The Reagan Con, pt. I

¡Hola! Everybody…
Congrats to the socialist/ commie/ non-profit entity otherwise known as the Green Bay Packers (click here) on their Super Bowl win. Nothing more ironic than having the “enemy” (ACORN was also a non-profit) as Super Bowl champs!

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-=[ The Reagan Con, pt. I ]=-

I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.

-- Grover Norquist

No great democracy has ever existed without a strong middle class.

Period.

Conservatives have an irrational, almost religious belief that if economic and social policies are made by the market, we won’t need government -- that’s you and me, the voice of the people. Let me repeat this point, because it’s important: you and I, and everyone else, we’re the government (“we the people”). Or at least we’re supposed to be...

The conservative mantra of “smaller government” has long become a dominant thought virus (meme) and for a long time most of you fell for it. Essentially, “smaller government” means less government oversight and regulation, thereby, the “theory” follows, allowing the “free” market to decide our policies. If you pay attention to Voodoo Economics devotees, they will tell you that a middle class will magically spring into being if we would just free corporate power (and greed) from government restrictions. The way to create jobs, the superstition goes, is to “free” the market. When the Wall St. fat cats are allowed to romp freely wealth is created, goes the belief, that wealth, they assure us, will trickle down to the rest of us, in that way creating a middle class.

This conservative ideology has been at the core of this country’s economic decisions since Reagan. Today, we the people (the middle class) work longer hours for less real money in jobs that are highly unstable. In addition, major sectors of our economy have been outsourced to “emerging markets” (a euphemism for poor, Third World nations), essentially putting you in competition with horribly oppressed workers who work for literally pennies a day.

Yeah, in case you didn’t get it, this very same voodoo has driven our economy to the ground.

This is what you have fallen for and what you continue to fall for today. Recently, Obama and other conservatives extended the Bush Wealthfare tax giveaways for the rich. In case you missed it, this is the same economic policy that got us to the mess we’re in today. The.very.same.

What we have today, contrary to allegations of socialism/ Marxism/ fascism is Obama’s Voodoo Economics on steroids. I actually believed that a vote for vote for Obama would’ve been a vote for an economics that shifts the tax burden away from the middle class and forcing the richest percentile of the population to share a fair burden. I was wrong. Today we have socialism for the corporations, capitalism for the working stiff. The simple, American idea that believed the solution is to build an economy from the ground up has been supplanted by that superstition in building the economy from the top-down (trickle down).

As I have written in the past, there is no such thing as a free market. Markets are the creation of government (we the people). While Obama is desperately trying to channel the spirit of Reagan, he’s throwing the most vulnerable under the bus.

During the most prosperous times for the middle class, taxes were viewed as investments in a civil society and were routinely embraced by the majority of the middle class. In that way, we invested in new schools, better roads, higher pay for police and firefighters, and a multitude of public works that resulted in extended periods of unprecedented wealth and stability for all economic classes.

Ronald Reagan and the corporate PR machine were successful in convincing an American electorate that taxes and government (we the people) were bad. Reagan did two things that dramatically changed our government. First, he changed laws like the Fairness Doctrine so that propagandists like Rush Limbaugh, backed by heavy corporate funding, could help convince the “Joe Six packs” of the world that the government was the enemy. In fact, Reagan ran for re-election as an outsider. My question is, how do you run for re-election as an outsider?!!

::blank stare::

In any case, Reagan’s second major act was to stop enforcing the Sherman Antitrust Act, which had held corporate power at bay since 1881 (the law is still in the books, but rarely implemented). Subsequently, the media began forming huge monopolies resulting in fewer voices. Across America, two-three, and four-newspaper towns became one-newspaper towns, all shilling for the corporations that owned them. Today, about five corporations own almost all of the media. You can go literally for days getting your news from Time Warner, for example.

An entire generation has been indoctrinated into this trickle-down-smaller-government-is -better point of view. People began reacting positively to this viral thought-meme. Hoover-style conservative Clinton enacted global treaties (NAFTA, GATT) that further eroded the power of government (we the people) to regulate business and the media. The result was another explosion of mergers and takeovers (along with the downsizing that came with them), that has brought us to our current financial meltdown.

Today, the bottom line rules, it’s profits before people, and the working class be damned.

That’s what you will be deciding this coming election: more voodoo economics, or a vision of building the economy from the ground up.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization...