
As revealed by Joseph Trento in Prelude to Terror, throughout the course of WW II, Prescott was involved in funding the Nazi War machine, even while son George W. Bush was off fighting in the Pacific–what does that tell you about the value of money in the Bush household?
After the war, as damning evidence surfaced from captured German bank records, documents made their way into a CIA file where Richard Helms could shield Prescott while having something he could hold over him. Prescott then “spent most of his post-World War II life cooperating with and taking an active interest in, the most covert CIA intelligence operations.”
Like Prescott and other Wall Streeters behind the 1930s coup plot, the billionaires behind the “Tea Party” movement are what Henry Kissinger described in his 1957 doctoral thesis, A World Restored, as a “revolutionary power”–a movement that does not accept the legitimacy of the existing order.
The reactions of the Democrats was explained by Paul Krugman in The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century, quoting Kissinger:
Krugman said that when he read this, it sent a chill down his spine because it describes the precise reaction of the Democrats in response to the radical features of the Bush/Cheney agenda. He added:
Jeannie Dean @4
The truth is funny as hell…and that Jeannie was truth!
Great companion piece to this…
link here
Thanks for the link, BlueHawk. Greenwald’s piece pertaining to the “vast Secret Government — composed of military and intelligence agencies and the largest corporations — so sprawling and unaccountable that nobody even knows what it does” is a compelling, must read.