Monday, August 9, 2010

The Radical Right, aka republicans

Ever since the radical right subsumed the Republican Party, I have been watching and reading in sheer amazement. Frank Rich wrote an Op-Ed piece in Sunday’s newspaper, in which he warned Obama that action is necessary, and the sooner the better, to begin resolving the unemployment problem. He warned also that running against Shrub is no longer a viable option, due to the selective amnesia of the right wing and Americans generally.

He is right of course. It is no longer possible to paint Republicans with the brush of Bush failures, however monumental. Action is surely necessary since there is no available source of employment any longer, due to the sheer ineptitude of the free marketers. No, the only way to increase employment now is to literally create whole new industries, principally energy and infrastructure related. The private sector basically sucks at the game of infrastructure development. If you think about the telecom business and the incompetent infrastructure we now have, it becomes clear why the privates don’t do well in this area. I keep wondering what our interstate highway system would be like now had we relied on the big three automakers to build it—which is what we did with the cell phone infrastructure.

So, yes, we need to invest now and heavily, although exactly how we pay for such investments is unclear, given the mood of the nation and the right wing Congressmen. It is by no means clear to me that Obama will be able to do anything in the investment area, because of the blizzard of complaints he will receive from the anarchists who now make up the Republican Party.

Heaven help us all, cried Tiny Tim, should the republican anarchists actually take over the Congress. What do they want to do?

1. Repeal the Federal taxation system and abolish the Internal Revenue Service. Obviously, without any federal tax structure, there will be no money to pay for a federal government, so arguably, those anarchists now running against government will be willing to give up their positions after they succeed.

2. “Privatize” Medicare and Social Security, by which they mean eliminate both. But, since there would be no money to pay for anything anyway, that policy position would be subsumed by their basic policy—no federal government.

3. We assume that, with their policy of no federal government, we would have no military, so we would then be open to being run over by anyone with bigger guns.

4. Since several states wish to secede from the Union, we can assume that The United States itself will begin to break up into factions, with perhaps a half dozen entities emerging. Perhaps some of those entities would be less interested in the anarchy being proposed by the republican crazy party. So, we might eventually see a Northeast America emerging, with its own federal government. It seems likely that the Confederate States of America would also re-emerge, although whether it would have a government is unclear. Obviously the “Nativist American Region” (Far West) would become a region, although without a federal government, the residents might have to contend once again with the actual nativists in that region (aka Navajo, Hopi et al).

5. Without any funding base, one assumes that the entire American health care system will collapse, leaving all residents (there would be no longer any “citizens”) to cope on their own. And it seems likely that these proposals would also eliminate the problem of illegal immigration, since this country would become even more hopeless economically than Mexico and other central American countries. Nobody is likely to want entry into this region, legally or otherwise.

So, Mr. President, we need you to “get crack’n” on this employment thing. There’s more to this upcoming election than anyone seems to realize.

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